To mark Mother’s Day, singer-songwriter Gary Barlow and his mum, Marj, talk to Emma Higginbotham about family – and food.
Throughout Gary Barlow’s autobiography, A Better Me, there’s a comforting presence in the background. It’s his mum, Marj, a petite Liverpudlian with a definite twinkle in her eye. Or as Gary puts it, ‘Small, ginger, the boss’.
We find her perched with a cup of tea outside teenage Gary’s bedroom, listening to those early compositions that’ll eventually become Take That hits. When the band splits and Gary sinks into depression, it’s Marj who dashes across the room to snap off the radio if a Robbie Williams song comes on. And, naturally, she’s sitting proudly in the audience of those sell-out shows after his sensational comeback.
‘We are close, aren’t we? We have a laugh,’ says Gary. ‘Obviously I have a slightly unusual life and I can’t be there that much, but we speak a couple of times every week. And I’m very lucky that if I’m travelling and working somewhere, rather than be by myself I’ll ring her and go do you want to come?, and quite often she does.’
The 74-year-old has travelled everywhere from Australia to Jamaica with Gary and, when they’re together, one subject that invariably pops up: their mutual passion for cooking.
Marj took to the saucepans early in life. Her father was a chef in the merchant navy (‘I swear that’s where it came from’) but after contracting tuberculosis during the war, he never worked again.
‘My mum had to get a job and he just stayed at home all day,’ she says. ‘He died when I was 11, and I felt so sorry for my mum, having to come in at night and cook for me and my brother. So one day I thought “I’m going to cook the tea”, and I went and asked our neighbours, who were two sisters, how to do the potatoes.’
She began to take charge of mealtimes, ‘and my mum would bring her friends home at lunchtime for fried lamb’s liver, or bacon and eggs, that I’d made. I really did love it.’
In her early 20s, Marj was working in a hospital pathology lab when she took a pub job to earn some extra cash to buy a car. Among her customers was Colin Barlow. They married in 1967 and settled in Frodsham, Cheshire, where she still lives; Ian arrived a year later, followed by Gary in January 1971. What was he like as a baby? ‘Shocking! He cried a lot – perhaps it was practising for the future,’ says Marj.
‘I was seriously worried one day because this baby would not stop crying. I rang the health visitor, and she rocked him backwards and forwards in the pram for ages until he was asleep. I don’t think she’d even turned the corner at the top of the road and he was at it again.’
Growing up, Gary refused school lunches (‘The smell!’) but adored Marj’s cooking. Hearty pies and Sunday roasts always graced the Barlow table, ‘and we never, ever had pre-packed meals,’ he says. ‘Even if she made chips it would be from scratch.’
But A Better Me tells the story of how, for Gary, food went from friend to enemy. In the early 2000s, dropped by his record label and overeating to numb the pain, he ballooned to more than 17 stone and ended up battling bulimia.
Even after Take That reformed in 2005 and his career soared, Gary put himself through diet after diet before finally rediscovering the joy of eating well, thanks to a new-found hobby: cooking fresh food from scratch. And a healthy balanced diet combined with regular exercise means that today he’s fitter, in every sense of the word, than ever.
‘I’ve always made a point of never going “Hey, you need to do this”; instead I’ve gone “This is what I did”, so I don’t feel like I’m hitting people over the head with it,’ says Gary. ‘But the one thing I always say is that everyone eats too much.’
‘Move more and eat less – it’s so simple,’ agrees Marj, who puts her own trim figure down to lengthy walks with her lurcher, Teddy.
In the most heartbreaking moments of the book, food takes centre stage. When his dad died suddenly of a heart attack in 2009, Gary went to stay with Marj. ‘It was lovely,’ he writes. ‘She cooked for her little boy every night. Sometimes we didn’t talk. She just cooked.’ They had the food channel on all day.
Similarly when Gary’s fourth child, Poppy, was tragically stillborn in 2012, he turned to cooking to both comfort the family and to keep himself from falling apart, writing that ‘food was the crack where the light came in that dark summer.
‘I spoke to mum every day. We never spoke about what I was going through, what we were all going through. Instead, we talked about cooking.’
That love of bringing the family together through food still resonates, and Gary cooks at home every day. Signature dishes range from slow-cooked beef and oxtail stew to a simple dal: ‘An idiot could cook a dal and not get it wrong,’ he says. ‘The kids wolf it.’ In fact all three of them – Dan, 18, Emily, 16 and Daisy, 10 – love their food: ‘Dan eats basically the same portions as a large racehorse,’ says Gary. ‘When he leaves, I swear the shopping bill is going to be halved.
‘Anyone can cook and, as parents, it’s so important to have a skill that can bring the whole family to the table together. That’s what it’s all about. We never ate our dinners on our knees. Ever.’
Marj, he adds, is ‘a great mum, and a great grandmother. The one thing I always remember is a happy home, and when you move forward and have your own life, I think you just transfer it into that.’
:: A Better Me by Gary Barlow (Blink Publishing) is available in audio, print and ebook. Take That Greatest Hits Live Tour begins on April 12 takethat.com.
Gary’s highs and lows
Marj recalls taking Gary, aged 13, to a talent contest: ‘When it came to his time I was absolutely shaking all over. I said “Are you bothered?”, and he said no. He got up and I just thought wow.’ Six years later Gary, Robbie Williams, Jason Orange, Mark Owen and Howard Donald became Take That, and topped the charts from 1990 to 1996.
Sparks flew between Gary and backing dancer Dawn Andrews on the (appropriately-named) Nobody Else tour in 1995. ‘I remember falling in love with her in those rehearsals, catching the odd look and my stomach leaping into my mouth.’ Next January they’ll celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary.
When his solo career nosedived, Gary became ‘so fat I had to roll side to side and slowly build enough momentum to raise my lumbering carcass out of bed.’ The press weren’t kind: ‘Headlines like TAKE FAT, RELIGHT MY FRYER, BACK FOR PUD are all quite funny from a distance of 15 years and wearing much smaller trousers.’
After reforming (minus Robbie), Take That’s 2006 Ultimate Tour was a triumph, and their single Patience stayed at number one for a month. ‘If you’d have written our comeback as a script, you’d read it and go, “Nice story but it can’t possibly be true”.’ When Robbie temporarily rejoined the band in 2010-11, over 1.8 million fans went to see their Progress tour.
Since Jason’s departure in 2014, Gary, Mark and Howard now record and tour as a three-piece. In spite of his successful solo sidelines such as writing musicals, Gary insists there’ll never be another Take That split announcement.
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend on March 23rd 2019. (c) Waitrose