I WAS TERRIFIED OF MY PIANO, SCARED TO GO OUT OF THE GATE

Intense highs. Crushing lows. His one-man show A Different Stage tells his life story, and in a candid new book Gary Barlow reveals how it came about...

When I started working on A Different Stage I was nearly 50, when you’re forced to take stock and wonder what your life’s been about. I needed to do something to mark this milestone, something new. Do I keep on making albums? I could easily do that, but it’s not challenging and I needed a challenge. An intimate one-man show required a different skill.

A few years ago I was taken aback by how much I loved narrating the audiobook of my autobiography, and I wanted to explore how I could use this storytelling on the stage. So I decided to act, but I needed help. I talked to Tim Firth, the composer and writer I’d worked with on two musicals: Calendar Girls and The Band. ‘You’ll have to go somewhere you’ve never been before,’ he said.

It’s normal to run away from where you’re from, but for me it was time to go back. We started with me writing chunks of detail about my life, raw and unvarnished, and then the two of us decided what belonged in a two-hour show. It opened in Runcorn, a short walk from the first working men’s club to give me a residency, a few weeks after my 51st birthday earlier this year, and the run ended at Frodsham Community Centre in the town where I was born and bred. As it tours the country this autumn, here are some of the highlights from the book I’ve written about the inspiration behind it...

I’M NOT SID VICIOUS BECAUSE OF MY PARENTS

My parents were selfless. They never did anything except focus on what was best for their kids. They married in January 1967, and our Ian came pretty swiftly after, then me, the greedy-for-attention kid. Dad worked, sometimes two jobs, but at the weekends he was always there when I was playing in the clubs. My first business cards proudly announced, ‘Gary Barlow, Electronic Organist’. A new keyboard was several weeks’ salary, so my bloody amazing, quiet, stoic, grafting dad decided to sell all his holiday back to the fertiliser factory where he worked and spend £399 on the A55N Yamaha.

I know I’ve made my parents really proud, and we’ve all enjoyed my success, but they’ve also had their fair share of the bad bits fame can bring. The band would just get on a plane and go to Japan, but the parents were left at home with kids scribbling messages all over their houses. Mum’s never complained though. ‘Oh, we just got on with it, they were mostly pretty harmless.’

What I got was really good parenting. It’s why Gary Barlow isn’t Sid Vicious. I was safe, I was loved. As a parent I can see that now, and I am so grateful.

MY BAPTISM OF FIRE IN THE WORKING MEN’S CLUBS

I got my first gig aged 11 as the Saturday night organist at a working men’s club in Wales (I had an international career from the get-go). Mum and Dad would drive me over, then wait and drive me back pretty much every weekend for five years. When the hot meat pies arrived, the PA announced ‘Piesvarrived!’, and sometimes my entire audience got up and left. I’d be upstaged by meat and gravy in pastry.

The compere and other acts were all adults who had done things and been places. In some ways I was raised by wolves. I’d sit in those smoky clubs, chatting, gigging, jamming. These were my friends. At school my head was always somewhere else. One break I was practising on a keyboard and my friend said, ‘Gary, we need you to come and play football, you’ll never get any girls playing that thing.’ I didn’t go.

At 14, I became the resident keyboard player at

Halton Royal British Legion. Saturday nights, buffet, bingo cards: a big deal. I think, if I’m honest, I was a bit of a novelty because I was good, but you could rarely play so well that the woman screaming and cackling at the back would shut up. I reckon part of the reason Take That’s shows are so dramatic was an attempt to make that woman at the back sit up and get involved. I remember the compere saying, ‘I can see you performing in front of thousands one day.’

By the time I joined Take That I’d done thousands of gigs. I went from playing in my school uniform to my final gig with a trendy haircut and Simon Le Bon-wannabe pegged trousers. The only people with that level of experience these days are buskers, like Ed Sheeran was. There aren’t the same kinds of live venues. They were big, tough rooms, and I was performing to an audience that had seen them all.

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A SEASON AT BLACKPOOL WAS MY UNIVERSITY

In 1988, when I was 17, I remember telling Mum, ‘Hey, I’ve got a summer season at Blackpool.’ I’ve been sniggered at over the years because of my links with Blackpool. Do I care? No, I don’t. Snobs! That place was my university. Blackpool made

When the pies arrived, my entire audience would get up and leave. I’d be upstaged by meat and gravy in pastry