standards such as ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’. He’d been offered the job after coming second in a talent competition at the venue with a cover of the surreal classic, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. Gary’s slot at the Labour Club lasted two years, during which time he also formed a duo with a friend known only as Heather. Together they played the pubs and clubs circuit for a further two years. He also formed a short-lived band inspired by Adam and the Ants. His rudimentary keyboard was soon replaced with a £600 organ with foot-pedals, which offered the budding songwriter far more musical possibilities.
One of the most significant jobs he secured was a ‘residency’ fronting a small, middle-aged band at the Halton British Legion in Widnes, near Runcorn, which included four gigs every weekend until well after midnight. By then, the mid-teenage Gary was earning up to £140 a night, which was no small accomplishment. Inevitably, late working hours and early school schedules were exhausting for him, but all he wanted to do was play and write and perform. He even gave up his beloved karate lessons because he broke his fingers twice and was concerned about jeopardising his piano-playing.
Gary supported some notable performers, including Ken Dodd and Bobby Davro, and, perhaps more importantly, began to slip his original compositions into his set alongside the staple club standards. One of those original songs had taken him six minutes to write and was entitled ‘A Million Love Songs’. Another two were called ‘Another Crack in My Heart’ and ‘Why Can’t I Wake Up with You?’.
By this stage, Gary would spend any spare time he had writing new material. On quiet weekends he’d aim to write and demo one song a day at home, a challenge he often completed. This prolific drive, cooped up in his bedroom, was balanced with the practical experience of weekly gigging. The Legion was an ideal sounding-board for his song ideas, and also a priceless three-year apprenticeship working both with the public and veteran musicians, especially for a boy who was still twelve months shy of taking his O levels when he started. The ‘pie-and-mash circuit’ might not be the most glamorous of jobs, but there is no better way to breed new talent.
It’s hard to trace back to when a pop star has his first big break, but undoubtedly when Gary entered a song for the BBC Pebble Mill’s competition ‘A Song for Christmas’, and promptly reached the semi-finals, it was a watershed moment. He was only 15. His mother had been largely unimpressed with his self-penned ballad ‘Let’s Pray for Christmas’, but his music teacher entered it into the competition for him.
It was during a gym lesson that Mrs Nelson interrupted Gary to tell him he had been selected by the BBC to go into the next round of ‘seniors’. This involved travelling down to London’s West Heath Studios to record the track in full. It was the first time he’d been inside a recording studio but he was a natural and made full use of the orchestra and backing vocalists on offer. The whole experience was filmed, and watching the clip back now it is hard to imagine that Gary was only four years away from starting the biggest boy band of the Nineties. Although Gary’s track stalled at the semi-finals stage, he won a modest amount of prize money, which he promptly utilised by going into 10CC’s Strawberry Studios in Stockport to demo some more of his own material.
During his time in London, Gary had met several famous agents and music-business executives, so his ‘showbiz networking’ had begun. However, his path to stardom was far from smooth. Eager to get a potentially lucrative publishing deal—effectively selling his songs for other performers to sing—Gary scoured London’s record labels looking for someone who thought he was capable of writing a smash hit for their artists. Among the usual polite rejections, Gary tells a story about one executive who listened to ‘A Million Love Songs’, scornfully ripped the tape out of the machine and slung it through the open window into the street, ending his bizarre tantrum with the warning that Gary should never darken his door again. Gary has, over the years, resisted what must be the great temptation to reveal this executive’s name.
Meanwhile, Gary’s secondary education was unremarkable, with no major dramas: he was a good student and passed six ‘O’ levels, with his parents keen for him to work in banking or the police force.
***
Given their roles in Take That, it is interesting to note that two of the first members to start the chain of events leading to the band’s formation were Howard and Jason. The oldest of the band, Howard Paul Donald, was born on 28 April 1968 in Droylsden, Manchester (Howard is almost four years older than the baby of the band, Robbie Williams). Howard was from a large family, with three brothers (Michael, Colin and Glenn) and a sister (Samantha), as well as his father Keith and mother Kathleen. Both parents were entertainers, Keith teaching Latin American dance and Kathleen being a gifted singer. His parents later separated and he is also close to his step dad, Mike.
Surprisingly, Howard’s first ambition was to be an airline pilot. He went to Moreside Junior School for his primary education, where reports suggest he was a good student. His time there was not without its dramas though: ‘A couple of weeks after I started school, I got this disease called impetigo. When I was off school, this teacher put a big sign on my desk saying “Don’t Go Near This Desk!” When I told my mum, she drove up to the school and went mad!’
Howard’s first album was by Adam Ant and, like his future band-mate Gary Barlow, he was a big fan of the Dandy Highwayman. However, as his teenage years rolled by, he became fascinated with an altogether different style of music—break beat and hip hop. In turn, this relatively new genre introduced him to dancing—break-dancing in particular—and with this new obsession came a declining interest in academic matters.
Break-dancing is an extraordinarily athletic and acrobatic style of movement and dance that at the time was a central part of hip hop culture, emerging as it did out of that movement in the South Bronx of New York City during the late Seventies and early Eighties. It can actually be traced back to 1969, when James Brown’s ‘Get on the Good Foot’ inspired famously acrobatic dance moves, and simultaneously Afrika Bambaataa started organising one of the first break-dance crews, The Zulu Kings. The relevance to Take That might seem tenuous, but by the early-to mid-Eighties, hip hop and break-dancing had been exported across the Atlantic and imposed itself on the daily lives of British youth. School yards were filled with teenagers spinning on old pieces of lino, hip hop clothing labels were worn and break beat music blared out of oversized ghetto blasters—suburban Britain doesn’t have too many ghettos like the Bronx, but that wasn’t the point. It was a style, a look and a sound that became immensely popular. Howard was exactly this type of break-dancing Brit, and he lived for it. He often played truant so he could practise his moves, which increasingly included complex gymnastics, so that by the time he was 15 he was a very adept dancer indeed. According to an interview with Rick Sky for The Take That Fact File (one of the few writers to have covered the band from before they were famous), he once absconded from school for five weeks in a row: ‘I only intended to have a few days off, but I kept taking another day, then another day, till the days had run into weeks. I got into awful trouble for that.’ He later admitted to being caught graffitiing a bus, although that appears to be the extent of his ‘waywardness’. Like Gary, he also bought an electronic keyboard, but his main passion was for dancing.
Despite his latter-day persona as the quietest member of Take That, Howard was something of an extrovert at school—break-dancing was hardly the domain of the class nerd, after all. This obviously provided plenty of distraction, because he left school without a single ‘O’ level to his name. He wasn’t altogether troubled by that, not least because he had just been enrolled in a local break-dancing crew called the RDS Royals.
It was 1986 and Britain was in the grip of the Thatcher years. Unemployment was over the three million mark, social unrest was rife and many people, particularly the young and less privileged, were isolated and disillusioned. Behind all the politics and histrionics, the reality for 16-year-olds with no qualifications, like Howard, was simple: either unemployment or the last bastion of state-sponsored slave labour, the Youth Training Scheme, or YTS. Howard took
