Gary Barlow: Take That's Lost Era & Finding My Way Back
The High Performance Podcast
High Performance
4.6 • 4.8K Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Legendary Take That songwriter Gary Barlow joins us to share the most honest account of failure, shame, and rebuilding we've ever recorded on High Performance.
The recent Netflix documentary charted Take That's journey - the split, Robbie's solo success, the comeback. But what it couldn't capture was Gary's seven-year internal collapse. The songwriter and leader everyone expected would conquer solo stardom was drowning while Robbie soared.
After a catastrophic American launch performance, Gary walked alone through the rain with nobody from his label. What followed was seven years where he couldn't sing, couldn't play piano, couldn't even listen to music. Seven years of sitting in his studio pretending to work while doing nothing. Seven years of deliberate weight gain as armor and public shaming.
Key moments include:
* Trust Your Gut Over External Authority: How ignoring his instincts for industry pressure led to catastrophic consequences he never recovered from
* The Fragility of Creative Confidence: Why someone who doubts themselves cannot create wholeheartedly - and how one moment can dismantle years of evidence
* Understanding Shame vs Accepting It: Why he deliberately gained weight as armor and what it teaches us about controlling the uncontrollable
* Small Steps Over Grand Gestures: His first run while overweight and smoking - giggling at how far he had to go but knowing he was finally "on the road"
* Creating Psychological Safety: How Take That's reunion principle of "let's lose all the dickheads" transformed their worst years into their best
This is a conversation about the fragility of creative confidence, how one moment of not trusting your gut can derail everything, and how the way back isn't through therapy or grand gestures - it's putting trainers on, lifting the piano lid, and just turning up.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So I went through this whole period then of being unhappily overweight, but kind of happy |
| 0:08.8 | because it was doing something for me. |
| 0:11.0 | Yeah, it was a great coat of armour. |
| 0:13.2 | And I'd killed the pop star. |
| 0:15.9 | So it was like I'd controlled something for the first time in ages. |
| 0:21.3 | And it sounds incredibly dark what I'm saying here, |
| 0:24.7 | but that's the way I was thinking at that point. |
| 0:30.6 | That is the distinctive voice of legendary singer-songwriter Gary Barlow. |
| 0:34.4 | Now, if you're a fan of take that, or even if you're not, |
| 0:37.0 | you will, of course, know the story by now, and I hope like me you've enjoyed the recent Netflix documentary that has charted the highs, but also the lows of their time together, including the big split and the comeback. But I guess what the cameras couldn't capture was the internal collapse of just one man during the band's darkest period, |
| 0:56.0 | because Gary was the songwriter, he was the leader, he was the kid who grew up dreaming of being a musician, |
| 1:02.0 | he's the one that everyone expected would then go on to have the huge solo success, |
| 1:06.0 | yet the reality is that he was drowning whilst Robbie was soaring. |
| 1:12.2 | The band had split. |
| 1:14.6 | Robbie was enjoying this unprecedented solo success. |
| 1:19.0 | And Gary, well, he was trying to launch himself in America with a cover version that he hadn't written. |
| 1:25.1 | On a remix he didn't understand, at a pre-Grammy party, he wasn't ready for and didn't want to be at. |
| 1:28.2 | And what happened next would define the next seven or so years of his life? This is a remarkably honest conversation. One of the most open we've had about failure, |
| 1:33.8 | about shame, about the fragility of creative confidence, what it actually takes to rebuild |
| 1:38.3 | yourself when you've lost everything that defined you. If you'll love to tell you, if you don't, |
| 1:42.7 | if you've watched the Netflix documentary, even if you haven't, this is going to give you an insight into a man who really |
| 1:48.6 | bravely and brilliantly opens up to us. As Gary takes us from that despair in New York, |
... |
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