W L INTERVIEW
WIRRAL LIFE TALK TO GARY BARLOW
Gary Barlow OBE , has sold over 50 million records worldwide , singer , songwriter , record producer , actor , and television personality . He is the lead singer of the most successful boy band of all time Take That . He is one of the United Kingdom ' s most successful songwriters , having written fourteen numberone singles ( 10 with Take That , 3 solo , 1 with Robbie Williams " Candy ") and twenty-four top-ten hits and three number-one solo albums , and has additionally had seventeen top-five hits , twelve number-one singles and eight number-one albums with Take That .
The new album , Music Played By Humans , his first record without Take That in seven years is a big-band album . He ’ s joined by jazz quartets , Latin ensembles , nine celebrity guests and an 80-piece orchestra . He ’ s also in performing in Liverpool later this year .
Tell us about the story behind the single Elita So it ’ s basically , this started last November , I really wanted to write for the orchestra and so someone I have bumped into many times over the year and constantly works with sections is Michael Bublé , so I called him up to just sort of go , you know , ‘ how ’ s life , you know , how do you go about making your albums , who are you working with ’ and anyway , I ended up playing a bit of this song and he was , like , ‘ hey , it could be the two of us ’, so I was , like , ‘ yeah , let ’ s try it ’. We tried it and we thought , you know what , it ’ s really good , wouldn ’ t it be amazing to get the authenticity of someone who has spent their life amongst this music , ' cause it ’ s got a Latin sort of flavour to it and so Michael went off and came back with this name , Sebastián Yatra , who I was , like , ‘ who is this guy , who is it ’ and whipped onto Instagram , 24 million followers he ' s got , so these South American guys , they ' re just enormous in their territories . So , anyway , we sent it him and he sent it back , like , hours later , with all this stuff on it , so basically , it ’ s a three-way , it ’ s me , Michael and Sebastián .
It sounds great . Yeah , it ’ s exciting - I ' ve only toured in South America once and I think it was around ’ 98 . The band had split up and the label there had taken my album , Open Road and they wanted me to tour there , so I toured there , we went to Santiago , went to Buenos Aires , we went all over and we ended up in Rio and we got taken to this club one night and there was lots of acts on , it wasn ’ t like a normal club where it ’ s just a DJ all night , there was loads of acts on
and the whole night was building towards , everyone kept saying , ‘ are you ready for Elita ’ and all night I was thinking , what the hell ’ s going to happen and when this act came on , she was just the most incredible dancer , she didn ’ t sing , she just danced and the place , I ' ve always wanted to write this song . So , when the idea of sort of , you know , musicians and bands and stuff , I just thought , oh , I ' m going to try and write this song now , so it is a song about that experience but it ’ s kind of , like , about all women , it ’ s about , like , taking what they ’ ve got and ruling the world basically , so it ’ s kind of , like , women ’ s power sort of thing and how we bow down to it so easily , ' cause they ' re just so in control .
There ' s a great mix of feels on the record . We ' ve been listening to This Is My Time , it felt like you had in mind the Gershwin era . Yeah , basically I toured with the band the other year , we did a 30 years greatest hits thing and I really promised myself while we were on tour to not come up with the next idea , because what happens is I come up with something and then it sort of takes my attention away from what I ' m doing and almost takes me out of the moment and I didn ’ t want to do that , but right near the end of the tour when we were in Europe , I thought , do you know what , after all these years , I ' ve never worked with an orchestra , I ' ve never specifically chosen to write a record that would feature a lot of players and I think when you think like that , I think all of a sudden , your keyboard grows and I think your palette of chords also then is just never ending .
I think what that song is , This Is My Time , is just sort of me letting go and opening the listener to the scope of , ' cause I used to , God , when I started off , you know , I was such a good player and I lost it actually over the years because I neglected it , I went off on the road and concentrated more on singing and you know , writing pop music , it ’ s constantly sort of , like , simplifying yourself and I let all that go on this record and just really opened the door to the fact that I was a musician when I started and I wanted to kind of return to that a bit , I think .
Yeah , it ’ s very ambitious melodically , that falsetto you do , really adds to that kind of classic romantic vibe . Yeah , again , I ' ve wanted to go back and exploring the voice because , again , I think with modern pop music , even over the last 10 years , you constantly go , well , I could sing it like this but no
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