CityLife

Take That give Gary Go the go-ahead

STADIUM RUN: Gary Go

‘IT’S insane!,’ gasps Gary Go, eyes widening behind his Brains from Thunderbirds horn-rimmed glasses.

At 24, the singer-songwriter has been selected to support Take That on their record-breaking British tour this summer, playing to over a million people including the venue at the end of the road where he grew up, Wembley Stadium.

“It’s still unbelievable. It’s the biggest tour since Bad by Michael Jackson, who was the first artist I went to see. I’ve got to plan my entrance for that one. It’s the Circus album tour, so I want to come in on an elephant.”

While a new major label artist (in this case, Universal) going on tour with the same major label’s bigger artist is commonplace and the two acts share a history in Go having co-authored two tracks with Gary Barlow for ill-fated ITV1 series Britannia High, Take That insist they’re ardent fans of Go’s emotive balladeering.

“I’m absolutely made up he’s touring with us,” gushes said elated Mark Owen. “He really is quite… wonderful”.

Growing up, Gary Baker’s (the name on his passport) interest in music was piqued by his by his elder cousin, who was in a trip-hop band signed to Björk’s label, One Little Indian, called Essen.

“He gave me my first keyboard, a little Casio, to start making music when I was eight,” recalls Go, supping a pint in Manchester’s the Apollo where he’s just finished a set opening for Dublin pop-rock trio The Script.

“So at an early age, I had an insight into being in a studio, being around people making music and being around loads of drugs.”

He hiccups a laugh: “I’ll never ever forget seeing the first rock of hash when I was eight years old. My cousin took it out of a box within a box, like Russian Dolls. I asked ‘what is that?’. I knew it was something he didn’t want his parents – my auntie and uncle – to see. He was explaining to me and I didn’t understand. Such innocence.”

Like an alt-folk S Club Junior, the first song he ever penned was named The Stomach Ground, about a village of people living on someone’s stomach (‘pretty drug influenced even back them,’ he chuckles), a slice of surrealism that might have been subliminally inspired by his father’s job as producer for Jim Henson’s The Muppets.

At 17, he left school for a bottom-rung job making tea and stamping envelopes at record label Zomba, but it was Peter Gabriel who would be the catalyst for him to devote time to his own material, when the former Genesis frontman doled out advice after he flunked a job interview to assist at Garbriel’s Real World studios in Bath.

Idiot

“I really want the job and I’m saying to him like an idiot, ‘Yeah, but I love writing and I love to write music and I can still write, can’t I?’,” recalls Go.

“And he looked at me and said ‘You should work on your own music, not mine’ encouragingly. He could see I had designs on other things.

"He knew I wouldn’t just want to log his tapes or whatever. So I went off totally distraught. I was convinced I had been blown off the path of fate. That night, I got a drum machine and started recording tracks.”

His opening sonic gambit, Wonderful, a Coldplay-shaped anthem (think Self Help: The Musical), was constructed during something of a crisis of faith. “It’s about totally being down and unsure who you are and what you’re doing,” he explains.

“With the chorus, I wanted to remind myself ‘You’re not so bad’. When I started writing it, I was in New Jersey, staying in the house that Frank Sinatra grew up in. Feeling lost.”

Comparisons to Chris Martin’s elegiac, cathartic songwriting abound, and it’s of little surprise that Go assisted on the demos for Coldplay’s breakthrough album A Rush of Blood to the Head.

“Through bugging people, I got to sit in on the session in Battery Studios, while Chris Martin was demoing songs like Clocks. I remember him looking me up and down and saying, ‘are you in a boyband?’. And I said to him, ‘no, you’re in a boyband’. Which is true.”

With His forthcoming self-titled debut album (released just in time for Mother’s Day, expect it to grace a lot of 4x4 glove compartments) recorded in the Prague countryside, the Catskill Mountains of Woodstock, Manhattan, Los Angeles and his own studio in West London, Go snared the attention of Decca records – the first label to sign confirmed fan Peter Gabriel – who offered him a deal.

Since then, the will surely be his ticket to stage has been set for stardom, thanks to coveted support slots with the likes of MOR-revivalists The Feeling.

Even current queen of electro-pop Lady GaGa has expressed interest in securing his services.

“I met her last week and she said she wanted me to be in her next video, so I want to follow that up,” he chortles.

“She liked some art that I’d drawn on my face and she was like,” he adopts an American accent, "‘Oh my Gawwwwwd, I had a dream about that! I want that in my next video. You gotta be in my next video’. I’ll hold her to that.”

Gary Go’s debut single, Wonderful, is out now. His album follows in the spring. He plays the Ruby Lounge with VV Brown on Sunday then supports Take That at Lancashire Cricket Club, Old Trafford, on June 23-24, 26-28.