He says he’s not saving the world, but he is making an art out of doing nothing. It’s the actual Mark Owen! Back for good? He never left.
WORDS / Michael Cragg
PHOTOGRAPHY / James Moriarty
ART DIRECTION / Hidden Agency
STYLING /Alexis Knox
GROOMING / Rebecca Lidstone using Creme De La Mer
STYLING ASSISTANTS / Emily Meola, Francesca Barry, Megan Clews-Pannell
There are pop stars who know how to talk a good game. Robbie Williams, to pick a not exactly random example, is able to sell himself and his music in a way that can’t be taught. He’s so good at it that he even managed to get the Rudebox single into the UK Top 5. Mark Owen, his sometime bandmate in quite popular five-piece Take That, however, would frankly prefer to be doing anything else than talk about his forthcoming fourth solo album, the excellent The Art Of Doing Nothing. Sat in a fairly uninspiring grey office on the third floor of a rehearsal space in London’s rain-sodden Wandsworth, Owen sits crumpled in his chair, his multi-coloured cardigan buttoned up and a scarf wrapped tightly round his neck. His still boyish face – he’s 41 but looks about 21 – bears the signs of sleepless nights. He’s been fretting about his forthcoming tour and you sense that the prospect of being back in the spotlight, alone this time, is something he’d put below ‘frontal lobotomy’ on a list of things he’s looking forward to.
“I’m a really bad salesperson,” he laughs when we start talking about the album. That will please the label I say. “I’m the worst at it. I do watch other people and think ‘I could so do with a bit of that’.” The fact is, as part of Take That, which he has been on and off since 1989, he didn’t really need to do it. They had Robbie to be the cocky one and Gary Barlow to be the serious (boring) one as and when somebody needed a serious (boring) question answered.
Owen’s main role, it seemed, was to be the cute one – the one that scooped endless Smash Hits Poll Winner’s Party awards for Best Looking Male. The fact that one year he accepted the accolade while dressed as a woman probably gave a clue as to how he felt about it all, and this sense that he wanted to be seen as more than just a pretty face was cemented on his debut solo album, 1996’s Green Man. Produced by John Leckie (The Stone Roses, Cast) and featuring a debut single (Child) that could best be described as ‘a little bit fey’, it was an obvious statement of intent. “There was definitely a search going on and me trying to find I guess a value to myself really,” Owen says about the immediate aftermath of Take That’s split. “I went the other way. I can only do what I do. I didn’t consciously not do a pop album, I just went with what’s in my heart and my gut. I don’t know if it’s always been right, but it’s always what I felt at the time. I did an album [2003’s In Your Own Time] after Green Man and I didn’t want to write choruses. Then I got dropped and then I had a few years of not knowing what I wanted to do.”
One more album followed in the shape of the ignored Tony Hoffer-produced How The Mighty Fall in 2005 and then he was sucked back into the Take That bubble for the massively successful Beautiful World and The Circus albums. It was after the tour for the latter that Owen’s reputation as pop’s nice guy was shattered after revelations of extra marital affairs were exposed by a tabloid newspaper, resulting in Owen checking himself into rehab. The whole experience and what followed with Robbie Williams returning to Take That for the Progress album seems to have had a massive effect on The Art Of Doing Nothing.
Ever thoughtful and deliberate when faced with a fairly straightforward question, he stumbles on how best to describe just how much of a saviour music has been in recent years: “I think when The Circus tour finished and I went to rehab and…When we finished the tour and Rob came back, there was a space that I hadn’t been…There was silence and smooth ground that was nice to be witness to as well and [the album] kind of grew from there really.” Was it like a weight being lifted off your shoulders to have Robbie back? “It’s nice now because there’s open communication – we CC each other in now,” he laughs. “There was a new space – maybe that’s where a lot of the white came from on the [new album] cover.
While he’s got a slight handle on some of the reasons behind the album’s artwork, a fairly innocuous question about the album’s title throws him into an amusing stupor – each attempt at an answer punctuated by silences and thoughtful pauses. “There are many many reasons why,” he begins. “It depends on how depressing I want to go with it all.” I tell him I’d read it was because people would ask him what he was up to and he’d just say ‘oh nothing’. “It’s easier to say ‘nothing’ or ‘not a lot’. If I go into certain worlds, it is nothing really – I’m just writing songs. I’m not saving the world, I’m not healing the sick. But then I go another way and think, well life’s nothing really. We start as nothing and then we end up back at nothing. There’s all different layers you can look at it on. The nothing is almost a circle I think. There’s something in that as well. The circle.” He takes a pause that seems to go on for an eternity. “Just in a psychological way, if I wake up in the morning and think ‘shit, I’ve got to do this and do that’ I can get into a bit of a state but then I think ‘just enjoy it, it’s nothing’. It will get done. Just calm down. Breathe. Actually, the circle, if you want to go…It’s the womb,” he mumbles, before quickly adding with a start, “breathing! It’s a breath. The art of breathing. So there’s that as well.”
Just half an hour in his presence reveals a lot about Mark Owen. He’s almost comically contorted by worry, second guessing everything he says and constantly conflicted about almost every aspect of the album-making process, from the recording (it was recorded in his garden studio, which started out relaxed but not “at 6pm when your mates leave and you haven’t written a good song it’s kind of depressing”), to the marketing of the album (“I keep saying to the label ‘this is the art of doing nothing and the only person doing nothing round here is you lot, I’m doing fucking everything!'” he jokes) to the amount of copies it might shift. “It’s nice to be part of something that’s successful – much nicer than being part of something that isn’t,” he jokes. “I do ask myself this question really and sometimes I think it doesn’t matter, it’s the art of doing nothing and we’ll all be free and it’s all lovely and then sometimes I think, it would be really embarrassing if does really badly.” It’s no reflection on quality though is it, I say helpfully; some amazing albums only sell about five copies. “Most of my albums have sold five copies! So actually, I’m probably more used to it not doing more than five copies so if it actually sells six I’ll have a heart attack.”
Unfortunately for Owen’s ticker The Art Of Doing Nothing should shift a few more copies than six given that a handful of the songs could have slid easily onto any of the recent Take That albums, specifically the epic, electro-tinged stomper The One and current single Stars, which despite the title and the video featuring Owen walking around Berlin in a space suit, doesn’t continue his alien obsession which came to the fore on Progress. “It was a little bit more ‘stop thinking about the aliens and think about your own life’,” he laughs. “Progress was end of the world stuff and I think we all believed the world would end and then it didn’t so we were like what do we do now…I’m joking. There is a definite theme in that record and I didn’t want a themed album for this one.” Instead it’s an album that, paradoxically given the fretful nature of its creator, feels completely relaxed and comfortable in its own skin. There are moments of downcast introspection and paranoia (the beautiful S.A.D.), but even the closing End Of Everything incases that navel-gazing and lapses into cod-psychology in a hook-laden swirl of galloping drums, undulating keyboards and Owen’s versatile voice, which has matured from its shrill beginnings.
As good as it is, however, did he ever think of giving Gary a call and asking for a song? “There’s a bit in my head that goes ‘I don’t want to bother them’,” he says with such a forlorn look that I let out an involuntary ‘ahhh’. “Then there’s a bit that goes ‘I don’t want to put them in a position where they have to say yeah, because they might say no and then we’ll have to break up again for ten years’. So that would be a bit uncomfortable.” Maybe just maybe, he didn’t need them this time. He’d never say it himself, but I think that’s it.
