We’ve let him entertain us for more than thirty years.

Robbie Williams is the perfect choice for the very first PATH TO FAME book.

Robert Peter Williams did not become Robbie until, aged sixteen, he joined a bunch of boyband hopefuls who eventually made it to the very top as Take That. He was just Rob, a surprisingly sensitive boy from Stoke-on-Trent, who preferred amateur dramatics to football in the park with his mates.

His biggest success was not scoring a winning goal but singing ‘Consider Yourself’, the timeless classic from the musical Oliver in which he played The Artful Dodger. He coped manfully with the shock of seeing his dad, the comedian Pete Conway, in the front row of the Theatre Royal, Burslem. Pete had quit the family home when his son was just three.

Rob left school with no qualifications and was whiling away his days smoking and selling double glazing when his mum Jan spotted the advertisement for an audition in Manchester that would change his life. It wasn’t all plain sailing, however – he was sacked from Take That and had to battle through a descent into drink and drugs before becoming a multimillionaire, a record-breaking Brit award winner and, as he himself might say, a Better Man.

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He relit the fire of his prodigious talent and musical ambition.

Gary Barlow’s path to fame came to an abrupt halt when his career slumped in the most spectacular way. Until his solo career crumbled, his pathway had been lined with gold. Quite simply, he was a musical prodigy as a teenager growing up in the small Cheshire town of Frodsham.

The compère at the local British Legion Club asked the bingo enthusiasts to listen politely to a song the schoolboy musician had just composed and give it a massive applause. Gary blew on the mic, as he always did, and began: ‘Put Your Head Against My Life…’

It was the first public performance of ‘A Million Love Songs’ and it did indeed bring the house down. The classic track was one of more than a hundred songs that he composed while still at school. And on the last night of his residency at the club when he was eighteen he performed fifty of the greatest hits of all time from Michael Jackson, The Beatles and many more ending with ‘New York, New York’ by Frank Sinatra.

When he first found fame, Gary was perceived as arrogant but that changed when his solo career flopped and he became depressed and overweight, while the triumphs of Robbie Williams were a constant reminder of his failure. But Take That returned, bigger than ever, and Gary got back on the path.

And just like Robbie, the first book of the unique PATH TO FAME series, he had to hit rock bottom before he could Rule the (pop) World again.

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