‘I have huge fear every day’: Gareth Gates on bullying, resilience and tabloid gossip

For Gareth Gates, the toughest moment of the recent reality show Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins wasn’t dealing with CS gas, or stress holds, or even sharing a dorm with Matt Hancock; it happened in an interview room. Gates has had a lifelong stammer, and speaking in a stressful situation was about as hard as it gets. “When I was stretched in every way, physically drained and exhausted, to then have to talk, which is my hardest thing in life, was tough,” he says. “And I was unearthing trauma and exposing scars I hadn’t spoken about before.”

In the show, which puts contestants through SAS training, Gates broke down, berating himself as he did (“I said I wouldn’t do this”). He talked haltingly, between tears, about being bullied at school – sometimes he was held down and physically attacked, hearing boys shouting: “Let’s beat the words out of him.” After the show finished, the contestants were offered therapy sessions: “I absolutely took it. I definitely needed it – I’d tapped into areas I hadn’t been to for many years.”

Gates won the show, which was a happy end to a gruelling process, and proved to himself that he could win a reality show. He came to fame via Pop Idol, the TV singing contest, in 2002, when he was the runner-up to Will Young. If the first reality show changed his life, so did the latest one. He learned, he says, “how resilient I am”. At school, “I always saw myself as very weak. I actually was very weak then. But I’m no longer the cowering boy who sits in the corner; I have learned to speak up, I’ve learned to be stronger. It took for SAS to happen to really realise how far I’d come.”

Tough going … Gareth Gates with fellow SAS: Who Dares Wins finalists Matt Hancock and Danielle Lloyd. Photograph: Pete Dadds/Channel 4/PA

Gates is talking from his cabin aboard a cruise ship, somewhere in the Atlantic, where he performs most nights. On 9 November, a few days before we speak via a video call, he had posted a video on Instagram, calling out three women in the next cabin. He could hear them making fun of his speech. Even at 39, Gates is dealing with bullying. “I’ve had it my entire life, and when it does happen, I have learned to switch off.” It usually happens on nights out, and usually comes from drunk men, he says. Most of the time, he ignores it, but being on a ship, with his partner, it became too much. “Every time we went out on to the balcony and they heard we were there, the abuse started. It was fine at first and if I’d been on my own, I’d have probably just let it go. Or if it had been guys, I’d have gone round.”

It was his partner who confronted them. “And it stopped. Off the back of SAS, it just felt the right time to do a ‘stand up to bullying’ post, and it was huge. It’s had over a million views now and there’s a lot of comments from people saying they’re pleased that I spoke up.”

We’re joined by Chris, a friend and voice coach who occasionally steps in to remind him to slow down, or to breathe, or to have a few seconds’ rest. Gates finds interviews hard, but he speaks well – he is warm and talks with a smile – although it is clear it is an effort. When we are talking about the bullying and, later, about the pressures of young fame, his speech is noticeably affected.

Live TV interviews are worse (“I don’t sleep well the night before; I’m up worrying about it”), but the one he did two weeks ago on Good Morning Britain reduced the co-host Ed Balls to tears. Balls said seeing Gates had inspired him to be open about his own challenges with a stammer. It means a lot to Gates. “I tried to say this on the show, but I wasn’t as eloquent towards the end, because it all became quite emotional, but I think one of my biggest achievements is I’ve raised the awareness of stammering,” he says. He loves the messages he gets from other people with a stammer, but also “people with anything that holds them back in life … they tell me I’ve inspired them to keep going, and that you don’t have to allow something to dictate who we are and what we can achieve. It’s a great feeling.”

‘I didn’t really think too much, I was purely going along for the ride’ … Gates with Pop Idol winner Will Young. Photograph: Myung Jung Kim/PA

Gates was eight when he discovered he could sing. He auditioned for a part in a school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, only because his friends were doing so. It was a revelation – not only that he had a lovely voice, but that, when he sang, his stammer disappeared. He got the lead part – a role he would later play in the West End. “I just completely fell in love with music, because it was my only form of expression,” he says.

The bullying lessened. “I finally gained respect from my peers. It was still hard at school, I was still teased, but it wasn’t to the extent of the bullying before, because people saw that I was good at something.”

He has always questioned why he is able to sing unencumbered. “I think it’s that I adopt a different persona. I’m not really Gareth Gates, I’m whatever part I’m playing, and that’s really helped me.” Even in the speaking parts – he has been in musicals including Les Misérables and Legally Blonde – rehearsing the script thoroughly means he can get fully into character “and it isn’t ever an issue. I can talk freely on stage.”

Gates joined Bradford cathedral choir at nine, eventually becoming the head chorister. He took up guitar and piano, working his way up through the grades. He got a place at the Royal Northern College of Music, where he planned to study to become an opera singer, but he was also entering local talent competitions – the last of which was Pop Idol. It didn’t really matter that he didn’t win – he already knew he would be getting a recording contract.

The first generation of reality shows have been re-examined in recent years, but Gates says he had a good experience: “I was treated well. I was fortunate that I was kind of Simon Cowell’s boy from the start; he was rooting for me.” The show “gave people an insight as to what I was about. Up until then, my speech had always caused me so much hurt and pain, but on Pop Idol, for the first time, it was actually a positive thing, because it helped me stand out.”

None of the contestants had any idea how big the show would become, he says. He became famous overnight. One day, he could walk down the street “unscathed”; the next, people mobbed him in central London. “My T-shirt was ripped and it was all a bit manic,” he says. It helped that he was so young: “I didn’t really think too much, I was purely going along for the ride.” He was living his dream and “very thankful for that”.

But it can’t have been easy. The tabloids and celebrity magazines were in full feeding-frenzy mode. He was a victim of a particularly tawdry kiss ’n’ tell – the glamour model Katie Price, then 24, told of taking 17-year-old Gates’s virginity in excruciating detail. Paparazzi would wait for him outside bars and clubs. “You are always looking over your shoulder, you are always aware of people; who you can trust, who you can’t,” he says.

‘It was all a bit manic’ … Gates in 2003. Photograph: Alan Davidson/Shutterstock

I would have thought it would have been harder to deal with as a young person. “I think it goes back to the hardship that I had as a child,” says Gates. “Although that time with the tabloids was hard, it was nothing in comparison to the bullying and the beatings that I went through as a kid because of my speech. That puts it all into perspective, and I think that’s why I was able to get through it.”

Four of Gates’s first five singles went to No 1 and his first album sold well. His second didn’t have the same impact and the fallout from his relationship with Price had damaged his clean-cut image. It didn’t help that he had lied about it at the time, then was forced to admit it, which blew up the story. With 2023 eyes, the power imbalance between Gates and Price, who was seven years older and far more media-experienced, feels bigger than it did at the time (in one of her autobiographies, Price jokingly writes about seeing a teenager who still lived at home and would whisper on the phone to her from his bedroom). Had their genders been reversed, Gates may not have been given such a hard time.

He took a break. It was his choice, he says. In a 2006 documentary, painfully titled Whatever Happened to Gareth Gates?, he seemed stung by the whole experience (his girlfriend at the time, Suzanne Mole, with whom he later had a short-lived marriage, and a daughter, said being dropped by his record label had been tough for him). But with the benefit of maturity and hindsight, it all worked out, he says. The break “was for my own sanity”, but it wasn’t good for his career. “The fans certainly didn’t like it,” he says. “I left it a few years until I released the third album, and it didn’t do as well, because people move on if the artist isn’t active. I was used to having No 1 after No 1 and selling millions, and when I didn’t do that on album number three, I was a bit gutted.”

As Joseph in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat in 2009. Photograph: Alex Lentati/Evening Standard/Shutterstock

When he was 30, Gates injured one of his vocal cords. It made him re-evaluate. He had spent much of his 20s partying: “I was going out a lot, but I swapped that for the gym.” A few years ago, people noticed how ripped he was getting (he still is – he goes to the gym most days). “I’ve always wanted to look good on the outside,” he says. “I think that’s probably to compensate for not being perfect on the inside. As a stammerer, just doing normal things, I get that anxiety and fear every moment of every day of my life. I see that as an imperfection.”

But it wasn’t just about that, he says; it was a way of looking after himself better. Gates is sensible for a pop star – he invested much of his early money well (he describes himself as a businessman), although he lost £250,000 to a currency scam. “It took for that injury to happen on my vocal cord to realise I can’t really burn the candle at both ends – and I want to continue to work,” he says

He moved into musical theatre, panto, reality shows and appearing on cruise ships. “I’m extremely fortunate that I’ve continued to work. I haven’t ever hit rock bottom, I’ve never been out of work, so I haven’t that tale to tell.” Does he worry that there is a stigma attached to being a cruise-ship singer? “I was asked to do cruise ships years ago and I shared that same mindset, purely because of that stigma,” he says. “I think it’s going away now.” He loves it, talking about performing to sold-out crowds each night. “It’s a really lovely gig and I get paid very well. I couldn’t care less about the stigma.”

Is there still a part of him that would like to be a pop star again? He smiles and says a man who is “really big in the industry” – he won’t say who – “contacted me two months ago and wants to make another album with me”. If he can make it work – he says he barely has a day off until next April – the plan is to release an album next autumn. “So it looks like I could be a pop star again,” he says, with a laugh.

Between his second and third albums, Gates started working with the McGuire Programme, a course for people who stammer; he also became a coach. When he was promoting his third album, Gates employed a coach from the programme to come on the road with him, working on his speech daily and getting him through his promotional duties. “Eventually, I found a good level of eloquence.”

Since then, his fluency has declined. “I’m not in the best place with my stammer,” he says. “I became complacent after achieving a lot of success with my speech and it became harder and harder, and now I’m in a place where I have to kind of start again.” He says it is a “constant battle”: ordering something in a restaurant, asking for a receipt, chatting to a stranger. He would like to be able to check into a hotel without anxiety: “Saying your name, for a stammerer, is always the hardest thing to say, because there’s only one answer.” Sometimes his partner, or his father (who works for Gates), steps in. “There’s situations and challenges I avoid, and that’s not good, but at times it’s too much. That’s something I have to work on.”

He says he is thankful for his Celebrity SAS experience, “because it’s given me the kick up the backside to actually put the work in”. I ask if he has accepted his stammer as a part of who he is, but he says he can’t. “I think that’s the battle, because in the past I’ve achieved a good level of eloquence and fluency that I’m trying to get back. I know that I can do it – and I will.”