Gary Barlow has revealed he was the first person ever to ask Prince Charles about his and the Queen’s taste in music..
“I had a list of questions I wanted to ask him – what does the Queen like, what does she listen to? And he came into the room with six CDs. We were like, ‘OK, what’s this?’
“He said, ‘Well, I’ve brought some of my music collection cos you need to understand that because we travel so much, we get to hear so much music – it’s not what you’d think’.
“So I was shocked. I was like, ‘Have you ever even talked about music on camera before?’ and he said, ‘No-one’s ever asked me about music’.”
”It was a really eclectic bunch, from Cole Porter to people you’ve never heard of – from Africa, folk bands, mento bands from Jamaica, and I was intrigued by it because it was music from the Commonwealth.
Speaking on Graham Norton’s show (which goes out tonight) Gary spoke about meeting the Queen and how she blind-sided him with some logistical questions!
“I learned everything about this gig, I know every act that’s on, I even know every band member in Madness. There’s not a question she can throw at me where I am going to falter. I went, ‘Your Majesty, this is what the concert is going to look like, it’s going to be incredible, this is where it’s going to be, in front of the palace’.
“She looked at me and went, ‘So, all that equipment, how long is it going to take to dismantle it?’ At this point I’m guessing and I say, ‘Oh about six or seven hours’ so she went, ‘The concert’s going to finish at half ten at night which means you’ll be doing that all night while my family live at the front of the palace’.
“So in my chat with him he said, ‘If you really want the Queen to like this, find people; go and travel and find people’.”
The 41-year-old added that his talk with Prince Charles prompted him to ask the BBC for more money to finance the project.
“I had to go back to the BBC and say, ‘We need a bit more money because we’ve got to get on a plane a few times and go off round the world’,” he added.
“A little bead of sweat ran down and I was like, ‘So, moving on Your Majesty – this is the royal box, this is where you’ll be sitting’. She said, ‘How am I going to get there?’ It was something else I didn’t know the answer to.”
Barlow added: “She is incredible for her age – very, very smart. She’s excited about the whole weekend, she really is.”
Sing will be released on May 28.
Documentary shown BBC One on June 3.
Gary Barlow will appear on The Graham Norton Show along with Will Smith and Sir Tom Jones tonight (May 18) at 10.35pm on BBC One.
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