Prog legend Rick Wakeman is one of music's great raconteurs, a fact which the 75-year-old keyboardist demonstrates to fabulous effect in a wide-ranging new interview with YouTube personality Rick Beato.
One of the many entertaining anecdotes the former Yes keyboardist shares in the 88-minute interview with Beato concerns a brace of surprise encounters he had with the late Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.
Wakeman first met Queen Elizabeth II's mother one morning in 1968, at the London home of Thomas Goff, the English lawyer-turned-harpsichord-manufacturer. Wakeman received an invitation to Goff's home on Pont Street, near Sloane Square, while studying at the Royal College of Music, after Goff heard him playing one of his harpsichords in a rehearsal room at the college. Welcomed into Goff's home by his butler, Wakeman was shown into a room with three harpsichords, and invited to sit down and play.
"So it comes to about 11 o'clock, and the butler comes in and says, 'Mr Goff requires your presence in the parlour for morning tea with his other guest'," Wakeman recalls. "His parlour was bigger than the house I was brought up in, and so I go in there, and he says, 'How are you finding the harpsichord?' I said, It's beautiful Mr Goff, thank you, and he said, 'Sit down, have some tea.'
"There was a woman at the end of this huge long table, and she's reading a paper, The Sporting Life, the horse racing paper... He said, 'Elizabeth, did you hear any of the playing?' and she put the paper down... and it was the Queen Mother! So I'm now just very grateful that I'd had a bowel movement before I arrived! And she said, 'Yes, very nice.'"
Wakeman recalls that the Queen Mother began talking to him about horse racing, and offered him her advice as to a horse she considered an excellent prospect to win a race later that day, suggesting that he might wish to place "a couple of shillings" on it, but that he wasn't able to place a bet as he was an impoverished student at the time. "I could barely afford a potato at lunchtime," he recalls.
"There is a sequel to this story," Wakeman tells Beato, moving on to the mid 70s, when he was enjoying a successful career with Yes. At this point, Wakeman was friends with a horse racing journalist, who introduced him to a horse racing trainer called John Webber, who mentioned that the Queen Mother had a young horse for sale at her stables in Wiltshire, for £8,000. Wakeman and Webber travelled down to Wiltshire to purchase the horse, a one year-old gelding, and the musician was informed that the Queen Mother was on the premises and wished to meet her horse's new owner.
Wakeman continues, "Out comes the Queen Mum, and she's meeting everybody, and when she reaches me, the man says, 'And this is the gentleman who's bought the gelding.' He said, 'You obviously haven't met Mr Wakeman before', and I said, Well, we have actually met ma'am, and she said, 'Really? Tell me!'
Wakeman proceeded to retell, in great detail, the story of meeting the royal at Thomas Goff's house, only to have the Queen Mother look him straight in the eyes, shake her head, and reply, "I don't remember that at all."
"I felt about that high," Wakeman tells Beato, gesturing to about six inches off the floor, and admitting that he was mortified. "Then she went on about two more paces, and came back, and said, 'Of course I do [remember], it was wonderful, and I do remember you very well. You've obviously done well for yourself since then!' And we had a nice little chat."
Wakeman concludes his story by revealing that he played one of Goff's harpsichord's on Yes' Fragile album in 1971, and his own 1973 solo album, The Six Wives of Henry VIII.
Watch the interview with Beato in full below.
