Will Young reveals that emotional Buckingham Palace butlers ‘thanked him’ after coming out in 2002

Musician Will Young, who is currently on tour in the UK, has revealed that butlers working at Buckingham Palace thanked him in secret for coming out after he won Pop Idol.

The “Leave Right Now” singer, 45, appeared on Jamie Laing’s Great Company podcast where he opened up about coming out in 2002 after winning the ITV talent show.

He recalled going for lunch with the Queen and noted a lot of the butlers working at Buckingham Palace were gay men.

“And it was quite a big thing then, you didn’t often get a male pop star at the beginning of the career coming out,” he said.

“And so they were coming up to me in secret… and one of them came up and went, thank you so much. And obviously they’re not allowed to talk to you. They’re not allowed to do anything. 

“Obviously they weren’t allowed to do that. And then I went off to the loo, and another one was like, thank you so much.

“I mean, I could cry. It was amazing!”

Also during the podcast Will Young touched on his twin brother Rupert who took his own life aged 41 after battling depression and alcohol addiction. 

He recalled his brother telling him prior to his death that he had become “steely” and “cold.”

“I maybe became a bit too steely and I remember my late brother saying to me, ‘You’ve become a bit cold’ because I think I was so shut off to it,” Young said.

“I remember it was so sad. I could well up about it because he was crying. He was like, ‘I don’t understand what has happened’.”

Young previously said in Channel 4’s documentary Will Young: Losing My Twin Rupert that his brother “would be drinking 24 hours a day” towards the end of his life.

Before his death, Rupert lived with Young sporadically for three years. The singer had reported him as a trespasser and had him removed from his home days before Rupert took his own life, saying the living situation was “affecting his wellbeing.”

“You’ve got this monster who’s not moving. So, the only thing was to throw him out but also to be aware he might end up killing himself. I was OK with everything I’d done to try to help him.”

“My day would start. Either he was sick or he would have peed on the sofa, so I’d have to clear that up, then go get more beers and codeine because he was addicted to painkillers.”

Recalling Rupert’s last weeks, Young said: “I had a big moment where I realised I couldn’t save him and that brought a whole lot of grief. Now I just feel very grateful that I got 42 years with him.”

“I did everything I could to not let him die,” he continued. 

This autumn Young is set to go on a 49-date tour in support of his nineth album, Light It Up, which was released on Friday (9 August).

Young said each show in the tour will be “an intimate evening of music, stories and laughter” and will see him head to “many areas I’ve never had the chance to perform before”.

The tour will begin on 3 September in Southend then head off to areas including Reading, York, Leicester, Brighton and Glasgow before finishing up with two nights at London’s Cadogan Hall on 26-27 November.

You can find out more about the tour and how to get tickets here.