Never mind Michelle O’Neill attending the coronation of King Charles III. We are here concerned with the removal of The Proclaimers from the “official coronation celebration playlist”. Yes, there is such a frightful thing. A bit of Elbow. Some ELO. Too much George Ezra. The wrong David Bowie. Imagine hold-music for the administrative department of Hell’s most boring substation and you are halfway there. It seems that, until early last week, The Proclaimers’ I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) was also on the list. It would be nice to report the Scottish twins had demanded its erasure (why no Erasure, by the way?), but it seems the track vanished after complaints flooded in concerning Charlie and Craig Reid’s republican views. The news reports concluded with a hilarious list of their unambiguous pronouncements on the topic. Charlie had expressed support for the man initially detained by police after shouting “Who elected him?” at the king in Oxford. “I thought that guy spoke for me,” he said. They wrote a whole song slagging off hypocrites who take digs at the royal family and then accept honours. “You’re just the same as every other clown who likes to put the crown before or after their names,” the lads sang on In Recognition. And so on.
So, The Proclaimers are no longer associated with the coronation. Good. No popular musician should be associated with that event or with the British royal family in any capacity. I am not being naive here. I know that, once they make their first million, rock stars can no longer convincingly claim maverick status. They play golf. They holiday in Mustique. They drink Louis Roederer Cristal. You will rarely find them hustling for dimes on Hard-Luck Boulevard. But would it kill them to pretend? From the mid-1950s, when rock’n’roll came down from the hills and into the cities, musicians at least wore the unofficial uniform of rebellion. They were convincingly monosyllabic when interviewed by men in three-piece suits. They gave the police reasons to bust them on trumped-up drugs charges. That is how the transaction was supposed to operate. The stars were there to appal parents on behalf of children who couldn’t themselves face meaningful rebellion. Hey, Ronnie Blancmange. Hey, Sally Vixen and the Vipers. We’re paying you good money to enrage the Daily Express. Why the hell are you playing croquet with the Duchess of Kent?
Still your fury. The British papers have, over the past few months, groaned with stories about stars turning down invitations to play the coronation concert. And we’re not talking Stormzy and Little Simz. Such denizens of the dinner-party playlist as Adele, Ed Sheeran, Harry Styles and Robbie Williams will be elsewhere on the happy evening. Even Elton John, whose gruesome paean to the late Princess Diana soundtracked the recreational grieving in 1997, will be otherwise engaged (at the Mercedes Benz Arena in Berlin, apparently). Most seem to have a reasonable excuse for their non-attendance, but the Daily Mail did extract interesting whispers from a “source” close to Kylie Minogue. “Kylie ... admires the royal family,” this Deep Throat murmured. “But she is also a passionate Australian and has read the room in a country that could very soon become a republic.” It seems as if those attending the concert will be stuck with Katy Perry, Lionel Richie and Take That.
Whatever else you may say about the royal family, they have never, ever been cool. They are no cooler than Jacob Rees-Mogg or The Antiques Roadshow
The apparent gulf – well, crevice anyway – between the rockocracy and the Saxe-Coburg descendancy should not altogether surprise us. It was not until this century that the two institutions reached such a full understanding. Plenty found Elton John’s warbling in the Abbey a tad vulgar. It was the concert for the Queen’s golden jubilee in 2002 that cemented the entente. That was the one where Brian May played the national anthem from the roof of Buckingham Palace and Ozzy Osbourne reunited with Tony Iommi for an unlikely blast through Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. Up to that point, the two bodies had been properly suspicious of one another. The Beatles did play for the Windsors at the Royal Variety Performance, but a sardonic John Lennon made sure he invited them to rattle their jewellery. Princess Margaret was alleged to be pally with Mick Jagger, but they certainly didn’t attend Henley or Glastonbury together. King Charles (as he then wasn’t) famously liked The Three Degrees, but that did nothing for their credibility.
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Until relatively recently musicians did not need to be reminded of information that should have been axiomatic. Whatever else you may say about the royal family, they have never, ever been cool. They are no cooler than Jacob Rees-Mogg or The Antiques Roadshow. It is this unavoidable truth, rather than any political embarrassment, that may yet keep the two elite factions apart. We mean it, man.
