Brian May on the roofing of Buckingham Palace, guitar up. Tom Jones and Blue duetting to “You Can Leave Your Hat On”. A visitor look from Kermit the Frog. An ending that saw Paul McCartney, Ozzy Osbourne and… Atomic Kitten, entirely on phase. This was the miscellany of acts that, on 3 June, 2002, were collected at Queen Elizabeth II’s authorities London residence for Party at the Palace. The telecasted extravaganza significant 50 years given that her accession to the throne – and offered the plan for royal pop performances moving forward.
The formula? Throw in some golden oldies (McCartney doing a Beatles assortment and Shirley Bassey blasting out a Bond style) along with some strong, family-friendly pop components and the odd wildcard. Since then, these displays have just end up being more head-spinningly diverse. In The Independent’s four-star evaluation of 2022’s Platinum Party at the Palace (where Rod Stewart covered “Sweet Caroline” and Diversity danced their method through the history of British music), Mark Beaumont hailed the occasion as “one of the most bizarre and unrelenting barrages of random entertainment ever staged”. During King Charles’ crowning weekend, among the greatest occasions will be a show including the similarity Katy Perry, Lionel Richie and Take That, plus the Royal Shakespeare Company and inbound Doctor Who, Ncuti Gatwa, carrying out excerpts from the Bard.
These huge telecasted celebrations, it appears, are now confronted with the weighty task of showing the nation in musical microcosm, encapsulating a sense of nationwide identity. That, obviously, is a principle that is “so diffuse and so complex that it’s not easily definable”, says Dr Kirsty Fairclough, reader in screen research studies and interim deputy head of Manchester Metropolitan University’s School of Digital Arts – and not least within the boundaries of a two-hour pop show, which can just ever display “a small slice of the UK musical ecosystem”.
Of course, the acts aren’t, maybe, the ones that the king themself uses heavy rotation. “I know that the music wasn’t necessarily to the Queen’s taste, because I was told that earplugs would probably be worn when she was watching it,” says Lorna Dickinson, Party at the Palace’s executive manufacturer. “And that’s fine, but she knew that this was actually for the country. It wasn’t just for her.” (Dickinson did, however, “have it on authority” that there were other royals who would value Ozzy’s performance of “Paranoid”.)
Dickinson worked carefully with the “very forward-thinking” Sir Michael Peat, keeper of the Privy Purse, on a line-up that would “celebrat[e] 50 years of the Queen’s reign”. Peat was the man credited with convincing Elizabeth II to open her back garden to 12,000 fans, who had actually won tickets by means of a lotto. A further one million loaded into the palace premises and royal parks to enjoy on cinemas, while 200 million TV viewers tuned in worldwide.
The origins of our “emphasis on national spectacle” as a method of building “Britishness” depend on the post-war duration, says Irene Morra, teacher of English Literature at the University of Toronto and the author of Britishness, Popular Music and National Identity: The Making of Modern Britain. Britain and its Allies had actually won the Second World War, however the collapse of the empire had actually tossed the nation’s put on the world phase into concern. With its worldwide impact on the subside, Britain doubled down on the “soft” power of the arts. “What you see in the Fifties is this massive attention to culture,” Morra discusses, as the nation rebranded itself as “the land of Shakespeare”, at the start of a “new Elizabethan age”.
A couple of years later on at the dawn of the Sixties, Fairclough includes, artists began riffing on British – and royal – history, establishing a “symbiotic relationship between music and popular culture and the monarchy in the UK”.
“Bands like The Kinks or The Who or The Rolling Stones kind of played with that imperial past – it [was] material for their look and sound,” she discusses, “in some ways to poke fun at it, in other ways to respect and revere”.
The Beatles, obviously, not just repurposed Edwardian military outfits for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – they were, Morra says, a “great big gift” for Britain’s self-fashioning. “Not only are [they] really popular in the UK, but what they do is they replicate this empire type of narrative, because they invade the US – it’s this British invasion with British culture.”
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Because the monarchy is “so closely aligned with this post-war [cultural] moment”, this period “still informs the attempts to create contemporary popular concerts” commemorating the royals, Morra notes. Hence the space took on almost every line-up for Sixties fond memories, changing previously countercultural icons into loveable nationwide treasures. The UK, she recommends, is “a nation that can’t stop looking back… it looks to its arts to articulate that history so it can repackage it into the modern world”.
Of course, it’s not everything about importance and nationwide metaphor. There are significant practical factors to consider when managing a live occasion on a big scale. While the Golden Jubilee had the relative high-end of a substantial preparation duration, with Dickinson’s group “sending out letters to artists in August of 2001” on the down low, the organisers of the crowning show didn’t have that running start (last August, she keeps in mind, “no one knew that the King’s coronation was happening”).
“The date decides who and what’s available and you can’t really work around that, because rockstars plan their touring schedules years ahead,” Dickinson includes. Back in 2002, Robbie Williams notoriously declined the Golden Jubilee gig (“He wasn’t free on that date,” discusses a valuable article on CBBC’s Newsround website, protected in digital amber; somewhere else it describes Williams as “party pooper Robbie”).
Learning the large scale of preparation associated with such a phenomenon may provide time out to the critics; even if the line-up isn’t to your tastes, these occasions are a technical and logistical accomplishment. Working on Party at the Palace, Dickinson’s group had “16 cameras and about 30 runners” (all of whom needed to have complete security clearance, stepped up in the wake of 9/11).
Beforehand, the range in between May (on the roofing) and Queen drummer Roger Taylor (on the phase) almost showed troublesome (“If you’ve separated a musician… it could be off cue”) and the gown practice session almost increased in flames. The day prior to the efficiency, “smoke started coming out of the roof of the Palace. All of a sudden, all these security people came out of the bushes… Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, you name it, were all shunted to the back of the Palace gardens while we waited”. The trigger? Not cable televisions and wires overheating, as Dickinson had actually feared, however “a leak in a toilet in the attic right at the top of the palace – someone had left a fan heater on to dry it out”.
Prince William obstructs his ears throughout Party at the Palace in the summer season of 2002
(Getty Images)
But more than twenty years on, will the very same dish for pop pomp and situation still work? Even in the months given that the Platinum Party at the Palace, a shift in nationwide state of mind has actually been palpable. “The loss of the Queen, the fact we’re in a cost of living crisis – it’s going to be very interesting to see how this does actually project a sense of whatever national identity is in [the organisers’] eyes,” Fairclough says. “I think it is a very difficult time to be holding an event of this magnitude.”
Earlier this month, a recent study from marketing research business YouGov asked more than 3,000 grownups how they were feeling about the approaching crowning events – 35 percent said they “do not care very much”, while 29 percent said they “do not care at all”. Throw in headings declaring that everybody from Harry Styles to the Spice Girls declined the show and you have a possibly challenging PR scenario – albeit one made a little more interesting by its possible to set the cultural tone for King Charles’ reign.
“So he’s bringing in the Royal Shakespeare Company… is that just reinforcing that connection between monarch and tradition and elitism? Or is there going to be a recognition of the potential modernity of arts institutions under a new king?” Morra marvels. “It will be kind of interesting to some extent to see whether or not he’s trying to change the signification of what he’s doing [with] the concert.”
Sometimes, it is the incidental minutes that accidentally feel one of the most quote unquote British. Yes, Robbie Williams carrying out with the Coldstream Guards band in front of Buckingham Palace throughout 2012’s Diamond Jubilee Concert was a little a tick box workout – however Robbie yelling “Let’s ‘ave it!” at the politely flag-waving crowd somehow felt endearing. And whether or not it is to your own taste, often “you kind of can’t avert, due to the fact that it’s becoming part of that minute”, as Fairclough puts it – “even for people who wouldn’t necessarily call themselves monarchists, there is something about experiencing it, whether that is live-tweeting it [or] taking swipes at it – there is something about being part of it that I think is always interesting”. Perhaps the genuine “Britishness” is available in joining to dissect these minutes – and leaning into the turmoil.
