Is this really the King’s favourite music?
If you’ve ever had sleepless nights wondering what King Charles’s favourite tunes are, Apple has now come to your rescue. A selection has been put out on Apple Music, grandiloquently entitled ‘His Majesty King Charles III’s Playlist’, and the monarch has put out a brief statement to explain his choices. ‘I wanted to share with you songs which have brought me joy. They evoke many different styles and many different cultures. But all of them, like the family of Commonwealth nations, in their many different ways, share the same love of life in all its richness and diversity.’
The lede is hardly buried, but the knowledge that these songs have been ‘compiled to mark Commonwealth Day’ means that the selection is less a truly representative selection of the music that one can imagine the King listening to in his private time at Sandringham or Highgrove, and more a carefully focused-grouped selection of inoffensive but often inessential songs, all with Commonwealth associations.
A few of them, admittedly, feel like they have a more personal connection to the monarch. It isn’t at all difficult to imagine the King and Queen having a mild boogie to Millie Small’s ‘My Boy Lollipop’ or, slightly more daringly, Bob Marley’s ‘Could You Be Loved’, just as the inclusion of the sole truly old-school number, Al Bowlly’s ‘The Very Thought Of You’, seems like something dictated by Charles’s own taste rather than a PR exercise. And the King comments, rather charmingly, of Diana Ross’s ‘Upside Down’ that ‘when I was much younger it was absolutely impossible not to get up and dance when it was played. I wonder if I can still just manage it.’
The rest of it lies somewhere between bewildering and slightly terrifying. Kylie Minogue is clearly one of Australia’s most successful musical exports, but she is responsible for far more enduring and better songs than the Stock Aitken Waterman-produced cover of Carole King’s ‘The Loco-Motion’, which still makes its appearance here. (Charles talks, slightly desperately, of its “infectious energy”.) There is a tendency either to blandness (the reigning monarch of MOR, Michael Bublé, pops up with ‘Haven’t Met You Yet’) or that of great artists being represented by odd choices. Grace Jones’s ‘La Vie En Rose’, for instance, is not the song that most would associate with her. And by the time that Beyonce’s ‘Crazy in Love’ is shoved onto the playlist as a bonus track, it is hard not to feel that whoever was compiling the selection had given up.
What it doesn’t do is to offer any insight into Charles’s own personal musical tastes. Granted, apart from his abiding interest in the contemporary classical composer John Taverner, whose challenging and Greek Orthodox-inspired pieces would seem to reflect the king’s ascetic side, he has seldom made his preferences public. He enthusiastically danced around to the Philadelphia soul group The Three Degrees at his 30th birthday, and the band’s singer Sheila Ferguson subsequently blamed the-then Prince of Wales for impacting her cool quotient and romantic life as a result. And Status Quo once claimed that he had told them that they were his favourite band, although this might seem more about their tendency to make grandiose claims that it does about Charles’s desire to wig out to ‘Rockin’ All Over The World’.
The playlist, then – which, intriguingly, is entitled ‘Episode 1’, suggesting that we might see further, perhaps more revealing instalments in future weeks or months – should be regarded as a harmless diversion rather than anything revelatory. Still, at what has been an eventful, at times embarrassing year so far for the royals, the suggestion that Charles likes the soul singer Raye’s unsuccessful 2019 single ‘Love Me Again’ rather more than anyone else did is a welcome touch of eccentricity that humanises this apparently music-loving monarch. Still, had he picked the Smiths’ ‘The Queen Is Dead’, that would have been a real talking point.
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