Music - William Cook inspects Diana's CD collection and discovers she was a pleb at heart

Princess Diana never appeared on Desert Island Discs, but now we have the next best thing. In October, her former butler Paul Burrell will stand trial at the Old Bailey, charged with stealing 302 of her personal items - charges that he denies - including, allegedly, 21 records, 19 CDs and ten cassette tapes. It's a much more comprehensive cross-section than the eight tunes you're allowed on the BBC's desert island and, as a musical biography, it is also far more intimate. Unlike on Desert Island Discs, these records were played in private. Consequently, they are gloriously free from the self-conscious constraints of fashionable good taste.

Diana was our Pop Princess, an unpretentious populist who bopped along to high street pin-ups such as Duran Duran and Wham!. Di didn't just like Simon Le Bon and George Michael, she looked like them. Yet the first big surprise about this melodic back catalogue is its wealth of classical music. Beethoven and Wagner, Turandot and La Traviata, Mozart and Rachmaninov piano concertos, plus Romeo and Juliet - by both Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky. It's a resolutely Romantic mix - fans of Karlheinz Stockhausen won't find much to tap their feet to - but still displays a genuine appreciation of orchestral music, which suggests that Di wasn't a cultural lightweight.

However, the most revealing records in this haul are not timeless concert-hall classics, but songs from the era in which Diana lived. Michael Jackson's "Bad", "Foreign Affair" by Tina Turner and "Flying Colours" by Chris de Burgh - it's a sign of pop's democratic omnipotence that the wife of the heir to the throne, and the mother of his likely successor, listened to the same, middle-of-the-road music as any other middle-aged mum in Middle England.

Those are some of the CDs. The cassettes stretch a bit further back. West End musicals such as Les Miserables rub shoulder pads with teenage heart-throbs Aha, and with Phil Collins's Hello, I Must Be Going! - a tear-jerking album of broken-hearted ballads recorded just a year after Diana's royal wedding. Yet it's the vinyl relics that are the most fascinating titles in this archive, for the light they shed on Diana's musical tastes before she became an aristocratic superstar. Concept albums such as Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, movie soundtracks such as Barbra Streisand's A Star Is Born - these are the sounds of that lost age between flower power and punk, when progressive rock was still hip and the gatefold LP sleeve reigned supreme.

Some of Diana's faves, such as Elton John, have never really gone out of fashion. Others - Leo Sayer, for example - have recently enjoyed revivals. Nevertheless, from The Sound of Music to Supertramp, these LPs still say something about Diana Spencer, as she still was way back then, that no book or broadcast can ever tell you. The style guru Peter York even name-checks Neil Diamond, another artiste in this collection, in "The Sloane Rangers", his 1975 Harpers & Queen essay that defined Diana's generation.

Diana's private tastes may have been inhibited by her public duties. Nevertheless, her proletarian personality still shines through this list of Smash Hits greatest hits. Abba is pop for girls who want to chase boys, not foxes. Simply Red is pop for women who love men, not horses.

Cliff Richard, Sarah Brightman, Michael Ball and Michael Crawford, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera, on record and cassette . . . Diana was always stylish, but she was never too sophisticated, and that, more than anything, was why a nation fell in love with her.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website