When King Charles III was born on 14th November 1948, charts were still compiled from sales of sheet music – as they had been since the late 19th century. Top of the pops that week was “So Tired” by US bandleader Russ Morgan and Orchestra. The song, also released at the time on heavy and brittle shellac, had held the top spot for the previous six weeks. Its title was an apt summary of Britain in the immediate post-war era where tastes, like the footsteps in the nation’s dance halls, shuffled slowly.
In Charles’s lifetime, he watched as pop music evolved from a disruptive force into one of the few areas of settled consensus in public life. A little like what Andy Warhol said about cans of Coke, prime ministers and Deliveroo riders alike enjoy the same audio file of the same Ed Sheeran song. Veteran pop stars take on the same enduring longevity once the preserve of dictators and monarchs.
Now King Charles III has released a “personal” playlist, in collaboration with Apple Music, featuring 17 songs to promote Commonwealth Day celebrations. A video trailer for King’s Music Room shows a military band perform Bob Marley’s 1980 single “Could You Be Loved” outside Buckingham Palace. The King sits down inside beside a vintage “on air” broadcasting sign. Charles praises Marley’s “infectious energy”. And as expected: wallpaper press coverage celebrates the monarch’s “fun, spirited and slightly eccentric” selections – from Kylie and Grace Jones to Croydon trailblazer Raye and Nigerian Afrobreat star Davido.
The royal collaboration with Apple Music is a coup for the streaming giant, of course. Where Spotify’s expansion into non-music audio has courted controversy – none more so than its exclusive contract with shock jock podcaster Joe Rogan – Apple Music pitches itself as a company of broad stroke respectability. See Elton John’s Rocket Hour show, or Zane Lowe’s starry but frictionless head-to-head interviews.
But really, today’s exercise is about Brand Charles. In Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers, she reports that an early New Labour era Peter Mandelson told the future King that the public regarded him as “glum and dispirited.” In the 1980s and 1990s, Charles’s cultural pronouncements came in the form of his fusty opposition to modernist architecture. In the 2020s, the images that the palace promotes of the King are resolutely upbeat, to the point of eccentricity. As with this playlist, the intention is to underscore Charles as a modernising monarch at ease with the thriving multiculturalism the Commonwealth is now supposed to be associated with (a complex update on its obvious Empire realities).
In this, King’s Music Room is interesting solely as an exercise in reading between the lines. The only music from Charles’ childhood – where most of us form enduring memories around pop music – is Al Bowlly, the South African-British jazz crooner of the 1930s and 40s. “My Boy Lollipop” by Millie Small, the Jamaican singer who lived in London for most of her life in the decades after that 1964 release, is presented with a reflection on “how much we owe to the Windrush generation.” As with the playlist’s shout-outs to Anoushka Shankar and Daddy Lumba, King’s Music Hour is a historically watertight but bland two-step through the sounds of the Commonwealth. It could have come from a museum exhibition.
There will be some who are disappointed. There is no Nick Cave, who was guest at Charles’s coronation. No Spice Girls, who in 1997 kissed the then Prince Charles in a memorable Manchester encounter. No Gary Barlow, whose Take That headlined the King’s Coronation concert and in 2012 recorded a song featuring musicians from every nation of the Commonwealth. In Charles’s Commonwealth canon, there are no special favours.
Of course, befitting a man of his social class and age, Charles’s playlist tests plausibility. He is a classical music guy, a patron of the Royal College of Music and the English Chamber Orchestra. Charles has spoken fluently – more fluently than he speaks about, say, Raye – about Scylla et Glaucus, the only opera by a little-known 18th century composer of violin sonatas, a scene from which he selected for a 2010 appearance on Radio 3’s Private Passions. Curiously, that passion appears to have become a little more private, in favour of the more on-brand Apple Music cuts.
For those who wanted to know what, if anything, Charles listens to in private moments in the grand rooms of Buckingham Palace, the answer remains as mysterious and obscure as before.
[See more: Severance is laughing at you]
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