4/18/2023 0 Comments Macbeth character chart![]() I must go upstairs and watch ‘Twin Peaks.’” (I’d like to think she was watching Season Two.) Again, it’s hard to imagine anyone British thinking this was a story they should repeat in public, but Badalamenti had no such reservations.īritish indie-pop band McCarthy, followers of the hard-left Revolutionary Communist Party, were one of the few groups to write about our next monarch. McCartney, I’m sorry but I can’t stay.” He looked crestfallen. Just as he was telling the queen what an honor this was going to be, she said, “Mr. Composer Angelo Badalamenti, a frequent collaborator of director David Lynch, once recalled meeting McCartney at Abbey Road and hearing how the Beatle had been asked to play a half-hour set of his greatest hits at Buckingham Palace. The Beatles’ “ Her Majesty,” though it has long been used by Lennon loyalists as evidence of Paul McCartney’s soft, MOR tendencies, was hardly a ringing endorsement of Elizabeth II’s personality: “Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl, but she doesn’t have a lot to say.” The queen got back at McCartney at her birthday celebrations years later. It was about the fantasy world Britain had entered for a few months in 1977, where economic collapse, the rise of the far right and huge industrial unrest were somehow healed by Union Jack bunting and the balm of a street party. The Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” - originally titled “No Future” until the group realized the possible benefits of releasing the single just ahead of the queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations - might compare the monarchy to a fascist regime, but the lady herself barely figured in the lyric. But when the queen herself has featured in lyrics, she has usually been used as little more than a device, a figurehead for royalty, with an almost spectral presence. ![]() Other than that rash of early tributes, I can only think of Neil Innes’ cod-reggae “ Silver Jubilee” in 1977: “Queenie baby I’m not fooling, only you can do your ruling, in your own sweet way.” It isn’t hard to find anti-royalist material, like anarcho-punk band Crass’ sarcastic, saccharine ode to Charles and Diana’s 1981 nuptials, “ Our Wedding” (“Never look at anyone, I must be all you see / Listen to those wedding bells, say goodbye to other girls”). Where pop music intersects with the queen is an odd place. That the queen’s reign predated such a national institution is mind-boggling, and helps to explain the current sense of hollowness in the country - almost no one can remember a time when the queen wasn’t the queen. Not only was she our monarch before the singles chart existed, she went on to outlive its usefulness. Back then, there was no record chart at all - the first hit parade wouldn’t be printed until that November, and it quickly became a peculiarly British obsession, like trainspotting, or following the lives of the royal family in microscopic detail. The Top 10 didn’t even exist when Elizabeth, who died Thursday at 96, succeeded her father in February 1952. It took Trinidad-born pianist Winifred Atwell to liven up the celebrations with the much more ebullient “ Coronation Rag.” Unlike the “Queen’s Suite,” British popular music’s reaction to her coronation in 1953 was largely obsequious and dull - two versions of the dreary “In A Golden Coach” sat in the New Musical Express’ Top 10, one by band leader and BBC radio presenter Billy Cotton, the other by pre-rock heartthrob Dickie Valentine. ![]() Ellington, being American, was able to deal with meeting the queen on a normal, human level that anyone British would have found almost impossible.
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