Over the years, the music tastes of King Charles have remained something of a mystery - not one anybody seemed in a tearing hurry to solve, but a mystery nonetheless.
In the 1970s, he was reputed to be a fan of the Three Degrees, which perhaps tells you more about the stuff that got played at discos for the very posh at the time than about a deep-rooted love for lushly orchestrated Philly soul.
He attended a 1982 charity gig by Status Quo and “appeared to be having a fantastic time”, according to the band’s late guitarist Rick Parfitt. Whether the walls of Highgrove rang to the strains of Ma Kelly’s Greasy Spoon and Piledriver thereafter remains unknown.
And that’s about it. It’s perhaps churlish to suggest that we don’t learn much more about our reigning monarch’s music taste from the playlist he’s ostensibly produced for Apple Music, which is grandly announced as “a musical journey that spans 10 decades and reflects the diversity of the Commonwealth and a personal taste shaped by extraordinary experiences around the world”.
There are certainly parts of it you can imagine King Charles enjoying. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa gets a look in, and she famously sang Handel’s Let the Bright Seraphim at his wedding to Lady Diana Spencer (“she’s certainly got a good pair of lungs on her,” noted the contemporary fictional diarist Adrian Mole of her performance).
Perhaps Al Bowlly was a favourite of his mum, or his grandma. Perhaps Grace Jones’s La Vie En Rose and Diana Ross’s Upside Down evoke memories of the aforementioned poshos’ discos in his heady bachelor days (the latter track, he suggests during a filmed introduction, is one he found “impossible not to dance to” in his youth).
It’s presumably not beyond the realms of possibility that he encountered the work of Bob Marley in the same period, although his introduction steers clear of personal reminiscence in favour of footage of a royal band playing Could You Be Loved. You do wonder what Bob Marley would have made of that, although given that his widow, Rita, recently, bafflingly, claimed that Prince Harry “embodies the spirit of Bob Marley”, who knows? It proves a disappointment for anyone who hoped it might feature His Majesty detailing his enjoyment of the Tuff Gong’s oeuvre after a lick of the chalice (“one finds oneself feeling frightfully irie”).
Equally, there are parts of the playlist that it’s hard not to look at without thinking: no way. Is King Charles really a fan of afrobeats, with a particular penchant for Nigeria’s Davido? Do he and Camilla bust moves of an evening to Beyonce’s Crazy in Love? Were they following Raye’s career in the dark days before she extricated herself from her major label contract and self-released her debut album to wild critical acclaim, the period from which her track Love Me Again hails? At the risk of sounding like a hopeless cynic, it doesn’t seem terribly likely, does it?
And that, rather than its contents, is the problem with The King’s Music Room: it’s a playlist that somehow smacks less of a musical journey and personal tastes shaped by extraordinary experiences than of being designed by committee.
It might have been less diverse – and displayed substantially less knowledge of recent developments in the world of pop – had King Charles just listed his favourite songs, but it also might have been more interesting. As it is, what actually goes on the stereo at Clarence House – if indeed anything does – seems as much of a mystery as ever.
