Pop Concert at the Palace
The concert at the palace was extraordinarily bad. One of the presenters had the gall to say ‘If there was a World Cup of Rock & Roll the UK would win it every time’. Given the ‘talent’ on display here that would have to be the overstatement of the century …
Most of the concert was talentless pap like S Club 7. If you are not english you won’t have heard of them - they are the UK equivalent of Australia’s Bardot - a pop band manufactured by TV and completely lacking in talent.
The only real talent on show - from stalwarts like the leftover Queen, Tom Jones, Eric Clapton and Phil Collins - was prostituted to duet with these plastic cut outs. Just a couple of weeks ago the media were bemoaning the fact that no UK group was in the US top 40 for the first time in 40 years. With talent like this it is no wonder. There is real contemporary talent in the UK, but none of it was on show here. Maybe in their attempt to appeal to the masses they chose what they felt the masses would like - mediocrity. The one stand out performance was Ozzy Osbourne’s - an island of originality in a sea of ennui.
Having stood through this on the Mall, I was in the mood for a decent bit of Sturm und Drang, and fortunately the firework display did not dissapoint. The Queen (the human one, not the pop group) came out to the Mall, accompanied by hundreds of children carrying chinese lanterns. About 100m from the Victoria memorial she got out of the car and mounted a platform, where she ignited a touchpaper for the jubilee beacon.
Some seconds later, the fuse set off a rocket that flew along a guide wire to light thhe gas beacon, in a flame that leapt up 25m and started a fireworks display. Unlike most displays, that are primarily associated with the sky, this one was focussed on Buckingham Palace, and involved every possible variation of fireworks from the building - rockets leaping from the roof, cascading silver falls of light, jets of silver.
And while this was going on, the front of the palace was lit with a series of projected images - from plain colours (gold, blue) to evocative montages of children’s drawings of carriages and horses moving across the front of the palace. The effect was quite stunning, all the more so because of the simplicity of the idea, and the iconic status of the building.
The Queen herself stood for the entire time on the podium, unprotected by screens or walls. This was another interesting thing - there were no security checks - no bag searches, no alcohol bans (many people openly carried in six packs or bottles of wine in shopping bags. For all that the crowd was remarkably well behaved - over the two days of celebrations, with 1 million each day, there were only 3 arrests. Astounding. I have heard that the royal family are not considered a security risk from Islamic terrorists because, like all the european royal families, they are descendents of Mohammed. But its still strange to see such public figures so apparently unprotected.