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Platinum Party at the Palace review – you can
understand why the Queen didn’t turn up
Partly upstaged by a magnificently bored prince and
princess, it was the tried and tested likes of Elbow and Rod Stewart that went
down best at this jubilee pop bash
Alexis Petridis
Sat 4 Jun 2022
18.15 EDT
The last
time the exterior of Buckingham Palace and the Mall was turned into a concert
venue – for the Gary Barlow-curated diamond jubilee celebration in 2012 – the
Queen arrived midway through: a canny bit of timing that meant she got there in
time for Kylie, Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney but missed Jessie J, as well
as Gary Barlow and Cheryl Tweedy’s unprovoked assault on Lady Antebellum’s Need
You Now.
This time,
she gamely took part in a sketch with Paddington Bear, tapping out the rhythm
of Queen’s We Will Rock You on a teacup before Queen themselves appeared –
Brian May, clad in a jacket covered in drawings of badgers, performing on a
hydraulic platform – but didn’t show up in person at all, which was a surprise:
what apparently poorly 96-year-old wouldn’t want to spend an evening watching
Jax Jones and Sigala?
Not even a
rare public appearance from disco’s most elusive superstar, Nile Rodgers – this
time guesting with Duran Duran – could tempt Her Majesty from the comfort of
Windsor Castle.
She missed
a show that grew more visually spectacular as night fell, and attempted to be
all things to all people – selections from musicals and appearances by dancers
from the Royal Ballet next to Craig David and TikTok-boosted teen pop star Mimi
Webb.
There was
fun to be had watching the audience looking utterly baffled by Stefflon Don –
this visibly wasn’t the Brexit they voted for – although even the most ardent
republican might be forced to admit that the breakout stars of the TV coverage
were Prince George and Princess Charlotte, eight and seven years old and
visibly bored senseless by the whole thing: you were struck by the feeling that
their parents might just give in and hand them their iPads at any moment.
The concert
was on safer ground with Sam Ryder, who restored national pride at Eurovision,
and indeed George Ezra, although the line in Green Green Grass’s chorus about
throwing a party on the day you die was decorously edited out.
Presumably
mindful of hymning the nonpareil greatness of a former colony in front of
Buckingham Palace, Alicia Keys changed the lyrics of Empire State of Mind so
they reference London instead of New York.
Celeste and
Hans Zimmer offered an intriguingly dark take on What a Wonderful World, but
the tried and tested stuff goes down the best: Elbow doing One Day Like This;
Rod Stewart eschewing his own hits in favour of barking his way through the
guaranteed singalong Sweet Caroline; a video of Elton John performing Your Song
in Windsor Castle projected on the front of Buckingham Palace; and Diana Ross’s
headlining performance, which started shakily with a race through Chain
Reaction and the title track of her most recent album, but picked up
considerably with its finale of Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.
Before Ross
appeared, Prince Charles made a joke about the audience cheering loud enough
for the Queen to hear them in Windsor. In the unlikely event that she could,
you did wonder if the noise might have disturbed her while she was busy
watching something else.
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