It would probably be in poor taste to refer to the past several days' celebrations of the Queen jubilee as London's biggest event since the Battle of Britain. The upcoming Summer Olympics may end up being a bigger global event, but they probably won't surpass recent festivities for overall spectacle. One part of that spectacle calls attention to itself for the wrong reasons, the pop concert held at Buckingham Palace Monday from which highlights were shown on ABC last night.
I was tempted to put the term highlights in quotation marks, but that would be unfair because there were some genuinely good performances. Paul McCartney doesn't seem as ageless as he once did but still gives a good show, while Stevie Wonder and Tom Jones also delivered engaging performances. Beyond that trio, though, things got a bit questionable.
Madness were pretty good, but I couldn't shake the feeling that they were picked to appear because Prince Charles had a vague recollection that Princess Diana liked them (or perhaps Spandau Ballet was busy). It's equally hard to envision why anyone thought that Kylie Minogue in shorts and high-heels was in tune with the message of "celebrating an enduring royal legacy." It's also possible she was lip-synching, but at least she was in tune - something not everyone performing could claim.
Some may have been critical of the Queen wearing ear plugs during the concert in her honor, however, it was truly the only rational response to how awful Elton John sounded. At first I hoped that he was just having trouble with the uptempo numbers, as some artists do at his age, but I'm Still Standing was not an anomaly. Your Song was if anything even worse, and if I hadn't wanted to see Paul McCartney I would have changed the channel.
I'm glad I didn't because on reflection I realized that what "Sir Elton" was doing was truly visionary. Rather than let cover versions by inferior artists destroy his songs, he decided to destroy them himself. On a night celebrating legacy, there's something to be said for that.
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