22
| THE VOICE
MARCH 2023
Dotun Adebayo
I
Join the debate online voice-online.co.uk/opinion
Rate him or hate him - you can’t ignore him!
DON’T KNOW why, but I’m not really feeling it. Maybe it will change when it’s all over and done with and everybody starts saying ‘Hail, hail rock and roll, long live King Charles.’ Maybe. But I’m not so sure. You know when you feel something you feel it. And when you don’t, well, you don’t. And since the late Queen died, this monarchy thing has not been the same for me as when she was alive. All this despite the fact that Charles has bent over backwards to be a king for Black Britons. To give him his due, he was quick to jump on that Lady Susan Hussey race row business when the lady in question asked the Black guest, Ngozi Fulani, where she was really, really from. Since then of course, Lady Hussey and Ms Fulani have kissed and made up and agreed that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. I don’t know what HRH’s role in the reconciliation was but now that he’s on the throne, he was always going to be the ultimate decision maker. As Susan Hussey is now back in the royal fold, I’m presuming it’s all quiet on the Black front. That was a good look. I have to admit. I didn’t think that he would pull that one off. But he did so I should be giving him props. But when it comes to rubbing it in that they are bluer-blooded whereas the rest of us, if you cut us do we not bleed red? Maybe it’s that. Maybe I’m just jealous. I don’t think I am, but some Freudian psychiatrist will no doubt tell me that, despite my protestations And I know that I’m not the to the contrary, that I am just only person in the country who jealous because my blood is not is not really feeling like the cablue. lypsonian Young Tiger was feeling when he sang about how elated he was as “a young creole” Swear to God, it’s not true. But to be there at the coronation in this is the same shrink that in- 1953. And even though he could sisted that I must have seen my not follow the procession at least parents engaging in romantic he was there at the coronation. Even now, 70 years later, coupling when I was a baby in Young Tiger’s calypso resonates. the cot. He reckons that is why I am Most people would have forgotpsychopathological. And he ten what the weather was like knows because Sigmund Freud (inclement) on that day in 1953 told him that is always the case. when THE Queen was crowned if Whenever someone’s head is it wasn’t for that historic testanot coming correct, look to see ment on 78 rpm acetate that lives if they slept in the same room as on. On reflection, that coronation their parents when they were a baby. And now, because my head was OUR coronation. Like it or is not in the right place vis-à-vis not, she was OUR Queen. Just the coronation, my psychiatrist is as her first son and successor will be regarded, like it or not, as blaming my parents. My old man would be shocked YOUR King. I just haven’t found if he heard what I was paying it in me to regard him as ‘a fi we the shrink to come up with that king’, if you know what I mean. That might all change of conclusion, and that psychiatrists were making so much more course. If Meghan shows up, she gives the coronation the Black money than him.
TOUGH ACT TO FOLLOW: King Charles and Queen Consort Camilla
I’m not feeling it
SHOCKED
I’m not really feeling Charles or the upcoming Coronation
seal of approval. That is what this king so dearly needs. The last thing he wants is for her absence to overshadow his big day and for those of us of African/ Caribbean heritage to go about our business on the day in May because we’re not really feeling it without our Black princess being there. Havi n g s a i d that, the great Brit-
ish composer Shirley Thompson, pictured below, has been asked by HRH to write the musical soundtrack for his crowning. The moment she tweeted that the other day I thought, well, at least like his mother (with Young Tiger’s ‘At The Coronation’) Charles will have a musical legacy that will live long after him. Prof Shirley Thompson does not get the credit of being a national treasure. Not just one of our finest composers — Black or white (although it is important to recognise that she is the foremost of our composers to be recognised
in the castles and palaces of the British monarchy since Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast). And, who knows, King Charles (there, I said it, I somehow forced it out) may yet commission her to write a new national anthem so that we can dispatch with the dirge that is God Save The Queen (there, I said it) because I’m not feeling this God Save The King business that they are trying to get me to sing. And that’s not just me, the Scots feel that way as well, given that line in the national anthem that we no longer sing which went:
we shouldn’t sanitise the prejudice of Roald Dahl in our children’s books because they are sacred, when this institution that we call the British state realised that they cannot be insulting the Scots in our national anthem and took the decision to censor that passage.
GENIUS
Anyway, it remains to be seen whether this PM will last longer than Shirley Thompson’s coronation composition. Remember, a lettuce lasted longer than Rishi Sunak’s predecessor. Yeah, King Charles, make Shirley Thompson a dame and get her to re-write our national anthem without the ingloriLord grant that Marshal Wade ous legacies the current anthem May by thy mighty aid bears. She would, through her Victory bring musical genius, put a context to May he sedition hush modern Britain that would make And like a torrent rush us all feel part of the knees-up at Rebellious Scots to crush Westminster Abbey. God Save the King And if Meghan is there and all, well that would be the jewel So, it extremely irresponsible of in the coronation crown without the Prime Minister to declare that the Koh-i-Noor.
DOTUN ADEBAYO, BRITAIN’S MOST CELEBRATED BLACK BROADCASTER, IS KNOWN AS THE KING OF THE NIGHTTIME AIRWAVES. ALL VIEWS HERE ARE HIS OWN. LISTEN TO HIM OVERNIGHT ON BBC 5 LIVE FROM 1-5AM SATURDAY MORNINGS - MONDAY MORNINGS & 1AM - 4AM ON BBC RADIO LONDON (WEDNESDAY TO FRIDAY MORNINGS). FOLLOW HIM ON TWITTER: @dotunadebayo
