Singer-songwriter Emmy the Great writes a song for the royal wedding
Asked to write a song to mark William and Kate's imminent wedding, Emma-Lee Moss says that her first instinct was to trash the great occasion. "Rip it to pieces," says Moss, 26, who, with bandmates including bass player Euan Hinshelwood, performs under the stage name Emmy the Great. "I'm not anti-royal, but I'm undecided. Anyway I hate processions, I hate crowds."
Her debut album, First Love, released in 2009, was full of weird and wonderful stories inspired by the mundane: American spy dramas, chart radio. Three minutes on the biggest television event of the year should have been easy, but when she picked up her guitar she couldn't quite bring herself to be sneering. "You keep thinking, oh God, they are good for tourism?"
Moss had also just finished work on a new album, due for release later this year, that picked over a planned wedding gone wrong ? her own. (Her fiance broke off their engagement.) Moss couldn't help feeling sympathetic towards a couple that seemed pretty happy together.
"I realised the people I really felt for were the Hyacinth Bucket types. The ones living in the Cotswolds and decking our their gardens with Union Jacks ? feeling bitterly sorry not to be Kate Middleton's mum."
So Moss's song, "Mistress England", became a lament for mothers ? the ones whose ambitions, however long or deeply held, will finally be thwarted when Kate gets the ring on. The ones who "might have hoped they could have celebrated a little closer to the royal family on the big day".
The subject has inspired a touching, tender song. "Fold up your clean white invitations/ There is no need to keep them now," run the lyrics. "He found a Queen/ He chose another." The middle eight conjures distant churchbells, but in the Union Jack-decked garden, "no celebration here". "I'm two years younger than Kate Middleton," says Moss. "I honestly knew girls who applied to St Andrews to meet him. Presumably they're a bit miffed now."
Did she ever ponder, perhaps, putting St Andrews on her own Ucas form just in case? No, says Moss... Hinshelwood interjects to say, drily, that he applied to be Wills's best friend but didn't hear back.
"I keep trying to put myself in Kate Middleton's place," says Moss. "She did a degree, right, that's how she met him? I have never, ever heard it said what she studied there. But I do know what boots she likes to wear. That's a bit depressing, isn't it?"
So stay strong is Emma-Lee Moss's advice to any thwarted Mistress Englands: you may have had a lucky escape after all.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/apr/17/royal-wedding-emmy-the-great
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