by In an early episode of The Crowns new season, the future Princess Diana dances jubilantly with her squealing roommates to Stevie Nickss Edge of Seventeen. Newly engaged to Prince Charles, she is 19, starry-eyed and in love. But by the time the end credits roll, that glow is starting to fade. As Dianas wedding veil falls over her eyes and her gowns miles-long train trails behind her, Edge of Seventeen plays again, with Nickss vocals isolated. This time, the tone is markedly forebodingly different.
The decision to play the song again a cappella was a reflection of Dianas sense of existence at the end of the episode, explains series music supervisor Sarah Bridge. We were initially sent the stems of the song for editing purposes and upon listening to the vocal take in isolation, were all mesmerised by the raw beauty and starkness of the performance. It felt very fitting for this moment.
As the lavish Netflix series jumps from the late Seventies to the decade-long Thatcher era, pop music is placed front and centre, propelling the story forward, capturing the time period and communicating characters emotional journeys. The decision to use more commercial music this season is no accident, according to Bridge, who researched the real Dianas musical tastes. Diana did love music, she says. Most famously, Duran Duran were known to be one of her favourite bands. Episode three [Fairytale] is our first musical introduction to Diana and features several artists of whom she was a fan.
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We first meet Lady Diana Spencer (played with uncanny accuracy by Emma Corrin) in 1977, as a shy student who happens to cross paths dressed as a tree, no less with her future husband at her familys estate. From there, season 4 zooms in on a still-teenage Peoples Princess as she eventually catches a brooding Charless interest, passes The Balmoral Test with flying colours, marries into the royal family, sinks into a state of deep depression while privately battling bulimia, and confronts her husbands still-very-active affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. Throughout all this, music is a constant.
Bridge cites another episode-three cue: Elton Johns Song For Guy, which plays as a pre-wedding Diana is beginning to realise that her impending marriage may not be everything she anticipated. Diana is feeling utterly alone and despairing, she is losing herself in dance and music its a bittersweet moment of sadness and empowerment.
Corrins Diana in the moments before her wedding to Prince Charles (Josh OConnor)
But Diana doesnt get all the standout musical moments. The Princess Margaret-centric episode The Hereditary Principle opens with the Queens sister (played by Helena Bonham Carter) cueing up David Bowies Lets Dance and cutting a rug with a priest friend, Derek Jennings (played by Tom Burke). The song was on a playlist I had curated for the episode’s director Jessica Hobbs early on, Bridge says. Its a snapshot into a side we so rarely see in Margaret in Season 4 so incredibly alive and happy. It really came to life and blossomed on set when Helena Bonham-Carter and Tom Burke began to play with the performance and energy of the song.
Meanwhile, as newly appointed prime minister Margaret Thatcher (played with pitch-perfect precision by Gillian Anderson) rises to power and implements a string of unpopular economic policies, the general publics unhappy response is represented in song as well (The English Beats Whine and Grine/Stand Down Margaret). Margaret Thatchers politics received a musical uprising throughout the 1980s, says Bridge. A wealth of politically motivated and protest songs led to Thatcher being the one of the most condemned politicians in British music.
Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher in season four of The Crown
This is heavily illustrated in episode five, Fagan, which follows out-of-work house painter and decorator Michael Fagan, who keeps hitting bureaucratic dead ends as he waits on the dole line. Fruitlessly looking for work and trying to keep from losing his children in a contentious divorce, Fagan breaks into Buckingham Palace and tells Queen Elizabeth how much the countrys working class is struggling.
Fagan is the personification of Thatchers Britain as lived by the working classes, Bridge says. Hes an unemployed father of four struggling to survive in that early 1980s era of the Thatcherite economic experiment.
For the episode, Bridge was drawn to music that invited the audience into Fagans world and reflected the tonal landscape at play songs by bands such as Joy Division, The Cure and The Specials. It was really important to give authenticity to this period through music while juxtaposing the bleakness of his world, a disillusioned Britain against the richness of the Royal Family.
The shows next season will take the Royal Family into the 1990s, a decade that brought divorce, death and even more disillusionment. Bright’s prospective playlist is probably overflowing already.
Season four of The Crown is available now on Netflix
