Rocos said: "She did look like a beautiful young man.” The trio made her look more masc by styling her in a baseball cap, sunglasses and an army bomber jacket. The answer: by making her a “rather eccentrically dressed gay male model.” One thing’s for sure: she would have been a shoo-in to lift the glitterball trophy on Strictly Come Dancing now.But there was just the question of how Diana, one of the most well-known faces on the planet, could pass off unnoticed to the other clubbers. Was it a light-hearted skit that allowed Diana to express herself on stage? Or was she riling Charles, showing off again how much the public preferred her to him? The Crown seems to imply it’s a bit of both. She wrote: ‘Now I understand the buzz you get from performing’.” Sleep added: “She loved the freedom dancing gave her. Until 1995, that is, when the tabloid cheque books came calling, and the whole world got a glimpse of Diana’s love for performing arts - and Billy Joel. While there were no video cameras to record the performance, there was just one person who took a couple of photos and swore he’d never release them. It didn’t go any further than that.”Īuthor of The Diana Chronicles, Tina Brown, said Charles felt “frigid disapproval of Diana’s lapse in royal etiquette”, while Royal correspondent Richard Kay said: “It was a present which slightly backfired. Sleep said that at the afterparty: “He had a raised eyebrow, you might say. If Charles was seething, he kept it hidden - as we’ve learned on the Netflix series, seems to be the Royal way. And she said, ‘No, I’m not bowing to him, he’s my hubby.’”
According to Vulture, Sleep said: “You’ve got to bow to the prince. She then refused to bow to Prince Charles. Sleep told her no, that his mantra was “always leave them wanting more”. Sleep told The Guardian: “I remember thinking, “Don’t drop the future Queen of England.”Īfter eight curtain calls, Diana was buzzing, and wanted to do an encore. While not quite a hip-hop battle, the three-minute routine was a jokey, “one-upman-ship” competitive jive, with pirouettes, lifts, jazz hip rolls and even a risque high kick over Sleep’s head that probably had Charles shrivelling even more into his seat. “They were speechless.and she was on fire”. “There was a gasp from the audience of 2,500 people,” Sleep said. Sleep started dancing and the audience started applauding (“You just wait!” he tells CBS News), then Diana walked out on stage in a floaty white dress and posed as if to say, “yes, it’s me”.
#STORY BEHIND UPTOWN GIRL BILLY JOEL FULL#
After the pair had tripped the light fantastic together for a few years, he told Vulture that he had a call from Diana asking to meet up so they could practise a very special duet together.ĭiana apparently came to the rehearsal in full Jane Fonda gear - “a headband, pink leotard, tights, leg warmers, and jazz shoes” - and told him that her choice of song to perform was Uptown Girl, the 19th biggest-selling single of the ‘80s.Īfter Sleep gave her a secret signal from the stage on the night, the annual Friends of Covent Garden show, Diana slipped away from the Royal box and went backstage, through to the side of the stage. Sleep first met Diana around 1980, when she asked him for dance lessons, but he was “too busy”, so he sent a colleague to teach her instead. And despite the performance taking place more than 35 years ago in December 1985, he’s still just as excited about every high kick in this incredibly endearing video footage from CBS News in 2017. Sleep, an OBE (though not for that dance with Diana, we presume), is one of the UK’s most celebrated ballet dancers and choreographers. And If there’s one person who absolutely lives to re-tell the tale, it’s her dance partner from that evening. Despite it appearing to be a plot device to dial up the “attention-seeking” antics of Diana, it turns out the Princess really did pull on a pair of jazz shoes for a public bop to Billy in real life.
#STORY BEHIND UPTOWN GIRL BILLY JOEL SERIES#
This is just another case of art imitating life, as has so often been the case in arguably the most controversial series of The Crown to date. Maybe he just preferred Billy Joel’s earlier work? “What were you thinking?” he demands in the chauffeur-driven car home, and brands her routine a “grotesque, mortifying display”. A dancing princess! In a one-off performance, never caught on video camera! But the one person the routine was actually meant for loathes it: the would-be king of Great Britain. The audience in the venue love it, of course.