'Prince Harry should shut his mouth... he just doesn't get America': American ... trends now
Having aimed so many stinging barbs at the Royal Family in his bestselling memoir Spare, it was easy to overlook one choice comment Prince Harry made about America’s very own king – Elvis Presley.
Describing a visit to Graceland – Elvis’s home in Memphis – Harry wrote that it was, ‘Dark, claustrophobic. I walked around saying, “The King lived here, you say? Really?”’
He recalled that he stood ‘in one tiny room with loud furniture and shag carpet and thought, “The King’s interior designer must have been on acid.”’
Unsurprisingly, Elvis fans didn’t take kindly to his attempt at humour, not least singer-songwriter Don McLean, who tartly remarked on X, ‘“Prince” Harry should shut his mouth about Graceland and Elvis. He is a hot house orchid, a show horse who never did a thing.’
As Don says now, ‘He doesn’t understand that Elvis is like the poor man’s king. He came from nowhere and his recordings are among the greatest ever made.
US singer-songwriter Don McLean (pictured), 78, who is most famous for his 1971 hit American Pie, has just released the album American Boys
‘His family were as poor as they could be and Harry criticised Elvis’s home as if he’s comparing it to Buckingham Palace, and that misses the point completely. Here’s a fellow who has been brought up to be mannerly, but you don’t criticise America when you’re living here as our guest.’
Don adds of the prince, who recently listed the US as his primary residence, ‘He just doesn’t get America.’
As the man who wrote American Pie – considered by many to be the quintessential song about the US and its spiritual decline – Don McLean is in a pretty good position to comment.
The song’s meaning has been pored over for half a century, but for Don, its success (it brings in around £400,000 in royalties every year) has meant, quite simply, that he’ll ‘never have to work again’.
Yet work he does. His latest album, American Boys, has just been released. He’s also been invited to speak at Oxford University, and will be headlining The Long Road country music festival at Stanford Hall, Leicestershire, in August.
At 78, he’s decided not to do any more lengthy tours. ‘But I’ll go over for two or three shows. I love the British audience,’ says Don, whose father had Scottish origins, speaking from his home in Palm Desert, California.
Fans will be treated to songs from the new album such as the brutally comic The Meanest Girl, which he insists is not about his ex-wife Patrisha Shnier from whom he was divorced acrimoniously eight years ago, and The Ballad Of George Floyd – the black 46-year-old whose death at the hands of a white police officer four years ago helped propel the Black Lives Matter movement.
While the repercussions of Floyd’s death were divisive, the song references his final moments when he called out for his mother. ‘When I was little, I had really bad asthma attacks and nearly died a few times,’ says Don.
‘My mother gave me a baseball bat and said to pound it on the floor if I couldn’t breathe and she would come. I remembered that and somehow my heart went out to him.’
The new album is sure to add to his net worth, which has been estimated at £40 million – but that, according to Don, is conservative.
Don McLean performing at the BBC TV Centre on 1 January 1973. His hit American Pie brings in £400,000 in royalties every year
‘That figure is very low. It’s actually more than double that. I own my records, books, trademarks, everything. And I’m a bond investor so I could use the money I’m worth and make probably a billion dollars; but the way I feel, I’ve been so lucky to make the money I’ve made that I’m really happy where I am.’
One of the other reasons for his happiness is his girlfriend Paris Dunn, a model and Instagram star of considerable pneumatic charms whom he hired in 2016 to manage his social media and who has been with him ever since.
‘She’s everything to me,’ says Don, who wrote the track Mexicali Gal on his new album for her. ‘We have a blast together and everybody on both sides of my family absolutely adores her. There had been so much stress when my previous marriage was not working, I don’t think I’d have lived this long if it hadn’t been for her.’
Did he ever fear that Paris, who at 30 is 48 years his junior, may have been after him for his money? ‘No,’ he says, unequivocally. ‘The person who’s after my money is the person I divorced. She got more than $11 million of it.’
It’s fair to say that the vicious fallout from Don’s divorce from Patrisha, his second wife, has all the hallmarks of a bad Country & Western song.
Married for 29 years, their relationship came to an abrupt end in 2016 after Don was arrested at their Maine home when
