Duran Duran drummer Roger Taylor has revealed the moment he found out that the IRA were plotting to kill Prince Charles and Diana at one of the band’s concerts.
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday’s Event magazine, Taylor said that ‘finding out about the bomb was the scariest moment’ of his life. The plot was scheduled for July 1983 at a concert of Diana, Princess of Wales’ favourite band, at London’s Dominion Theatre.
“They wanted to kill Diana and Charles and us and everybody in the room,” Taylor said.
The attempt failed as the man due to perpetrate the act and plant the bombs, Sean O’Callaghan, was a police informant that had infiltrated the IRA. O’Callahan laid the bombs in a toilet wall near the Royal Box at the charity concert, but failed to return to set the detonators with 25lb of powerful mining explosive, Frangex gelignite, that would have killed or injured anyone within a 60ft radius.
The plan was revealed by the Daily Mail in 1992, almost a decade after the event, meaning no one knew of the danger they were in at the event.
“It was so shocking,” Taylor, now 55, said. “We were only made aware of it years later, but it was very frightening.”
O’Callaghan said of the plan in his book, The Informer: “It was a brilliant but horrific plan.”
The IRA leadership planned the attack in revenge for the death of Bobby Sands and nine other hunger strikers. It would have been another blow to Anglo-Irish relations, The Earl of Mountbatten having been assassinated in 1979.
“The fallout for the Irish community, particularly in London, can only be guessed at – something the IRA leadership would have regarded as a bonus,” the book says.
Feature photo: Alberto Botella