thedoorkeeper said:

And how many #1 singles did he have in the UK? Most have been many many #1 hits since the UK love for Prince is boundless. So how many?

He had ONE Number One in the UK but it was the one that counted, TMBGITW, his bid for freedom and the inaugural record from NPG, his vehicle of freedom.

Elsewise, journalistic UK responses to artists and music in general and Prince before and after Purple Rain in particular were much more focussed on the innards of his work, whereas the American press were already getting fixated with what we'd now call latter-day celebrity.
Take the (now defunct) UK music paper, Melody Maker's encounter with his Lovesexy tour in which the journalist runs down the spiritual content of the music and takes account of the worshipful reaction, raising it via intellectual approach.

There were other examples around this period such as the journalist who, 'getting' why Prince was nude on the cover of Lovesexy, was invited to Paisley Park or tours subsequently on many occasions.

Channel 4 television agreed at short notice to take 'a feed' of Lovesexy Live in London when Prince suddenly decided to promote the Sign of the Times movie launch with how he'd already moved on. Although going out to a relatively small audience at the time, it was on the very influential and (pseudo) cutting edge magazine programme 'Network 7' which was pioneering many of the techniques in television we now see in every show. The result was that he magnified their influence and they his in synergetic style and Prince basically came to be considered 'The Beatles of the Eighties'. Nowhere else was his 'gold run' of albums more aggrandised and praised and it was in terms of 'finally somebody who can compete with that Beatles gold run', all of which clearly engaged Prince big-time while American press was perenially interested in who he was sleeping with and what weird things he was doing in his purple regalia (that he was, of course, not longer interested in himself).

Of course, the general tone and approach of the British press was exhausted during the confusion of the 'Symbol' period, after which it seemed to follow a superficial path of 'Prince is nuts and here's why' ad nauseam. And it's understandable. Although Prince would subsequently clean it all up in terms of a protest, that was much less clear at the time and he himself would later say of the period that he thought he was going mad. The British press agreed.

Until then, though, the UK and European press had tended often toward a dialogue with Prince which seemed to fuel him whereas the US press had tended toward judgementalism.

I'm generalising because you can't really describe any country's press as if it's a 'body' but I'm talking about tendencies. The eighties music journalism in the UK was experimental and polemic with many journos making names for themselves by radical interpretation or behaviours, all of which tended to produce an intellectualism which was rather suited to Prince whose own intellectualism in his lyrics remains pretty underrated.

I'm not sure that audience reaction in the UK was a particular factor for Prince but, as we saw with Hit n Run shows in 2014, the capacity to make sudden bookings and moves with tight press coverage in pursuit was a major attraction when he felt like raising profile or speeding up the pace.

All in all, the attraction of the UK for Prince, as for others, was and is a combination of scale and intensity. Put simply, he knew he couldn't make the slightest move while here without it being covered and not just by paps and sub-editors but by 'real heads'.

[Edited 10/27/16 10:28am]

petalthecat said:

Let's not forget he was from Minnesota, so he obviously didn't mind cold shitty weather

I knew there was a shorter version of my verbose explanation and you just nailed it.


Where else could you announce a gig and an hour or two later have an all-day queue of people (not all Prince superfans either by any means, just opportunists) standing in teeming rain waiting to get in? In my case, I had left the apartment of a really hot girl I'd been in bed with for two days straight to go for some food when I heard the news on local radio. I dropped the food and didn't go back to the apartment! And it wasn't strictly because of my fandom. It was because here was an exciting event I just had to get in on.
And of course that was the gig where he dropped the door admission to ten pounds (from seventy a few nights prior at a similar venue) as a response to the 'wet enthusiasm'.

This is the kind of interaction that went on with Prince and the relatively small geography that is London throughout his career. Give and take on a very healthy and very spontaneous basis.

And the reaction to that gig and the price from those who were there was, all for one, less of an hysterical 'OMG Prince is so gorgeous' fandom as a 'street' one where he was taken for a kind of 'alternative government' (you can see this even now in the multitudinous articles on The Guardian's coverage of the London HitnRun shows).
As we left that gig, tere was a kind of hushed silence that comes from a deep but not OTT respect, a very London (rather than British) kind of reaction that is about 'shared cool', sometimes pretentious but, here, just absolutely ice in a glass. I think he got used to it and addicted to it as it probably approximated early days or quiet seasons in Mineappolis where he says jump and they jump to it.

And let's not forget the 21 Nights where the same expanded cross-section filled those seats, not just fans. There was and is a vibe in London where dynamic promotion like Prince's was responded to by people because of its dynamism, resulting in speculative ticket-buying by non-fans ripe for 'conversion'. The UK was/is a place to grab hot to trot newbies by being hot to trot yourself. And definitely the place to shift expectations as he most definitely did during HitnRun. His reward was reviving and actually surpassing the kind of close attention he hadn't had from newspapers SINCE the eighties 'gold run'. Quite simply, in London that week, he WAS the news and the extremely enthusiastic reaction to the four albums that followed in these same newspapers says a lot about why Prince would rely upon the UK to drive up his stock in a hurry.
Whether or not he'd passed, Prince had wiped out his 'difficult' period with press in something like a flash.

[Edited 10/27/16 10:58am]

nextedition said:

you little people are funny..

trust me.. there isn' anyone on this site that knows more than i do about music or anything else...

my POINT was - the Uk is a tiny portion of America's size... THUS.. its possible to have success there that isn't really comparable with having sucess in the USA or some other countries... ie: China...

funny little people...

BillieBalloon said:

jayseajay said:

I think the point is that he doesn't understand the difference between size and population.

Let's give him a lesson in basic geography. California population: 38.8 million United Kingdom population: 64.1 million

MD431Madcat said:

you little people are funny..

trust me.. there isn' anyone on this site that knows more than i do about music or anything else...

Except grammar obviously.

MD431Madcat said:

TheDigitalGardener said:

MD431Madcat said:

you little people are funny..

trust me.. there isn' anyone on this site that knows more than i do about music or anything else...

Except grammar obviously.

...and the award for the funniest comment on the entire internet goes to...TheDigitalGardener

MD431Madcat said:

you little people are funny..

trust me.. there isn' anyone on this site that knows more than i do about music or anything else...

my POINT was - the Uk is a tiny portion of America's size... THUS.. its possible to have success there that isn't really comparable with having sucess in the USA or some other countries... ie: China...

funny little people...

It is a much smaller market in terms of size. However £1 is more valuable than $1... even today.

Manchester - October 2002.

MD431Madcat said:

you little people are funny..

trust me.. there isn' anyone on this site that knows more than i do about music or anything else...

Anything else? Are you sure?

Guitarhero said:

We love him in the UK and we also appreciated his post 80's music. Only thing that gets me down is he only had one number 1. Blame those with no music taste just look at the number 1's in the Uk since the 80's

Bryan Adams number 1 for 26 weeks for the song (Everything i do) I do it for You.

While it did seem that Bryan Adams was #1 for 26 weeks, it was 16 (at least 15 weeks too long, lol). I for one was far more interested in the 5 number one studio albums Prince had in the U.K.

You're right that there's mostly something very throwaway and temporary about singles chart success, that means all kinds of crap gets to number one (Do I need to talk 'Chicken Song' 'Star Trekkin' and 'Mr Blobby'?). To have had 5 #1 studio albums is more a testament to his legacy than the fact that Rapberry Beret only reached #25 and that many post 80's singles missed the charts completely.

As many hits as Prince did have, I always thought of him more as an album artist, where the more discernible listener usually goes for their music..... like us Prince fans

PR3121 said:

CherryMoon57 said:

And me!

Me too

Me three

Yewdale said:

Guitarhero said:

We love him in the UK and we also appreciated his post 80's music. Only thing that gets me down is he only had one number 1. Blame those with no music taste just look at the number 1's in the Uk since the 80's

Bryan Adams number 1 for 26 weeks for the song (Everything i do) I do it for You.

While it did seem that Bryan Adams was #1 for 26 weeks, it was 16 (at least 15 weeks too long, lol). I for one was far more interested in the 5 number one studio albums Prince had in the U.K.

You're right that there's mostly something very throwaway and temporary about singles chart success, that means all kinds of crap gets to number one (Do I need to talk 'Chicken Song' 'Star Trekkin' and 'Mr Blobby'?). To have had 5 #1 studio albums is more a testament to his legacy than the fact that Rapberry Beret only reached #25 and that many post 80's singles missed the charts completely.

As many hits as Prince did have, I always thought of him more as an album artist, where the more discernible listener usually goes for their music..... like us Prince fans

God don't remind me And thanks for bringing up those 5 number one albums

Guitarhero said:

Yewdale said:

While it did seem that Bryan Adams was #1 for 26 weeks, it was 16 (at least 15 weeks too long, lol). I for one was far more interested in the 5 number one studio albums Prince had in the U.K.

You're right that there's mostly something very throwaway and temporary about singles chart success, that means all kinds of crap gets to number one (Do I need to talk 'Chicken Song' 'Star Trekkin' and 'Mr Blobby'?). To have had 5 #1 studio albums is more a testament to his legacy than the fact that Rapberry Beret only reached #25 and that many post 80's singles missed the charts completely.

As many hits as Prince did have, I always thought of him more as an album artist, where the more discernible listener usually goes for their music..... like us Prince fans

God don't remind me And thanks for bringing up those 5 number one albums

Are you guys trying to ruin my campaign lol? As far as I am concerned, I had already heard some less unheard Prince tracks before but it was actually a (stronger) Prince song heard on the radio - SOTT - that helped the balance tilt and made me become a true and more committed Prince fan. A few weeks later, I was buying all his albums...

CherryMoon57 said:

Guitarhero said:

God don't remind me And thanks for bringing up those 5 number one albums

Are you guys trying to ruin my campaign lol? As far as I am concerned, I had already heard some less unheard Prince tracks before but it was actually a (stronger) Prince song heard on the radio - SOTT - that helped the balance tilt and made me become a true and more committed Prince fan. A few weeks later, I was buying all his albums...

Guitarhero said:

CherryMoon57 said:

Are you guys trying to ruin my campaign lol? As far as I am concerned, I had already heard some less unheard Prince tracks before but it was actually a (stronger) Prince song heard on the radio - SOTT - that helped the balance tilt and made me become a true and more committed Prince fan. A few weeks later, I was buying all his albums...

CherryMoon57 said:

Guitarhero said:

I hope your campaign is a success cherry xxx If it wakes someone up to the awesome musician Prince. It's a plus to me

NorthC said:

nextedition said:

Forget about the uk, holland and prince...now we are talking 😊

Yeah! The only thing is that the UK is bigger = more people living there = more concerts there. But yeah... WE were the crazy ones!

Guitarhero said:

CherryMoon57 said:

I hope your campaign is a success cherry xxx If it wakes someone up to the awesome musician Prince. It's a plus to me

Thanks Guitarhero!

2olskool4u said:

It's almost like some people think the whole of the UK was in love with Prince. This was not true at all. I grew up as a hardcore fan, and I NEVER knew another, fans were few and far between. Being smaller, the hardcore were willing to travel up and down the country for concerts, and he wasn't considered 'all that' in the early 90's by hardly anyone. I think he just knew he had a good fan base in the UK, loyal (like all of us) who would always be appreciative of the early hour jamming sessions and the like. The U.S is full of homophobic, racist, fucking loonies also.

In the early 90s they were.

Your personal anecdotes aside, he was frequently in the UK charts from 1990 - 1996. Even one of his side-projects broke the UK top 20.

BillieBalloon said:

jayseajay said:

I think the point is that he doesn't understand the difference between size and population.

Let's give him a lesson in basic geography. California population: 38.8 million United Kingdom population: 64.1 million

More context: Yes, but the Queen of England legally owns 1/6 of the world's land surface. She owns whole countries, including countries that are not her own domestic territory.

gandorb said:

NorthC said:

Yeah! The only thing is that the UK is bigger = more people living there = more concerts there. But yeah... WE were the crazy ones!

Yes, and the only country that I'm aware of that he had more top 10 hits than the US.

MD431Madcat said:

you little people are funny..

trust me.. there isn' anyone on this site that knows more than i do about music or anything else...

my POINT was - the Uk is a tiny portion of America's size... THUS.. its possible to have success there that isn't really comparable with having sucess in the USA or some other countries... ie: China...

funny little people...

BillieBalloon said:

jayseajay said: Let's give him a lesson in basic geography. California population: 38.8 million United Kingdom population: 64.1 million

Trust you?..... Hahaha, yeah right!

Dibblekins said:

2) We're a very small country - with a very eclectic population - London in particular can be seen as a cultural melting pot, with people from all over the world widely represented. It was inevitable that Prince's 'chameleon-esque' self would appeal to various factions of the country;

I'm with Dibblekins on this. I always thought it odd that Prince didn't come to Brixton as the hub of Black music and culture in the UK, but seeing it laid out this way it makes more sense. To him London was already so diverse that he didn't feel he needed to.

ladycat said: