Hi, hope this doesn't count as spam (because I'm a real fan and I will be back to talk properly), but I just thought you might be interested to know that there's a review of the second Hammersmith show in this coming weekend's Independent On Sunday, written by me. If you can't get hold of it, then it should turn up on http://www.independent.co.uk in the next few days. If not, I'll post it here in full.

maple syrup and jam

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You mean this one ? http://enjoyment.independ...ory=339378

Whistler said:

No. That was the daily. I write for the Sunday. Unaccountably, the people who run the website preferred Mr Martin's review to my own. Grrr!

Anyway, here's what I wrote (the full, unedited version)*:


PRINCE
Carling Apollo, London

He: “London, are you in here tonight?”
We: “Yes!”
He: “Are you ready to get your Purple Rain on?”
We: “Yes!”
He (having apparently misheard): “Me neither! I’m not interested in what you know, but in what you’re ready to learn. This is ‘Xenophobia’…”

In case London was under any illusions, London now knows that One Nite Alone will not be a mere live re-enactment of Prince – The Hits. That’s just fine.

When the little feller’s on this kind of form, if the ticket read “Pay £45 to come and see Prince being funky”, you still would.

Cards on the table. I’m a confirmed atheist. As a philosophy student, I was never convinced by either the ontological or cosmological arguments for the existence of God. However, the existence of Prince Rogers Nelson consistently challenges my disbelief.

Not because he keeps telling us to give ourselves over to the Lord. Oh, he does plenty of that: now a devout Jehovah’s Witness, he claims “I don’t cuss no more”, recommends “the oldest book in the world – the Holy Scriptures” (he possibly hasn’t heard of the I Ching), and makes his 1985 salvation hymn “The Ladder” a central piece of the show.

It’s just that his sheer musical genius – the greatest of the 20th century – is so staggering and god-kissed that it beggars belief that it could come from a mere mortal. When I first heard “When Doves Cry”, it was so other-worldly it frightened me, and it sends a chill to this day. It helps that he’s a Dorian Gray-like physical freak too, apparently untouched by the ageing process (at 44 years old, with no apparent recourse to rhinoplasty or botox, he looks not a second older than the day Purple Rain premiered).

For fans like me, being in the same room as him is enough (at a party on Wednesday, I was reduced to a giggling wreck by standing ten feet from his sharp-suited, stiletto-booted person). Knowing this, he could easily switch to autopilot, take the money and run. Instead, I’ve never seen Prince being so open, so friendly (lifting punters onstage and
offering “Can I get you some refreshments?”), or so
funny (a wicked impersonation of Ozzy Osbourne’s zombie-like gait).

The first half of the show consists of songs from his recent Rainbow Children, available only via import or internet. Since his 1996 EMI release, Emancipation, you’ve had to work hard to find Prince records in shops: he’s put them out independently though a German label. Or to see them on TV, or hear them on the radio. He gripes about this tonight, proposing his own WNPG radio station and thanking us for supporting him “despite my troubles with the system”.

However, he now has bigger fish to fry. Once upon a time, ‘Slave’ was just something he wrote on his cheek. Now, the history of black slavery is a recurring theme, with projections showing a segregationist quote from Abraham Lincoln (a stance often airbrushed from history), texts detailing Florida signing over x amount of ‘negroes’ in 1852, and a recording of Martin Luther King’s “Free at last” speech. “Music is art,” Prince explains, “but it must ask the hard questions.”

The show really catches fire when he straps on that symbol guitar and, with Candy Dulfer and Maceo Parker from James Brown’s JBs on sax (Prince isn’t content with nicking the Godfather’s licks, now he’s nicking his band), reclaims eighties classics which, now that he is Prince again and not an unpronounceable hieroglyph, are his: the immaculate New Wave pop of “When You Were Mine”, the masochistic “Strange Relationship”, the sweet “Take Me With U” and a riotous “Raspberry Beret”, with its wonderful mix of the carnal and the romantic (“Rain sounds so cool when it hits the barn roof, and the horses wonder who you are/Thunder drowns out what the lightning sees/And u
feel like a movie star…”)

Prince has always had an uncanny knack of making sex seem holy, of (to some degree) making holiness feel sexy, and – no mean feat, this – of making sex seem sexy. And, Jehovah be damned, he can still do it. On “The Other Side Of The Pillow”, he leers “U use furniture in new ways, yes u do… How did u learn that trick with the chair? I don’t care just as long as u do it again”.

However, it’s when Prince sits alone at a piano and sings a succession of solo ballads in that falsetto - Joni’s “A Case Of You”, a snatch of “Diamonds And Pearls”, a hyper-emotional “Beautiful Ones”, “Nothing Compares 2 U” and “How Come U Don’t Call Me” – that he absolutely slays the Apollo. When he starts “Sometimes It Snows In April” then stops after one line, a barrage of booing convinces him to continue. “You sound like a lynch mob. I really got scared for a second!”

As he closes with the exquisitely glacial “Anna Stesia” – imagine an alienated Mahler – people are crying. I’m welling up too. I don’t believe in God, but I believe in Prince.

Simon Price

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*Apologies for any slight factual errors or glossing-over or whatever. Please bear in mind that I'm writing for a non-obsessed readership!

gr8 review Simon. There r so many newspapers that get the facts wrong or don't even bother reporting on the gig just his weirdness. U didn't and I appreciate that. Went to the Manchester 8th Oct gig. The man is the best and I just hope ppl start 2 listen 2 this man again because he is a genius and a lot of ppl don't realise it.

Dan said:

Thanks Dan! I'm a full-time music journalist, and I have to write about all kinds of stuff from the awesome to the awful, week in, week out, but a Prince gig is one of those rare opportunities you dream about, to really write something you *feel*.

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