Well, it's almost the talk of the day here in Holland: the TV-Show taping with Prince last Sunday. I was there and actually I had a pretty good time. That Prince wasn't in a good mood was not too obvious, really. It seems that the broadcasting of the performance and interview for tonight is definately off. Too bad, because the performance was pretty nice and the interview was very funny. Here's what De Telegraaf (biggest newspaper in Holland) has to say today. There's also a picture of the interview with it (see below).



IVO BOWS FOR PRINCE



At Ivo Niehe Productions they're pretty sick of it. The recordings of the performance and interview that were made this Sunday are ready for the garbage-can. Prince was not satisfied with the quality so he didn't give permission to broadcast it.



"Bad quality? No, not at all", says a dissapointed Ivo Niehe one day after the taping. "In fact it was one big party. At first he even didn't want to do an interview but thanks to the enthousiasm of the 300 people in the audience he got back on that one. Then I thought that it could only be a lousy interview, but in fact he was very open and very funny. Quite different from other interviews I've seen with him where he just gave simple answers or just walked out." Fact is that mistakes were made: microphones that were on where they shouldn't, instruments that were too loud or too low... Niehe: "We gave him all kinds of solutions to solve the problem and believe me: it COULD be solved. It wasn't that bad. I still have one tape here, he took the rest. Everynoe that sees the tape doesn't understand the problem." Harold Gerritsen (head promotion of BMG) was there and saw it. "Immediately after the taping he watched the tape in his dressing room. He wasn't satisfied with it. Then he went to the soundtruck and listened to the first song. It was obvious that his voice wasn't clear and that his guitar was too low. Later, in his hotelroom, he saw that there were also mistakes in the second song and then he forbid the broadcasting of the performance and the interview."



Gerritsen didn't see a solution for the problem either. "Especially not to the way the TV-Show crew wanted to solve it: they wanted to mix the rehearsal recordings and the performance recordings. But, obviously, The Artist and his crew didn't agree on that. We're very sorry this happened, because it costed a lot of money to get the whole crew to Holland. But we understand The Artist and respect his decision."



Ivo Niehe feels very sorry for his sound engineer. "He has letters on his wall of really big stars, and we got a LOT of them in the past 19 years, who are very satisfied with his work. But when The Artist came in we immediately got the impression that he came back on his earlier promises. For example: he said that our studio was too small. Nobody from his crew was with our soundman during rehearsals and the performance. That is very unusual with live-recordings of big stars like these. In the soundtruck he only listened to his performance for 15 seconds. I think he found the performace below his dignity, but I think that's not fair. We'll miss 20 very good TV-minutes now..."



The little superstar from Minneapolis was very clear on his Amsterdam hotelroom Sunday night: "I learned one thing today: I'll NEVER do this kind of TV-shows ever again. In the future they can get a tape from me. Then they can use that. Or not! They tried to get me down today, but they didn't manage to do that. It's sad, I'd love to show it to you so you could see for yourself but I was so angry that I destroyed the tape!"

---

Update: See picture below: