http://entertainment.time...146010.ece

On Saturday, July 7, central Minneapolis was thrown into chaos. A Prince concert at the 19,000-seat Target Centre was due to start at 8.30pm, but something was wrong. At the appointed hour the doors to the venue remained locked, resulting in thousands of confused fans milling around and spilling across First Avenue North, forcing police to set up a roadblock. It wouldn’t be the only time that night that Prince and the police would interact.

The patience of ticket-holders was rewarded, though. Finally taking the stage at 10pm, the local hero – reunited with his Revolution bandmates Wendy Melvoin and Sheila E – played an epic set that didn’t end till half past midnight, whereupon he decamped to the First Avenue nightclub (location of the live scenes in his film Purple Rain) and played one of his famous after-hours shows.

At 2.45am, 70 minutes into a planned 24-song set, Prince announced: “The authorities say we gotta go,” having received word from the police – who were by now massed outside on horseback – that he really had to wrap things up. “We always listen to the authorities,” he said with a sarcastic smile. “I promise I’ll be back.”

Of course one might expect a show from the Midwest city’s most famous son to cause a degree of excitement. What one might not expect is for the return of an artist whose commercial peak was more than 20 years ago to be causing a similar buzz halfway around the world in London (where he is about to begin a 21-date residency at the 0 Arena). But then, Prince Rogers Nelson has always been a bit different.

When Lenny Waronker, of Warner Brothers, signed the prodigiously talented teenager in 1977, Prince’s difference wasn’t immediately apparent. The doe-eyed youth’s 1978 debut For You, and its 1979 follow-up Prince, were dominated by standard soul balladry and lightweight pop-funk (with the prophetic exception of Bambi, a frazzled rock-out in which he pleads with a lesbian that “It’s better with a man”). During the last days of disco the sanity of investing in what appeared to be just another Rick James must have appeared highly questionable. But as the 1980s arrived, Warners’ faith was repaid.

On the Dirty Mind album in 1980 he stepped out from the shadows of his predecessors and emerged with a distinct persona: a sexually ambiguous Casanova in a Napoleonic trenchcoat and a pencil moustache, who lusted after everyone, including his own sister. Crucially, his influences were now coming from outside black music, and the subsequent albums Controversy and 1999 mixed funk with elements of new wave and synthpop to increasingly popular effect. The skinny kid with the high voice, it became clear, possessed a chameleon-like charisma and a mercurial musical genius.

It was the release of the quasi-biopic Purple Rain in 1984, and the record-breaking soundtrack album, that really catapulted Prince into the big league. Now dressing as a Regency dandy, the 25-year-old star completed his fusion of rock and funk: he was equal parts Jimi and Joni, Bowie and Brown.

This was when Britain first took notice. Hearing When Doves Cry on the radio for the first time was my personal JFK moment: I can remember exactly where I was standing. It sounded like nothing I’d heard before, music from a different universe (he achieved that other-worldly effect with the masterstroke of taking off the bassline). From that moment I was obsessed, and started dressing in musketeer shirts and jewellery, refusing to accept the reality that I was a freckly Welsh teenager with a Young Person’s Railcard, not a supercool African/Italian guy with a purple motorbike.

By now, Prince had created a sphinx-like mystique, refusing all interviews. It was a textbook example of enigma-building: the more he kept the public at bay, the more he fascinated us. That said, his appearance at the 1985 Brit Awards, when he was escorted to the stage by his bodyguard Chick Huntsberry and shyly mumbled “God loves you” before disappearing, caused more titters than ticker-tape.

Prince became – alongside Madonna and Michael Jackson – one of the decade’s triumvirate of titans. Unlike the other two, however, he was a genuine auteur: every word and note was written and, rumour has it, played, by him. But it didn’t take long for Prince’s now-famous perversity to become evident. His follow-up album Around the World in a Daywas a whimsical psychedelic folly, and in relative terms it bombed. However, he had smartly invested the Purple Rain millions in his own studio complex, Paisley Park. Increasingly, Prince was an autonomous entity.

For his next trick he made another, far less successful movie, Under the Cherry Moon (in which he played a gigolo on the Côte d’Azur), but the accompanying album, Parade, was buoyed by the extraordinary single Kiss, an effortlessly infectious slice of funk-pop with a bizarre falsetto vocal.

Nevertheless, Warners were worried. When he told them that he was ditching the name Prince and had recorded a whole album under the androgynous identity of “Camille”, a representative visited Paisley Park to tell him in no uncertain terms to snap out of it and deliver a proper Prince record.

The result was Prince’s masterpiece, Sign o’ the Times in 1987. For the next few years, he obediently played by the book, with the patchy-but-popular Batman soundtrack, the utopian Lovesexy, a third movie/ album Graffiti Bridge (his first real turkey) and the super-saucy Diamonds and Pearls.

It was on the legendary Lovesexy tour that I first saw him live, in the round at Wembley, and at the top of his game, arriving on a hydraulic Cadillac, playing guitar on a child’s swing, and shooting a basketball through a hoop first time. Was there anything Prince couldn’t do?

As his record sales tailed off, his popularity as a live performer never did. You learned the drill: turn up to the big arena show, but keep your ear to the ground and listen out for the afterparty. Across town in a club or a theatre or a warehouse, Prince would saunter onstage at stupid o’clock and play an informal, secret show for the hard core. He’s still doing it: I recently saw him at Koko in Camden, dragging fans onstage and diving into the crowd, belying his image as a stand-offish superstar.

In 1995, however, something snapped. Partly to spite the record company and partly in honour of his amorphous, quasi-religious personal philosophy, he ditched his name and replaced it with a logo (a baroque blend of the male and female symbols), although the media settled on The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. Throughout the 1990s, as his popularity plummeted, Prince’s relationship with his label became increasingly strained, and he was frequently seen with the word “slave” eyelinered on his cheek (or, on a French television show, “evals”, until he noticed his mistake and stomped off after one song).

Eventually wriggling free from Warner, he released records direct to fans via his own NPG label, making use of the internet years before the industry had recognised its potential. In 1996 he married the backing singer Mayte Garcia. The couple’s first child died shortly after birth from the rare Pfeiffer syndrome, and Prince understandably withdrew even further from the public eye. The public eye, in any case, was looking elsewhere. The 1990s was the decade of Britpop roundheads. An unrepentant cavalier such as Prince – flamboyant, not remotely down-to-earth – was out of step with the times.

Meanwhile, the religious undercurrent came to the fore as he became a Jehovah’s Witness, and paced the streets of Minnesota with his bassist (and Sly & the Family Stone legend) Larry Graham, knocking on doors. One can only imagine the expressions on the faces of homeowners on seeing an Eighties pop icon on their doorstep, copies of Watchtower under his arm.

His decade in the wilderness came to an end in 2002, when – under the name Prince once more – he played a series of shows entitled One Night Alone, reminding the world that he’s a master showman who, even in his late forties, can carry off splits, slides and pirouettes that would trouble a 20-year-old.

Simultaneously, the tide of fashion has turned in Prince’s direction. Flamboyance is no longer a crime, and his sound has dated extremely well. Pharrell Williams, the falsetto-voiced N*E*R*D leader, has proclaimed Prince a genius, Andre 3000 of Outkast, who have achieved the Princelike feat of making groundbreaking, original music immensely popular, agrees, and Noughties acts such as Hot Chip and Justin Timberlake have all paid him the sincerest form of flattery.

And suddenly, in 2007, Prince is big news again. The momentum behind his latest comeback started with a blistering half-time show at the Superbowl. An entire nation who had forgotten what a star they had under their noses, remembered. A few also noticed, and complained about, a “rude looking-shadow” cast by Prince and his custom-made guitar.Then, having announced his unprecedented London residency, he first promised to include a copy of his new album Planet Earth in the £31.21 ticket price, then gave it away with a national newspaper, causing a furore among retailers and record labels, who threatened that he would now become “the artist formerly stocked in our shops”.

As if he should care: a millionaire many times over, he is a smart businessman. He even has his own perfume. One hopes it will fare better than the ill-fated New Power Generation shop he opened in Camden, where I was enough of a sucker to buy overpriced candle holders and earrings, but few others were.

In any case, while Prince can be accused of many things, diminishing the value of music is not one of them. We should enjoy him while we can. At the press conference for 21 Nights in London, the diminutive deity announced that he intended to take time off from music to concentrate on studying “the prophets in the Bible” (raising titters from the press pack, and prompting him to cut short the Q&A in irritation).

The 21 Nights will, we are told, be the last time he performs his hits live, and as every Prince fan – hard-core or dilettante – knows, a pure hits show would be incendiary.

That’s got to be worth a few road-blocks.

— Prince plays the 02 Arena from Wed until Sep 21. www.3121.com



The Prince of cool

Dirty Mind Never mind the funktastic tunes or pervy lyrics. Just clock the cover!

Purple Rain Making a biopic when most of the world hasn’t heard of you takes balls.

Kiss He twirls like Travolta, squeals like a girl, and somehow still sounds cool.

Gett Off Filth has never sounded so funky
[Edited 7/27/07 2:36am]

You're as late as Prince was.

Thanks for posting this. Those lucky Brits

wlcm2thdwn said:

This was from The Times today....

AWESOME atricle!!!