The interview is in the Culture section of today's Sunday Times. No link as the ST is behind a paywall now. The article is big and only mentions a few bits about Prince so have just typed out the bits about him:

Three men walk into a bar, a band are playing. The three men ask if they can take the stage......the three men are Prince, Stevie Wonder and Larry Graham, black American musical royalty at play.

[Mainly talks about Larry - then moves onto P:]

Anyway, he would rather speak about Prince, who convinced him to leave balmy Jamaica and resettle him in the frozen Midwest. "Prince told me that, as a teenager, he led a high school band where he covered Graham Central Station numbers. When he asked me to shift to Minneapolis, I knew it was the right place to go."

I suggest to Graham, for Prince it must seem like he's living out his high school dream by getting to record with his hero. The bassist laughs and shrugs "I live right beside Paisley Park Studios, so whenever Prince calls and wants to record, I can be there in a minute. He's fabulous to work with - so creative! And let me tell you, he's the funniest guy in the studio, he constantly cuts us up."

[Edited 10/28/12 4:09am]

so do larry live in the egg outsisde of paisley since he said he live right beside paisely park?

and why couldn't the Sunday Times just say "American musical royalty"?

He's the ace of bass

Three men walk into a small Chicago bar. A band are playing on a tiny stage in front of a large window that looks towards the street. The three men ask if they can take the stage. The band immediately hand instruments over. The trio begin to jam. Very quickly, traffic snarls, and people who can’t squeeze into the bar form a crowd that swells across the sidewalk. Some start dancing on the street. The three men are Prince, Stevie Wonder and Larry Graham: black American musical royalty at play.

While Prince and Stevie Wonder are household names, Graham may cause some head-scratching. Scratch no more: Graham, 66, is a musical revolutionary, the man who did for electric bass what Jimi Hendrix did for electric guitar. To Prince — who calls him his “favourite musician” — and Wonder, who, as a teenage Motown star, reshaped his sound under Graham’s influence, he is one of popular music’s pivotal figures. And, as he releases Raise Up, his first new album in 13 years, I met him in London to discuss a life less ordinary.

At the Clapham Grand the previous evening, Graham led (on sparkling white bass) his band, Graham Central Station, through 90 of the funkiest minutes I’ve ever experienced. In person, he is both elegant and eloquent. Understandably, he wants to chat about Raise Up, but I insist that we go way, way back to 1966, when Graham, then a teenager playing bass alongside his pianist mother in Bay Area bars, was asked to join a band by Sylvester Stewart, aka Sly Stone.

Sly and the Family Stone’s members were black and white, men and women. They gave soul music a psychedelic hue while singing of an America where everyone danced, loved and respected one another. At a time of huge social unrest and racial tension, Sly and the Family Stone embodied a remarkable unity. And Graham was the band’s secret weapon: he plucked and thumped his bass strings, creating a unique percussive groove that was soon called “funk”. (He had developed the style to substitute for a drummer while working with his mum.)

“Well, I think it was unplanned,” Graham says when I ask how Sly and the Family Stone appeared to embody the 1960s’ finest ideals. “I fell into the right situation at the right time with the right people, and it all came together. It was exciting. And we recorded live, just like we played it. We’d all get together in the studio, facing one another, amps turned up. That’s how we cut those records. Playing together. Making eye contact. That’s still my favourite way of recording. You get such a buzz, such energy.”

Sly Stone wrote and produced the band’s hits, while allowing the members of the Family Stone a creative freedom that yielded a unique sound. “Back then, bands like the Temptations sang and had backing musicians, whereas we all sang and played our instruments. We set a new template for how soul music could be made. I think it was part of the genius of Sly that, although he was a great songwriter and producer, he allowed the musicians to be themselves. Although he was a great bass player, he didn’t tell me how to play. He let me do my thing. In the studio, Sly would sit down at the piano or organ, we’d learn his new songs, then he’d allow us some freedom of expression as to how we played and sang it.”

By 1969, Sly and the Family Stone were the biggest band in America, their Woodstock performance widely hailed as the festival’s highlight. Yet Sly, who had developed a messianic personality, shifted from San Francisco to Los Angeles and became a recluse, regularly failing to turn up for concerts and turning in no new material until the dark, dense 1971 album There’s a Riot Goin’ On. He and the Family Stone reshaped funk into something cooler, more liquid and contemplative, as borne out by the album’s classic hit, Family Affair. “Riot was a different way of recording — drum machines and layering and overdubbing the instruments,” Graham recalls. “Nobody had quite worked like that before, and it meant our sound changed.”

Family Affair is a striking song, and its rumbling, melodic bass line one of popular music’s most memorable. Yet Sly, now addicted to cocaine and angel dust, and surrounding himself with thugs, alienated a band who had been, as Graham notes, “truly a family”. Things got so bad that, in 1972, he and his then wife left the band by literally fleeing through a hotel window, terrified of Sly’s thugs’ murderous intent. These days, Graham will not discuss the drugs and violence that destroyed the Family Stone. A Jehovah’s Witness since the late 1970s, he frowns on mention of the stoned mayhem. “What went down with Sly... I can’t say,” he says. “Only he knows. For me, it was time to found my own group.”

He formed Graham Central Station and enjoyed a string of funk hits in America across the 1970s. Once disco killed funk, he put his bass aside, cropped what had been pop’s most formidable afro and successfully reinvented himself as an R&B crooner. He then left music to raise his family on a Jehovah’s Witness commune in Jamaica. Meanwhile, his bass lines were copied and covered, sampled and sung, with everyone from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Snoop Dogg indebted.

While Graham turned his back on fame for spiritual pursuits, Sly became an Icarus figure: frequently arrested and often homeless, he remains one of popular music’s most troubled icons. Graham refuses to comment on Sly’s current condition (recent reports had him living out of a van), beyond saying that he never sees him, but is friendly with the other Family Stone members. Anyway, he would rather speak about Prince, who convinced him to leave balmy Jamaica and resettle near him in the frozen Midwest.

“Prince told me that, as a teenager, he led a high-school band where he covered Graham Central Station numbers. When he asked me to shift to Minneapolis, I knew it was the right place to go.”

It was Graham who led Prince’s conversion to the Jehovah’s Witness faith and the two musicians remain close friends — Prince appears on three of Raise Up’s storming funk jams. For Prince, I suggest to Graham, it must feel as if he’s living out his high-school dream by getting to record with his hero. The bassist laughs and shrugs: “I live right beside Paisley Park Studios, so whenever Prince calls and wants to record, I can be there in a minute. He’s fabulous to work with — so creative! And let me tell you, he’s the funniest guy. In the studio, he constantly cuts us up.”

^^Here ya go

^ Well done

He lives in a small house by pp....