As many of you will know, the following songs were omitted from the released film: Girls & Boys (following Housequake), Let’s Go Crazy, When Doves Cry, Purple Rain, 1999 (following If I Was Your Girlfriend), and Kiss (following Forever In My Life) are missing from the film.

Apart from holdouts like Questlove and other elitist snobs, has anyone here actually seen them or known someone who has?

According to Prince Vault, they were, and you can see some snippets in the video for "U Got the Look" unless I am confused/mistaken, and they are clips from live shows?

rap said:

According to Prince Vault, they were

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PV says no such thing.

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These tracks were most likely filmed in Rotterdam and Antwerp, however that footage was unusable. I'd find it unlikely that these tracks were filmed at PP and then omitted from the final film: I bet by then Prince had already decided on the format and length of the film and never bothered spending time and money on filming "the hits".

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The inclusion of LRC (the only non-SOTT track) feels inevitable simply from a "concert flow" POV.

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, and you can see some snippets in the video for "U Got the Look" unless I am confused/mistaken, and they are clips from live shows?

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U Got The Look was filmed much earlier in the tour. Granted, it is not impossible that it contains footage from later gigs as well as PP, considering it was released around 20 July and the PP sessions started on 18 July, but I think it is far more likely the video was finished a while before that.

bizzie said:

rap said:

According to Prince Vault, they were

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PV says no such thing.

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These tracks were most likely filmed in Rotterdam and Antwerp, however that footage was unusable. I'd find it unlikely that these tracks were filmed at PP and then omitted from the final film: I bet by then Prince had already decided on the format and length of the film and never bothered spending time and money on filming "the hits".

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The inclusion of LRC (the only non-SOTT track) feels inevitable simply from a "concert flow" POV.

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, and you can see some snippets in the video for "U Got the Look" unless I am confused/mistaken, and they are clips from live shows?

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U Got The Look was filmed much earlier in the tour. Granted, it is not impossible that it contains footage from later gigs as well as PP, considering it was released around 20 July and the PP sessions started on 18 July, but I think it is far more likely the video was finished a while before that.

New Year, yet same ole Bort. Some things just never change.

rap said:

bizzie said:

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U Got The Look was filmed much earlier in the tour. Granted, it is not impossible that it contains footage from later gigs as well as PP, considering it was released around 20 July and the PP sessions started on 18 July, but I think it is far more likely the video was finished a while before that.

New Year, yet same ole Bort. Some things just never change.

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It's obviously my fault that you wrote something that isn't true.

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Also instead of coming up with sensible counterarguments you resort to a personal attack.

I would love to see a recut version of the Sign of the Times film with with a total concert set and the “unusable” (probably too dark and not enough close ups) footage that was filmed.

I have never been too fond of the segues and the “u got the look” dream sequence, and would have preferred a straight-up concert film.

The New Year's eve show comes closest to this, but lacks the stadium energy.

Just my personal preference.

bizzie said:

rap said:

New Year, yet same ole Bort. Some things just never change.

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It's obviously my fault that you wrote something that isn't true.

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Also instead of coming up with sensible counterarguments you resort to a personal attack.

My god, the irony!

andrewm7new said:

I would love to see a recut version of the Sign of the Times film with with a total concert set and the “unusable” (probably too dark and not enough close ups) footage that was filmed.

I have never been too fond of the segues and the “u got the look” dream sequence, and would have preferred a straight-up concert film.

The New Year's eve show comes closest to this, but lacks the stadium energy.

Just my personal preference.

There are outtakes which are easy to find if you're interested.

andrewm7new said:

rap said:

andrewm7new said:

I would love to see a recut version of the Sign of the Times film with with a total concert set and the “unusable” (probably too dark and not enough close ups) footage that was filmed.

I have never been too fond of the segues and the “u got the look” dream sequence, and would have preferred a straight-up concert film.

The New Year's eve show comes closest to this, but lacks the stadium energy.

Just my personal preference.

There are outtakes which are easy to find if you're interested.

But the outtakes are filmed @ Paisley Park as well, and frankly they are a snooze fest after a few minutes. Would be nice to see actual footage from the tour, even non-professional audience recordings, but apparently there's nothing out there.

bizzie said:

rap said:

According to Prince Vault, they were

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PV says no such thing.

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These tracks were most likely filmed in Rotterdam and Antwerp, however that footage was unusable. I'd find it unlikely that these tracks were filmed at PP and then omitted from the final film: I bet by then Prince had already decided on the format and length of the film and never bothered spending time and money on filming "the hits".

.

The inclusion of LRC (the only non-SOTT track) feels inevitable simply from a "concert flow" POV.

.

, and you can see some snippets in the video for "U Got the Look" unless I am confused/mistaken, and they are clips from live shows?

.

U Got The Look was filmed much earlier in the tour. Granted, it is not impossible that it contains footage from later gigs as well as PP, considering it was released around 20 July and the PP sessions started on 18 July, but I think it is far more likely the video was finished a while before that.

IDK what "unusable" means, though. Technically the SOTT show on SOTT SDE, not being mixed because there were no multitracks if I understand correctly what happened, would probably have been deemed "unusable" by Prince. Same with P&AM83.

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"Unusable" material could be sold to us via a subscribtion service or though an online store, the same way awful audience recordings allowed bootleggers to make money from a bunch of hardcore fans for years. Just don't put it on Spotify or Netflix, and don't sell it on an expensive CD or blu-ray boxset.

databank said:

IDK what "unusable" means, though.

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We know what it means: it's grainy footage that looks pretty awful. The movie contains some very short clips of actual concert footage because those are the ones involving the massive audience, and on the Blu-ray the drop of picture quality is clearly visible.

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Simply put: you cannot film a concert with its regular light show, because film simply isn't sensitive enough to pick up enough of what you see. Hence Talking Heads making their concert film in a controlled and well-lit environment.

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(And before someone brings up Kubrick and his masterpiece Barry Lyndon and how it was filmed with candlelight: he used special expensive lenses Carl Zeiss developed for NASA, and the scenes where he used those aren't full of action but they are quiet shots.)

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"Unusable" material could be sold to us via a subscribtion service

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Even if the actual concert footage still exists (not impossible, but who knows what condition it is in), nobody is going to pay a ton of money to scan all that footage (three concerts, multiple cameras) and then color correct it etc. And very few fans would be inclined to spend money of raw footage with low quality picture. Moreover, someone would have to sync all that footage to concert audio, that's yet another cost. Not gonna happen.

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They should have done a documentary for the SOTT box set and perhaps used some of that footage to show how awful it is.

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Simply look at the screenshots in this thread: https://prince.org/msg/7/471652. Notice how grainy the picture is. And that's an audience shot where the house lights seem to be on.

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[Edited 1/13/26 21:36pm]

psyche2 said:

rap said:

There are outtakes which are easy to find if you're interested.

But the outtakes are filmed @ Paisley Park as well, and frankly they are a snooze fest after a few minutes. Would be nice to see actual footage from the tour, even non-professional audience recordings, but apparently there's nothing out there.

According to LeRoy Bennett, there is.

databank said:

bizzie said:

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U Got The Look was filmed much earlier in the tour. Granted, it is not impossible that it contains footage from later gigs as well as PP, considering it was released around 20 July and the PP sessions started on 18 July, but I think it is far more likely the video was finished a while before that.

IDK what "unusable" means, though. Technically the SOTT show on SOTT SDE, not being mixed because there were no multitracks if I understand correctly what happened, would probably have been deemed "unusable" by Prince. Same with P&AM83.

.

I just wanted to add that the June 20 show on the SDE was actually recorded on 24track –

BUT
just noticed that I found 3 sets of 2" tapes for SOTT live shows in the vault photos, and the 3 dates on the side of the tape boxes are 7/7/87, 7/8/87 and 7/16/87. According to PrinceVault though, the tour ended on June 29.

Weird.

[Edited 1/17/26 10:30am]

Kares said:

databank said:

IDK what "unusable" means, though. Technically the SOTT show on SOTT SDE, not being mixed because there were no multitracks if I understand correctly what happened, would probably have been deemed "unusable" by Prince. Same with P&AM83.

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I just wanted to add that the June 20 show on the SDE was actually recorded on 24track –

BUT
just noticed that I found 3 sets of 2" tapes for SOTT live shows in the vault photos, and the 3 dates on the side of the tape boxes are 7/7/87, 7/8/87 and 7/16/87. According to PrinceVault though, the tour ended on June 29.

Weird.

[Edited 1/17/26 10:30am]

Perhaps those are the working tapes for what became the actual (audio) film - I mean, actual live recordings from the previous month, but overdubbed and mixed to what became the audio of the SOTT film. According to Prince Vault, the filming @ Paisley Park took place between 18th-23rd July, so it would make sense he first assembled the final audio and then worked straight away on the visuals.

psyche2 said:

Kares said:

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I just wanted to add that the June 20 show on the SDE was actually recorded on 24track –

BUT
just noticed that I found 3 sets of 2" tapes for SOTT live shows in the vault photos, and the 3 dates on the side of the tape boxes are 7/7/87, 7/8/87 and 7/16/87. According to PrinceVault though, the tour ended on June 29.

Weird.

[Edited 1/17/26 10:30am]

Perhaps those are the working tapes for what became the actual (audio) film - I mean, actual live recordings from the previous month, but overdubbed and mixed to what became the audio of the SOTT film. According to Prince Vault, the filming @ Paisley Park took place between 18th-23rd July, so it would make sense he first assembled the final audio and then worked straight away on the visuals.

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I don't think so, as the tracklists follow the usual tour setlists (so they are not limited to the songs used in the film) and they are also slightly different, just as the concerts were.

Kares said:

just noticed that I found 3 sets of 2" tapes for SOTT live shows in the vault photos, and the 3 dates on the side of the tape boxes are 7/7/87, 7/8/87 and 7/16/87. According to PrinceVault though, the tour ended on June 29.

.

That is weird, yes. Even if the month was wrong, those dates do not make sense.

Kares said:

psyche2 said:

Perhaps those are the working tapes for what became the actual (audio) film - I mean, actual live recordings from the previous month, but overdubbed and mixed to what became the audio of the SOTT film. According to Prince Vault, the filming @ Paisley Park took place between 18th-23rd July, so it would make sense he first assembled the final audio and then worked straight away on the visuals.

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I don't think so, as the tracklists follow the usual tour setlists (so they are not limited to the songs used in the film) and they are also slightly different, just as the concerts were.

Pure conjeture, of course. But the last date on those tape boxes is July 16th, and reportedly the filming @ PP begun on July 18th, just a couple of days later. Yes, the tracklist follows very much the actual tour setlist so I reckon there was not that much work to do, but still there were some overdubs and proper mixing for the film, I figure out.

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What else could be on those tape boxes if the dates are accurate? ...Rehearsals for a tentative US tour? ... Un-documented private gigs @ PP ?

bizzie said:

databank said:

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We know what it means: it's grainy footage that looks pretty awful. The movie contains some very short clips of actual concert footage because those are the ones involving the massive audience, and on the Blu-ray the drop of picture quality is clearly visible.

.

Simply put: you cannot film a concert with its regular light show, because film simply isn't sensitive enough to pick up enough of what you see. Hence Talking Heads making their concert film in a controlled and well-lit environment.

.

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Simply look at the screenshots in this thread: https://prince.org/msg/7/471652. Notice how grainy the picture is. And that's an audience shot where the house lights seem to be on.

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1. The excerpts we have glimpses of in the "U Got The Look" video look fine and professionally shot. Okay, there are lots of fade-in/fade-outs, so it's difficult to judge.
Considering we only have them from the crappy video reduction, there's no way to tell. But there's no way to tell either the "U Got The Look" video doesn't exist in a 16mm version, or at least a better source than the upscaled version we have in SOTT (the movie).


2. I don't see lighting problems with Syracuse (we see the limits, but it's not like it's totally unwatchable. Leroy Bennet explains it well in his Peach & Black Podcast interview), and I certainly don't see a lighting problem with 1986' Cobo Hall, or 1988's Dortmund.


3. The picture is grainy because (trust me, I'm the one who posted them) I pushed the gamma to almost a burning point with the built-in VLC slider.
Now, there are professional plugins that are a hundred times better at performing this, especially if you perform gamma correction on the original 16mm source, and not from a crude capture of a 720p video.
You can probably approach restoration perfection with serious AI tools: LLMs are crap, but machine learning in the graphics department brought wonders in the recent years.

Besides, it's grainy probably because the camera (if it was one of the professional set) was calibrated for the stage, as to not "burn" the whites passed a certain threshold of lumens. The house lightnings of Paris Bercy weren't blinding, far from it. They were OK for 1987, enough as just not to trip on the stairs, but it's not like you got the feeling the venue was ideally or strongly lit. Other venue attendants can confirm this.

In the thread where I posted the screenshots, some have confirmed the Paris shows were professionally shot. Whether this is true or not is up to their word...

...but that would definitely check with the "U Got The Look" shooting timeline. Some state the video was shot in a studio in the suburbs of Paris, but I don't believe for a second they unbuilt the entire stage on June 15th, shot the 16th, and then moved and rebuilt the stage for the June 17th show, just to shoot the video.
It must have been shot on the Paris Bercy stage, and apart from the TV's video low resolution (which again, may exist in a better resolution), and I don't see a lighting problem there either.

My guess is that all this "picture too grainy, unusable" is either bullshit, as Prince thought the performances weren't shot to perfection, or he was disappointed with them (the audio concert from the SOTT SDE is miles away from what we hear in the movie), or he wanted close-ups that would have been very difficult to blend in for continuity issues, or he was aiming for a visually polished result à la "Stop Making Sense", and not the much more organic, "live!" impression we get from Syracuse or the Cobo Hall.

Lastly, I think Leroy Bennett still has all of his brains, and if he says the Tour was shot in other venues than Rotterdam, it is one more clue that the Paris shows (June 13th, 14th, 15th and 17th) professional shootings exist, something Albert Magnoli may have confirmed elsewhere.

Again, refer to the thread bizzie mentioned:
https://prince.org/msg/7/471652

[Edited 1/18/26 10:18am]

BonnieC said:

bizzie said:

1. The excerpts we have glimpses of in the "U Got The Look" video look fine and professionally shot.

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That's because they were. That was shot under controlled circumstances, and thus it had adequate lightning etc.

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2. I don't see lighting problems with Syracuse (we see the limits, but it's not like it's totally unwatchable. Leroy Bennet explains it well in his Peach & Black Podcast interview), and I certainly don't see a lighting problem with 1986' Cobo Hall, or 1988's Dortmund.

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Video and film are completely different.

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3. The picture is grainy because (trust me, I'm the one who posted them) I pushed the gamma to almost a burning point with the built-in VLC slider.

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They are grainy in great part because the grain is what is there in the film. The reason you see so much grain is because low lightning causes more grain in film stock.

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My guess is that all this "picture too grainy, unusable" is either bullshit,

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You can literally see the picture quality drop dramatically on the Blu-ray in the few places where they use actual concert footage. It is not BS. They simply had no time to plan anything, this was literally Prince having a brainfart mere days before the concerts and his entourage contacting local people to find crew to film and record these concerts. NOS had to ask people on holiday to return to technically assist. The audio recordings were done using material that was scrambled together at the last minute. The cannisters with the footage that was shot were hastily piled in heaps because there was no time to handle this better during the show.

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In the end, the only people who could tell more are the ones who have access to the contents of the vault. But they don't seem to be willing to spill the beans and allow professionals to tell the full story, hence the disappointing SOTT SDE.