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Profile: Prince: The artist to be know in future as Holy Joe



Few people recognised the tiny figure in a garish suit hovering beside Beyoncé Knowles at the recent Grammy awards in Los Angeles. Then the signature strains of Purple Rain blasted out and an arc of electricity crackled around the world as the star ripped through some of his greatest hits.
After years in the wilderness, Prince is back. A world tour and a new album, Musicology, out tomorrow, are reviving memories of the man who redefined pop in the mid-1980s with a funky, sexy, often sleazy range of talents that eclipsed every performer on the planet.



With hits such as Kiss, Let’s Go Crazy and Little Red Corvette, Prince laid claim to the legacies of Curtis Mayfield and Sly Stone while dipping into the psychedelia of Jimi Hendrix and adding his own brand of explicit erotica. A complex and fascinating personality, the “purple poseur” brought the flamboyant stage presence of a wild-eyed libertine whose bombast and sexually ambiguous swagger contrasted with the professional care of a disciplined perfectionist. For good measure, he was also a painfully shy introvert.

Some critics have pronounced Prince’s new tracks his best work since his last great single, Gett Off in 1991. Fuelling the buzz is a tour that began in Reno, Nevada, last weekend and will reach Britain at some future date, as yet unspecified.

At last, the mercurial artist formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince has broken his self-imposed ban on performing his most famous hits. Now known once again as Prince, he is giving his fans the old numbers live “for the last time” — which in showbiz parlance means until the next time he needs to relaunch himself.

The impression that Prince Rogers Nelson has finally come to his senses at the age of 45 was reinforced last month, when he was inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame in New York. Yet, at the same time, his eccentricity seemed to have returned in his devotion to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Christian fundamentalists who reject all other denominations and believe in the imminent end of the world.

Of course, a bit of spirituality is almost a rite of passage for pop’s aristocracy. Al Green and Little Richard got religion (so did Cliff Richard, permanently). Madonna has become an adherent of kabbalah, an offshoot of the Jewish faith, while George Harrison and Boy George joined the Hare Krishnas. But Prince’s zeal is of a different order.

A note of hilarity crept into reports that one of the most lascivious figures in pop was knocking on doors in his home town of Minneapolis to ask astonished residents: “Would you like to talk about Jesus?” In one celebrated incident, he stepped out of his limo with four bodyguards and his friend Larry Graham, the former bass player in Sly and the Family Stone, and approached the home of a Jewish housewife.

She reported: “Door bell rings. My husband runs upstairs and says, ‘Prince is at the door!’ I say, ‘No way! This is Sunday and it’s the night of Yom Kippur’. My first thought is, ‘Cool, cool. He wants to use my house for a set. I’m glad. Demolish the whole thing!’

“Then they start in on this Jehovah’s Witness stuff. I say, ‘You’ve walked into a Jewish household and this is not something I’m interested in’.” Nevertheless, Prince stayed for 25 minutes of Bible readings and handed her a pamphlet.

His conversion has been attributed to a turbulent series of events that began with the death of his son, followed by his divorce from his first wife. Within weeks of his marriage to Manuela Testolini, his former assistant who, at 27, was 18 years his junior, came the death of his mother, whose last wish was that he became a Jehovah’s Witness. His father had died six months earlier.

The singer claims that he has a new set of values. “My song Darling Nikki was considered porn because I said the word ‘masturbate’. That’s not me any more,” he declared.

There is much to atone for — the four-letter words, the belief in salvation through sex, the string of girlfriends that included Sheena Easton, Madonna, Kim Basinger and Carmen Electra — but most notably the professional perversity that has kept him the shadows for so long.

This streak first surfaced in his falling-out with Warner Brothers towards the end of the 1980s. His dissatisfaction with a £100m contract led him to rebrand himself with numerous names, including an artistic squiggle. He appeared in public with the word “Slave” written across his cheek in eyeliner pencil. He said the dispute left him “really angry and in a warrior mode”.

Since he kept artistic control over his own work, people wondered what Warner had done to enslave him other than sell 50m of his records. In fact Warners retained rights to his master recordings, which threatened to deprive him of performance rights. When the contract expired, he became a cottage industry, restricting himself mainly to website sales. The last album he released in Britain, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, in 1999, sold a mere 5,000 copies.

Yet he remains a huge influence on popular music. Twenty years ago he laid out the foundations of modern hip-hop with a remarkably innovative output that married the psychedelia of 1960s pop to funk and soul. Tom Jones staged a comeback by covering Prince’s hit Kiss and producers such as Timbaland, who works with Missy Elliott, draw heavily on his music.

To his fans, it is a tragedy that he lost himself in artistic self-indulgence, with nobody to direct his talent or rap him on he knuckles as he reeled off songs in his studio complex at Paisley Park, Minneapolis.

It was where he was born, one of nine children. His Italian-Filipino father was the leader of a jazz band. “My dad’s stage name was Prince Rogers Nelson, and that’s the name he gave me,” he said in a rare interview. “When I was five I went on the road with him for three days. It was so exciting, I couldn’t believe it. From then on, I wanted to be a musician.”

However, when he was seven his father walked out on his mother, the black jazz singer Mattie Shaw, who then remarried. Finding it difficult to adjust to a stepfather, he was shuffled from relative to relative. His father had left behind a piano, on which he picked out tunes. He formed a high school band, wrote risqué lyrics and taught himself to play guitar, bass and drums.

When a local producer hired the 17-year-old Prince to dub a tape, he was astonished to discover a one-man band. Demo tapes persuaded Warner not only to sign him up, but also to grant him control in the studio, making him the youngest producer in the label’s history. For his first two albums he adopted the pose of a doe-eyed innocent and created a distinctive new brand of pop soul, but he soon put on punk regalia to become a slightly sinister new wave Don Juan.

Critics loved it. But his attempt to cross over and pitch his music to a white audience almost backfired. Some retailers, put off by his half-naked picture on the cover of his album Dirty Mind, refused to stock it and most white rock radio stations wouldn’t touch it. His annexation of rock music, originally hijacked from blacks by Elvis Presley, created a debate in the black community.

“Are these black punk acts and new wavers shunning their traditional black roots in favour of a little cosmic Uncle Tomming?” a black music magazine demanded. In fact, Prince’s rise coincided with a backlash against the clichés of black soul music.

In 1996 he married one of his on-stage dancers, Mayte Garcia, and later that year she gave birth to a son who died a week later from Pfeiffer syndrome, a rare skull disease. Prince appeared to go into denial, the next month producing a fantasy promo video in which he dressed in medical clothes and visited his visibly pregnant wife in hospital. Asked about rumours of the child’s death on Oprah Winfrey’s show, he replied: “It’s all good. Never mind what you hear.”

On New Year’s Eve, 2001, he married Testolini in Hawaii. A year later the couple were baptised into their new faith at a ceremony in which they were immersed in a swimming pool, wearing knee-length robes with swimming suits underneath. They now divide their time between Los Angeles and the £3m home Prince bought in Toronto, near his wife’s parents.

Doubts remain about his professional reincarnation. Purists maintain that although Prince’s new album shows flashes of his purple reign, it is rambling and self-indulgent. And most of the fans who will turn out in droves for his concerts want to see a 1980s Prince, not the performer he has become. But that was ever the fate of living legends.

I posted this article on Sunday but it seems only a chosen few are allowed to deem it 'NEWS', When i send an article into the NEWS i never get a response or its never published. This never used to happen.....get a grip guys.