Prince

by Matt Thorne

  The record has only one weak track, ‘Incense and Candles’, though I dislike it for personal reasons: it gives me a jolt when Prince sings to Támar that he’s grateful to her parents for feeding her healthy dinners; there seems something creepy about the suggestion that Támar’s mother is to be congratulated for keeping her daughter well fed for Prince (or maybe it’s just my own anxiety that my parents raised me on burgers and fish and chips), and the sniggering reference to Prince’s candle kills the mood. ‘Beautiful, Loved and Blessed’ (a co-write with Támar) is a variation on Prince’s Eden stories, with Prince this time being a piece of clay, which seems non-Christian until he quickly follows it up with the ‘blood on Calvary’. But by far the best of these ballads is the simply titled ‘Love’, a song which, to date, Prince has never played live. It shouldn’t work at all – it’s actually Prince listing a series of complaints about his partner – but it’s the best track on the album, almost entirely down to the minimalistic electro-funk synths and drums in the arrangement (although an acoustic version of the song he later released on his website is equally good). The significance of the 3121 party is made clear in the final song, ‘Get on the Boat’, which explains why this party (once again) should feel so apocalyptic: the people with Prince are the chosen ones, the only ones who will achieve salvation.

  *

  On this night at Prince’s house, the world doesn’t end, and as often happens at private and not-so-private Prince parties, the show ends with covers and Prince and Larry Graham jamming. Later, outside on the balcony, I am introduced to Támar by an American record exec who tells me I violated what was supposed to be a strict hierarchy by standing in front of the celebs. It’s a stressful night for Támar. Inserts in the 3121 CD sleeve said her record would be released the week before this party, but this hadn’t come to pass. Someone has started a slightly tactless conversation about Prince’s other protégés, and we talk about this for a while. I’m surprised to discover that she seems fully aware of everyone who’s come before her, and am touched by her warm, open nature. ‘Write nice things,’ she whispers to me as she clutches my hands briefly before disappearing into the darkness.

  *

  Later, eating breakfast burgers in a diner as dawn approaches, as all Prince fans always do, we dissect the show. The Universal people ask me about the Brits performance I’d witnessed earlier that year, where Prince reunited with Wendy and Lisa. They consider this the perfect Prince performance and want him to do it again on all the important American TV shows. I can understand why: as good as it looked on screen, it was even better live, evidence of what happens when Prince pours all his energy into a four-song medley (Prince must have valued it too, releasing both video and audio recordings of the performance as B-sides and a download) rather than a two- or three-hour show. Though just over ten minutes long, it was one of the best Prince performances I’ve ever witnessed. A couple of years on, I would ask Wendy and Lisa about it, and Lisa would tell me that while they ‘had a really good time rehearsing for it … at his house’, and Wendy thought, ‘The three of us are going to announce this, do that,’ when they got there Prince didn’t speak one word to the two of them. Lisa says: ‘It was like he went, “Psyche!”’ Wendy added: ‘When we performed “Purple Rain”, he had Támar up to sing, and then The Twinz, and me and Lisa, and we had no screen time, it meant nothing. He wouldn’t let us talk to the press to announce that we were going to be there.’

  *

  As the sun comes up, we get a cab back to the hotel and leave Prince’s fantasy land. The PR tells me I’ll never experience a Prince show like that again. She’s wrong. Two years later, in a hotel room in New York, I’ll witness an even better private(ish) performance. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  *

  Largely forgotten today, merely six years later, 3121 was a success, of sorts. It returned Prince to the top of the US charts – without the giveaway gimmick utilised for Musicology – for the first time since Batman, and the songs stuck around in his set for years afterwards, usually prompting the liveliest performances each night. But it could have done better, and with more promotion I believe Prince could have pushed this record further into the popular consciousness. The most significant missing project from this era is a film also called 3121, shot around the same time the album was recorded. A trailer from it was leaked in early 2011, the footage suggesting it was more like The Beautiful Experience than a new narrative movie. Prince blogger Dr Funkenberry described having seen the full film, which, he explained, was mostly shot by Sanaa Hamri and later renamed Lotus Flower and was due to be featured on the website Lotusflow3r.com back in April 2009, before Prince decided not to add this content. Pressed by his followers, Funkenberry explained that the film was a collection of videos for ‘3121’, ‘The Word’, the acoustic version of ‘Love’, ‘Incense and Candles’, ‘The Morning After’ and ‘The Dance’. The later Lotusflow3r.com version of the film also included a video for the song ‘Guitar’ and a different version of the ‘3121’ video, but it’s yet another lost project, albeit, it seems, something with the home-movie calibre of 3 Chains o’ Gold than a significant missing work.

  *

  On Independence Day 2006, Prince shut down the NPG Music Club, declaring all the lifetime memberships void. The timing of this was peculiar as just a month before he had received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the ‘Webby’ organisation. There would be a 3121 website to promote the album and subsequent shows, but it was a far less successful enterprise and the ‘Jams of the Week’ offered via the site tended to be live versions of tracks he’d made available several times before (like ‘Splash’). And while the Lotusflow3r had the potential to eclipse any online effort Prince had created before, the reality would turn out to be far less inspiring. For much of the previous two years, since the enormous Musicology tour, Prince had retreated from the larger world and concentrated instead on small private at-home concerts, as well as the tour during which he had performed as merely a member of Támar’s band. But towards the end of 2006, Prince headed to Las Vegas for the first of the many residencies that would become a central part of his new touring policy. In retrospect, it’s easy to see why this was a sound business decision, as well as being creatively liberating for Prince. But at the time, the fact that he was heading to Vegas worried me. It wasn’t just the location, but the set lists too. Commentators were quick to point out the irony of this now deeply religious man setting up in Sin City. As if to answer them, on the first night Prince opened with a post-Jehovah’s Witness version of his Controversy song ‘Sexuality’, now rewritten as ‘Spirituality’, and later argued that the old spiritual song ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’ is really about Satan. This was one of only a dozen times that Prince played ‘Fury’, a song that seems to have spooked him. As the run went on, the shows appeared to grow more varied, with more compelling after-shows, especially the night he played ‘Wasted Kisses’ at the show following his well-received Super Bowl performance, and one of the new songs that Prince introduced at Vegas, ‘Somewhere Here on Earth’, was excitedly seized upon by fans as evidence of a fresh burst of inspiration, although in truth it was no advance on the piano ballads on One Nite Alone …, and with its reference to paging lovers as on that record’s ‘U’re Gonna C Me’ and a title one word away from the same album’s ‘Here on Earth’, it seemed almost like flagrant recycling (unsurprising in one so prolific, but another factor that made these records feel like diminishing returns).

  *

  The central question about the last handful of Prince releases to date – Planet Earth, Lotusflow3r, MPLSound and 20Ten – relates to his intent. We know from past interviews that for a long time Prince put an enormous amount of care into constructing an album. At first, he thought about writing hits and then constructed albums around these songs; and later, when this became restrictive, he started thinking about his full-length releases (as musicians with a desire to tell grander stories and operate on a wider canvas of
ten do) as grand statements. But from Musicology onwards, his main focus seems to have been on how to come up with innovative ways of getting his albums to as many listeners as he did before the collapse of the record industry. From a business perspective, giving away Planet Earth in the UK with the Mail on Sunday (it got a conventional release in the US) was a wonderful way to generate publicity, just like the name change a decade before.

  But what I find hard to discern is whether he values his new songs as much as he did his previous recordings. Wendy Melvoin, who (with Lisa) contributed to two songs on Planet Earth – ‘The One U Wanna C’ (a pleasingly early-1980s retro song with playful lyrics that seem to owe a little to The Cars, whose ‘Let’s Go’ Prince now plays in concert) and ‘Resolution’ – thinks that Prince doesn’t care about recording any more, concentrating instead on the deal. And Planet Earth is a collection of mainly good songs that somehow don’t quite cohere into a good album, suggesting that it was assembled without Prince’s usual close attention. The title song, though pretty and musically a close cousin of ‘Empty Room’ – so much so it was easy to confuse them at the London O2 shows – has a lyric consisting of dull environmentalism, while the album’s single, ‘Guitar’, is the reductio ad absurdum of Prince’s music.1

  The UK playback for Planet Earth was much the same as that for 3121. It took place at the O2 rather than in a club in Mayfair’s Air Street, but the same thing happened: a representative came out and told the assembled rock critics that this was the best Prince album since the 1980s and that we’d all be knocked out when we heard the return to form. They played the record a couple of times, and though people weren’t knocked out, they enjoyed it and went home and generally wrote respectful reviews.2 But I do think that ultimately Prince’s heart wasn’t in Planet Earth in the same way. Without a record company on his back, he seemed to toy with the idea of promoting the record properly, but soon gave up on doing anything substantial. He did shoot videos for two of the songs during his time in London, flying to Prague midway through the shows (as recorded in the 21 Nights book) to record a video for ‘Somewhere Here on Earth’, and basing the video for ‘Chelsea Rodgers’ – the album’s only standout song, more for Sheila E on percussion than the sexist lyrics – around his performance at London Fashion Week. The former is as desolate, sad and lonely as you would imagine from the circumstances in which it was shot.3 ‘Future Baby Mama’ is an astonishingly ungallant smooth-jazz song in which Prince says that all his past lovers looked alike because he was searching for a platonic ideal he briefly thinks he’s found in a new partner. ‘All the Midnights in the World’ is another angry love song, populated this time not by sticky spiders but ‘prickly fingered scallywags’. There’s a link between ‘Mr. Goodnight’ and MPLSound’s ‘(There’ll Never B) Another Like Me’, with the same lyric repeated in both songs, but whereas such connections had previously hinted at a hidden world behind the released records, here it seemed to suggest merely that Prince wasn’t keeping track of what he was releasing. The song is funny, though, with Prince revealing that his dating technique involves private planes, a little Spanish man, the Johnny Depp film Chocolat and, bafflingly, a mouth full of chocolate-covered raisins, which presumably he’s using more imaginatively than the toddlers who usually consume such treats. ‘Lion of Judah’ features Prince wondering if he’s passed his expiration date and issuing threats, while the other Wendy and Lisa collaboration, ‘Resolution’, ends a somewhat bitter and angry album by wondering why people don’t want peace. (Well, maybe it’s because there’s too many people out there following Prince’s example in ‘Lion of Judah’ and striking their enemies down and believing they have a theological right to do so?)

  But in the US, where the album received a full release from Sony, the reviews were warm. This may have been because magazine editors seemed to have reached the point where they simply handed the record over to long-time supporters and true believers, like Alan Light of Spin, who suggested that it was no longer useful to compare new Prince records to past ones, but that the album still deserved four and a half stars when compared to everything else out there. As an example of a major artist challenging the means of distribution, Planet Earth is important; as a Prince album, it’s negligible. But that doesn’t matter. With Musicology, Prince had used his live audiences to get his album into the charts; now, he was reversing the trick, using a free(ish) album – it was given away at the 21 Nights shows as well as with the paper – to get audiences back into his shows. And it worked.

  33

  21 NIGHTS IN LONDON: A FAN’S NOTES

  Hearing that Prince was going to play twenty-one nights at a venue a short distance from my house presented an irresistible opportunity to get a deeper understanding of Prince’s abilities as a live musician. Normally, the only way to see an artist for that many shows is to follow them across the US or round Europe on tour; the fact that this was happening a short taxi ride from my home meant that even after-shows that ended at 4.30 a.m. would be easy to get back from. It also helped that Prince was pitching this as a stint that everyone would get more from if they attended multiple shows, suggesting he wouldn’t be playing the same stadium set every night, even if it was unlikely to be as varied as the most dedicated fans might desire. I hadn’t gone to Nevada to watch the Las Vegas residency, but I had felt a pang every time I read a report of a new song. Here was the opportunity to make up for it.

  I went to nineteen of the main shows, deeply regretting missing the two I couldn’t attend, and thirteen of the fourteen after-shows. I also attended the preview show Prince played the day the run was announced, at the smaller Koko club in Camden, north London. This sold out in five minutes, and was the first time I’d seen Prince live since the performance at his house in 2006. In the meantime, he’d done the dispiriting run in Las Vegas, and the excitement of seeing a small club show was tempered by anxiety that this might be where I finally fell out of love with Prince’s music.

  The last time I’d seen Prince play in London was the four-song set at the Brit Awards, but the last time he’d played a full set to a British audience was the One Nite Alone … tour in 2002. So much had happened to his career and reputation in the meantime, but most of it had taken place in the US. London had missed out on the audience-pleasing Musicology tour and the year he’d spent pretending he just wanted to be a session musician playing guitar in Támar’s band. Did the fact that he was coming straight from his Las Vegas residency mean he would just be exporting this greatest-hits show, or did the length of the run suggest a return to his old ambition?

  When Prince first came out on stage, the show could have followed straight on from the Jehovah jazz of the last British performance five years earlier, going directly into The JBs’ jazz-funk song ‘Pass the Peas’, a cover he’d been doing live since 2002. The rest of the show was essentially a preview of tracks that would become very familiar over the twenty-one-night stand, the main surprise this night being two covers of recent hits – Amy Winehouse’s ‘Love Is a Losing Game’ and Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’. But the Koko performance was most memorable for the moment when an overexcited female audience member tried to hump Prince and was hauled offstage.

  Between the Koko show and the 21 Nights run, Prince returned to the US for a brief series of shows – inviting Wendy Melvoin to play with him at the Roosevelt Hotel and playing three shows on his birthday in Minneapolis – before returning to attempt to make good on his onstage promise at Koko that this series of shows would be his best yet. The length of the London run had ensured maximum hype, both for Prince and the relatively new O2 arena. The Koko show had reminded critics of the quality of Prince’s live performances, and the Planet Earth newspaper giveaway had boosted his media profile in the UK to its highest point in years. Although Prince remained reluctant to give interviews, most music magazines and newspapers ran profiles or reassessments of his ‘lost’ years, the critical consensus being that he’d begun his return to prominence with the Musicology album. Pr
omoters AEG staggered the release of tickets and ensured maximum coverage at every stage, while Prince’s publicity department claimed once again that this would be the last time he’d play the hits, although this, of course, was something he’d later deny.

  It had been announced that Prince had rehearsed a hundred and fifty songs and would be mixing up the set every night, an encouragement for long-term fans who might have been disappointed that the tour was neither going to introduce a large amount of new material (as with 1995’s The Ultimate Live Experience tour) nor include a radical reinterpretation of his back catalogue (like the Lovesexy or One Nite Alone … tours) to buy tickets for several shows. As long as Prince’s interpretation of ‘hits’ was loose enough to include beloved album tracks, it boded well. And this time he got in an announcement about his possible imminent retirement, amusing the pre-show press conference by telling people he’d be off to travel and study the Bible as soon as the shows were done.

  Wednesday 1 August 2007

  It wasn’t the first time Prince had opened with ‘Purple Rain’ (indeed, he’d done so at the Target Center in Minneapolis a few weeks earlier), but it still seemed a clear statement of intent. British tabloid the Sun reported that Prince changed the entire set hours before going onstage after the original running order was leaked, a claim supported by the appearance of an alternative set list on Internet fan sites the day of the show. Whether this was true, there was undoubtedly something schizophrenic about this first night, a seeming tension between Prince’s desire to impress the critics and the show he really wanted to do. Among Prince’s many onstage comments – he was chatty this first evening, the ad libs still fresh, joking about how he had more hits than Madonna had kids – the one that seemed most pertinent was that he was in a slow-jam mood, the ballads – ‘Satisfied’, ‘Shhh’, ‘Somewhere Here on Earth’, ‘Pink Cashmere’ (which he combined with the lyrics of the more recent song ‘The One U Wanna C’) and ‘Planet Earth’, none of them strictly speaking hits – easily the best part of the show.