Prince

by Matt Thorne

  Later, it would be possible to look back and see how this performance shared the basic structure of the concerts that immediately followed: how the show was divided into two parts by an instrumental cover of ‘What a Wonderful World’, played by Mike Philips and Renato Neto, or the way that just before this break there would be a two- or three-song jam session – this night including ‘Musicology’, ‘Controversy’ and ‘I Feel for You’ – where Prince would invite audience members to dance on stage in his traditional manner, but at the time there was simply too much new information to take in. Prince’s new symbol stage1 – ‘I just got it, it’s sexy, right?’ The way he turned this stage into a playground that the whole band could roam around. Prince’s shows always have incredible constant motion, and while any performance in the round would always struggle to match the Lovesexy tour, this current version of the NPG had a whole troop of people traversing the symbol. Although the core of Prince’s band (Renato Neto, Josh and Cora Dunham, Morris Hayes) stayed in the centre of the symbol, the dancers and horn players were always moving, at least on this first night, making sure that every side of the audience had someone to watch. Támar had long since gone from the band, but Marva King, Shelby J and The Twinz were this show’s cheerleaders. And when he left the stage after the second encore, many in the audience (including me) assumed it was the end and went to find their cars or queue for the after-show. But after the house lights had been up for several minutes, Prince returned again for a third encore – ‘Little Red Corvette’, ‘Raspberry Beret’ and ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’ – before concluding with Sheila E’s ‘A Love Bizarre’ and Chic’s ‘Le Freak’.

  Thursday 2 August (a.m. after-show)

  No one knew yet what to expect from the after-shows. Prince’s 3121 website posted a message that encouraged fans to take a risk on the twenty-five-pound entry, without making any explicit promises. It seemed unlikely that Prince would play every night, but did that mean a live show from Prince’s band, a Prince-sanctioned guest, or DJ Rashida doing a Prince disco? Two hours after the end of the main show, the curtains in the Indigo opened to reveal Prince’s band, jamming on A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘Can I Kick It?’ After introducing everyone and playing another jam, they were joined by Maceo Parker and Candy Dulfer, who, according to her website, had been told by Prince that there wasn’t room for her in the main show after getting her to come to London. With Candy in the band, the sound was closer to the One Nite Alone … tour, and it seemed as if these shows might be perfectly balanced (a more mainstream, but still horn-driven hits show, followed by a loose jazz-driven after-show). All that was missing was Prince.

  And here I can’t avoid a moment of hagiography.

  If I had to define what makes Prince the perfect pop star, what puts him above David Bowie and Madonna or any of his lesser rivals, it’s the fact that his desire to impress, his showboating, show-off sense of style, never stops. Just as his fans were beginning to flag, just as everyone (most of whom had now been here for seven hours) was reaching their physical limitation, our hero strolled out in a strawberry-coloured suit and matching boots and launched into a guitar solo more exciting than anything else he’d played all evening.

  This first after-show included songs by Maceo (‘Shake Everything You’ve Got’), The JBs (the now-familiar ‘Pass the Peas’), Prince himself (‘Anotherloverholenyohead’ and the new horn-driven version of ‘3121’ that he played at the Montreux aftershow), The B-52s (‘Rock Lobster’), two jazz standards familiar to fans with access to past show recordings (Billy Cobham’s ‘Stratus’ and Wayne Shorter’s ‘Footprints’) and a long jazz song by Cora, Prince’s drummer. By this point, even the most critical fan had no choice but to submit.

  Friday 3 August

  The first show had received rave reviews from every newspaper. Simon Price claimed in the Independent on Sunday that it was ‘the single greatest concert’ he’d been to in his life. OK, this is a man with a tattoo, and until this point, as he explained later in the review, his previous favourite concert was a date at Wembley on Prince’s 1988 Lovesexy tour, but still, that a commentator who has followed Prince throughout his career should be so impressed indicates the high quality of the opening show. Concluding the review, Price echoed comments regularly made about Bob Dylan, suggesting that anyone present at the concert should feel lucky to be alive at the same time as Prince.

  But this tour wasn’t about one night. If Prince was going to get through a twenty-one-night stint without fans getting restless, he needed to prove his claim that he would be making each show individual. And on Friday, it seemed as if this might have been mere hype. I had good seats, close enough not just to see that Prince’s preferred form of transport to the stage is still an upright black equipment box, but to catch a glimpse of his eyes through the ventilation hole, but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. The first half of the show was a cut-down version of Wednesday night, and the only extra song in the first half of the set was a cover of Wild Cherry’s ‘Play that Funky Music’, extending the jam section and giving the audience more time to dance on stage, but hardly raising the quality of the show.

  Then, after the ‘What a Wonderful World’ interlude, a moment of magic: ‘Joy in Repetition’. Not a particular rarity, but a fan favourite: the highlight of an otherwise lacklustre show. Like many of Prince’s songs, it’s a track that’s undergone reinvention over the years, but tonight it was delivered with quiet authority, a moment of truth in an otherwise over-rehearsed set.

  As the box containing Prince was wheeled out for a final time, there was a scuffle in the audience as someone tried to go to the gents at the wrong moment. The audience booed but refused to leave, having heard about Wednesday’s extra encore and wanting more. But that was it. The sense of disappointment was compounded at the Indigo club, when the curtains opened to reveal not Prince, but Dr John, who’d being playing a set there earlier that evening and had presumably been asked to do another show in place of Prince.

  [There were rumours that Cora, the drummer, had been ill. But what was Prince doing while we were waiting for him to come on stage? Well, if you consult 21 Nights, the photo book Prince put out to commemorate the run, and look at ‘Night 2’, we see that by 12.21 a.m. Prince was back at the Dorchester Hotel, where he posed for some photos as he climbed out of his car and got into a lift.]

  Saturday 4 August

  Prince’s first night with a support act (Nikki Costa). The show was the shortest yet, but length was irrelevant: tonight was the best show of the run so far. Everything extraneous had been cut – there was now room for only one ballad in the first half – and it had become apparent what these shows were really about: pleasing the audience. It was clear that this was a hits show he could deliver without feeling bored or being cynical. Maybe there was also a pleasure in the acceptance he was finding from the British media, who were revising their opinion of him. Ben Thompson, the Sunday Telegraph’s music critic, was so moved by the show he was prepared to forgive Prince for everything:

  The melodramatic feuding with his record company, the endless name-changes, the systematic devaluation of his own critical currency via a series of ridiculously boring albums: these were not, it now transpires, the death-throes of a once-great talent. They were actually a kind of diversionary excrescence – like Linus’s dust-cloud in Peanuts, or the flesh of an oyster within which a pearl might be discovered – buying this erstwhile 1980s leftover the time to reconfigure himself for the new century in a more Princely fashion than ever before.2

  Sunday 5 August (a.m. after-show)

  Not that the perversity wasn’t still there, of course. It was just the diehard fans he wanted to suffer. The good news was that he showed up for the after-show; the bad news was that he played less than ten minutes, appearing briefly in the middle of Nikki Costa’s otherwise dull set before returning to the hotel to pose sitting on his bed holding the telephone.

  Tuesday 7 August

  And then, just as Prince’s sh
ows were falling into a predictable pattern, he mixes things up. The first sign that tonight was going to be different was a new intro video, a short recording of a recent show from Houston. The clip showed the band playing ‘D.M.S.R.’, but felt like a risky opening as the footage looked more interesting than anything we’d seen at the O2. Maybe it was the absence of backing singer Shelby J that prompted Prince to make changes to the set, or simply that he was getting bored, but on Tuesday night he made two changes that lifted the whole night. Prince’s first change was an alteration in the show’s order, opening with the acoustic section he’d previously used for a third encore. As well as the three songs he’d played then (‘Little Red Corvette’, ‘Raspberry Beret’ and ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’), he played two songs for the first time, ‘Alphabet St.’ and ‘I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man’. As good as this opening was, the true highlight of the night was a piano medley that started the second half (after the now-familiar ‘What a Wonderful World’ interlude), as Prince played snatches of Planet Earth’s ‘Somewhere Here on Earth’, then ‘Diamonds and Pearls’, ‘The Beautiful Ones’, ‘How Come You Don’t Call Me Any More?’, ‘Condition of the Heart’, ‘Do Me, Baby’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’. Although the truncated songs frustrate fans, these piano medleys have been the highlight of many of Prince’s best tours, and while it wasn’t yet clear whether it was a one-off bonus to compensate for the absence of Shelby J or proof that the set would develop in intriguing ways, it was a necessary reminder that no matter how choreographed the main show was starting to seem, just by stepping behind a keyboard Prince could change the entire mood of an evening.

  Not everyone was impressed. The Telegraph, which was sending someone different to review each night of the run, had given British pop singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor the task of critiquing this evening’s show. Ellis-Bextor complained: ‘When I go to gigs I want to hear the hits, the songs I know, so on that level I thought it was disappointing. He plays lots of songs you don’t know, and even worse he does these little medleys where he sits at the piano for twenty minutes and plays a few bars of a hit before switching to another.’ These comments were placed on all the Prince fan sites, provoking a predictable response. The Mail on Sunday picked up on the story, describing how fans had responded to Ellis-Bextor’s complaint about the lack of hits by pointing out that he’d played ‘Little Red Corvette’, ‘Raspberry Beret’, ‘Alphabet St.’, ‘Cream’, ‘U Got the Look’, ‘I Feel for You’ and ‘Controversy’. Ellis-Bextor held firm. ‘He just did bits of songs and a couple of hits, then all the jamming stuff.’

  Wednesday 8 August (a.m. after-show)

  Prince’s support at the main show this night had been Grupo Fantasmo, an eleven-piece Latin band from Austin, Texas, who’d established a relationship with Prince over the previous year, playing a number of gigs with him (including the Alma awards and a Golden Globes after-party), as well as having a residency at the 3121 club at the Rio in Vegas. Prince had brought the band back onstage to join him in the final encore of the main show, ‘Get on the Boat’, so it seemed likely he’d jam with them at the after-show. The question was how long would he stay.

  As with every after-show performance so far, Prince waited a few songs before joining the band. When he came on with Grupo Fantasmo, he performed with the same loose energy he had at the first after-show, his composed attire (white suit, red shirt and Versace sunglasses) at odds with his manic mood. He stayed for the full performance tonight, covering Stevie Wonder (‘Superstition’, ‘Tell Me Something Good’, ‘Higher Ground’), Billy Cobham (‘Stratus’), Sly and the Family Stone (‘Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)’), and for any fan disappointed at the lack of rarities in the main set, a long instrumental version of ‘I Like It There’ from Chaos and Disorder.

  Friday 10 August

  On almost every night of the run so far, Prince had followed Cora’s drum solo at the end of ‘Shhh’ by quipping, ‘Not bad for a girl,’ a quip he’d been making back since Sheila E was in the band. Tonight Prince made her the focus of attention. Almost all of his onstage comments (‘Give the drummer some,’ etc.) seemed directed at her, and he kept catching her attention throughout the show, as he seemed to give her challenges that she invariably met.

  The show began with a song they’d yet to play on the main stage (‘3121’), went straight into ‘Girls & Boys’, and then Prince abruptly changed moods with his cover of ‘Down by the Riverside’ and lost the audience. Even following this with ‘Purple Rain’ didn’t entirely get them back, and the only other innovation in the set was replacing ‘What a Wonderful World’ with an instrumental version of ‘The Dance’. It was starting to seem that the Friday-night shows were the ones to miss.

  Saturday 11 August (a.m. after-show)

  The ‘xpect the unexpected’ message from the 3121 message board was now posted outside the Indigo, so I suppose I only have myself to blame for what follows, but it did say ‘unexpected’, not downright perverse. On the afternoon before Friday’s aftershow, there was a message on the official 3121 website, stating that he would not be at Friday’s after-party, but would likely be at Saturday’s.

  Standing in the long queue waiting for the after-show, I heard people all around me excitedly talking about the songs Prince might play that night. I considered telling them about the message on the website, but didn’t want to be responsible for spoiling their evening. It was clear that many people had decided not to come, and the club was half as full as it had been on previous evenings. Still, ‘xpect the unexpected’, right? On the other nights when Prince had appeared, his guitar tech had set up his guitar on the left-hand side of the stage, and there it was again tonight.

  Around 1 a.m., Beverley Knight took the stage. She was vocal in her praise of him during the first forty-five minutes of her after-show performance. But when Prince’s guitar tech came out and took his guitar away, I assumed the message on the website was true and he wouldn’t be joining Knight tonight. Even if he did show, I told myself, he’d probably only play one solo and leave, as he’d done at the Nikki Costa show. So I left.

  The moment I got on the Thames Clipper, the boat service that operated until 4.30 a.m. on after-show nights, I knew I’d made a mistake. Normally there were at least thirty people on the boat; tonight there were only two American women. Everyone else had stayed in the Indigo to witness Prince, Beverley Knight and the NPG playing a two-hour after-show including covers like the Stones’ ‘Miss You’ and Blackstreet’s ‘No Diggity’, alongside ‘Controversy’, ‘3121’, ‘A Love Bizarre’ and ‘Alphabet St.’.

  Saturday 11 August

  The best thing about this twenty-one-night stand was that there was no time to get upset about missing Prince’s after-show the night before, because as soon as I got up it was just a few hours before I could see him again. Of course, the whole reason for going to so many shows was because of the fear that I might miss the one time he played a favourite song, or did an interpretation of a track that gave away some secret about its composition (and I mean a real secret, not the pretend confession Prince made every time he played ‘Cream’ on the main stage that he wrote the song while looking in the mirror). I felt bad that I’d failed as a Prince fan (and the worst thing was, failed by believing his website), but I’d shored up enough previous unique Prince experiences to cope with missing this one show.3 But it didn’t mean that I wasn’t praying he’d turn up at tonight’s after-show.

  First, though, there was the main show to get through. The worst thing about the Prince experience is that the constant possibility of a more exciting after-show meant it was easy to take the main performance for granted. He opened with ‘Purple Rain’ again, and although it was probably the best show in the run so far (I realise I keep writing this, but he was getting better and better), it was a reshuffled version of most of the previous shows, opening with ‘Purple Rain’, with the funk section of ‘Musicology’, ‘Pass the Peas’ and ‘Play that Funky Music (I was heartily sick o
f being asked to chant ‘Hey, funky London’ throughout these songs), and it wasn’t until the synth encore that the show came alive for me. In a manner that no doubt would have enraged Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Prince had pre-sets for several of his most beloved songs (‘Alphabet St.’, ‘D.M.S.R.’, ‘When Doves Cry’, ‘Erotic City’, ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’, ‘Nasty Girl’, ‘Sign o’ the Times’ and ‘Pop Life’), and played a few moments of each before stopping, enraging the crowd (he seemed to love the boos more than the cheers) but also pointing out once again just how one show could never truly represent the true breadth of his back catalogue.

  The Indigo’s bouncers came down the line for the after-show, telling everyone that Prince wouldn’t be performing tonight. The crowd turned angry, with drunken women fighting the bouncers and being dragged away. After the website message, I thought this might just be an even bigger bluff, a way of ensuring that no one apart from the most ardent believers were in the front row. But as soon as we were inside and I saw the DJ set up in front of the stage curtains, it was obvious that the website message was totally wrong. Prince had tricked us again.