by Matt Thorne
Tuesday 14 August
Although it felt perverse, part of me didn’t want a good show tonight. I could cope with missing the next two shows after this if they were going to be the same basic set as the five I’d already seen; if he was about to change the set drastically it would be much more of a sacrifice. But once again, it was the best show so far. It had started to occur to me that maybe each show (aside from the ones that had obvious flaws) just seemed better than the ones before because there was still that fresh excitement of seeing Prince every time. And, of course, I’d now seen the show so many times that what made a good show for me was probably the opposite of what a first-timer would want from the concert. The main reason this show seemed so good was that he’d broken up the structure. A few nights earlier, the jam section where the audience dance on stage was my favourite part of the show; now, I was delighted that had gone. ‘Musicology’ was now the second song, and ‘Controversy’ had been moved towards the end of the show. Two Planet Earth songs (‘Guitar’ and ‘Somewhere Here on Earth’) had crept back into the set, and he played ‘Forever in My Life’ for the first time on the tour. But it was what was not there that made the show so different: no ‘What a Wonderful World’ interlude to slow things down. Without this, the show took on a new life.
Wednesday 15 August (a.m. after-show)
The Indigo bartenders had started taking bets on which nights Prince would appear. ‘You guys all get so upset when he doesn’t show up,’ one woman said, explaining why she didn’t like working the shift, ‘but I think he’ll play tonight.’ In fact, the British fans had got so upset that the twenty-five pounds you paid for an after-show was really like buying a lottery ticket that their grievances had started to reach the national press and the BBC consumer-complaints programme Watchdog. But the fan sites also thought he’d show tonight, citing the importance of the number seven in Prince’s numerology [it was the seventh show] and the fact that Beverley Knight was supporting again. I was sceptical, wondering if he’d find it too predictable to repeat the same experience that he’d had on Friday. Beverley was teasing the audience, referring to the previous after-show and singing ‘Raspberry Beret’, but giving no specific indication that he might come on. But there was no way I was leaving early tonight.
Knight kept referring to the fact that they were ‘making history’, a claim that seemed unnecessarily exaggerated.
Until Prince came on and played ‘Empty Room’.
Prince is completely aware of the difference between his casual and hard-core fans. Sometimes it seems as if he wants to punish both groups equally. But when he decides to please them, he knows exactly how to do it. He understands that the majority of the audience who go to the main show are desperate to hear him play ‘Purple Rain’, and he knows that while the after-show crowd would probably prefer never to hear him play that again, a well-chosen rarity like ‘Empty Room’ can create exactly the same excitement in the hard core. He later admitted as much to the Vancouver Sun, anatomising his hard-core fans with unnerving accuracy: ‘A smaller crowd of old school heads like to hear unreleased jams because they already own a lot of stuff on bootleg.’4
If I had to resort to hagiography to describe my feelings during the first night’s after-show, then it’s almost impossible to explain how hearing this version of this song on this night made me feel without sounding like a lunatic with no sense of proportion. It is, after all, just a man playing a song in front of a couple of thousand people. Followers of Bob Dylan might understand how it feels when you hear the perfect version of a song in the right context at the right time, but with Prince it’s even more complicated. Aside from the fact that this was the best single performance of the tour so far, there was the generosity of the moment, the reminder that even beyond the albums, the B-sides, the hits for other artists, there are hundreds of further jewels; songs that have never quite reached the mass public. And the excitement of hearing this song was intensified by hearing Prince perform a Hendrix-style guitar solo that made it truly unique, one of the first times on this tour where, as far as such a thing is possible, he had nailed a definitive version of a track for ever.
Making history, indeed.
The rest of the two-hour after-show (which lasted longer than the main show) was completely different to Friday’s. On Friday, he had covered several Stevie Wonder songs; now, he played two James Brown songs (‘I Can’t Stand It’ and ‘Cold Sweat’), as well as ‘What Is Hip?’, the Tower of Power song he loves so much. When he played at Koko, Prince had offered ‘mad props’ to Amy Winehouse and later told newspapers he wanted her to perform with him on the tour. But as Winehouse had recently taken an overdose of heroin, ketamine and ecstasy, it had seemed likely that clean-living Prince would have revised this idea.5 If so, he was still in love with her music, letting Shelby J cover ‘Love Is a Losing Game’ once more. He showed off his influences again as he covered B. B. King, The Staple Singers, Sly and the Family Stone, Aretha Franklin and Mary J. Blige. The now regular Billy Cobham song ‘Stratus’ was still in the set, and among the half-dozen of his own songs we got ‘Partyman’, in the version he’d played when he was backing Támar, and even a brief snatch of ‘Head’, Prince’s smile revealing that even if he had foresworn his most sexually explicit material for religious reasons, he still knew exactly how much people liked it, and that one day it might even reappear again.
Friday 17 August
The first of the two main shows I missed. It would have been easy for me to go – by this stage tickets were easy to get – but I’d been invited to read at the Green Man festival. As much as it pained me to miss these shows, I’d thought that at this stage in the run a short break might do me good. It seemed that going away to watch a different sort of music, albeit played by musicians – like Bill Callahan – who were themselves mostly Prince fans, would give me perspective when I returned to the O2. It was also good to be on a stage rather than watching one for a couple of nights – albeit only in the literary tent – and to remind myself that as good as being a spectator can be, particularly when you’re watching Prince, performing is equally important.
Still, this didn’t stop me from sitting with my wife’s Blackberry in the middle of the night, trying to work out whether the main show might have been good from the set list posted on fan sites, and desperately hoping I hadn’t missed out on a spectacular aftershow. Fortunately, it seemed the set list was much the same as usual, and the only real event of the night was that the audience member pulled up to sing ‘Play that Funky Music’ wasn’t the usual anonymous punter but the Hollywood actress Julia Stiles. [As a historical document, 21 Nights also fails me here, as according to this book, the big events of ‘Night 8’ were a maid making Prince’s bed and Prince posing with a guitar in what looks like a deserted stadium.]
Saturday 18 August
By now I was sitting with the Blackberry looking as each song was added to the set list, and was delighted to see that this was the shortest show to date – just eighty-five minutes, and nothing he hadn’t played already. But then I started to worry: did a short main show mean he was saving his strength for a marathon after-show?
Sunday 19 August (a.m. after-show)
How can one tell the quality of an after-show one doesn’t get to attend? The message boards are useless: according to those present, the best thing about this night’s show was that Prince was wearing a funny hat, and the set list never tells the complete story. Throughout this time Prince was employing someone to write gushing ‘3121 spy’ reports about his live performances (‘The NPG were kickin’ it,’ etc.) that were equally useless. I gleaned that it was a short show, full of covers (Rufus, Stevie Wonder, Cobham’s ‘Stratus’, Bill Withers, Sly, etc., two songs from Shelby) and light on Prince numbers.
Looking at the run in search of a narrative, the most significant inclusion this night was ‘The Rules’. Playing it in connection with ‘Satisfied’, it was the beginning of Prince introducing a new dimension to his performance: sta
nd-up comedy. This comic song about the differences between women and ‘brothers’, first introduced on the Musicology tour and never recorded, would crop up in his main show, and would soon be followed by an increasing number of comic monologues.
Friday 24 August
During Prince’s week off from the O2, The Rolling Stones had played two gigs at the venue, and as he opened Friday’s show, this was clearly on his mind. Prince has a long history with the Stones – from his ill-fated support of them at the LA Coliseum in October 1981 to his performance with Ronnie Wood at the Camden Palace after-show on the Lovesexy tour in July 1988. More recently, Wood’s daughter had claimed that Prince had asked her father to appear with him at the Koko show – and he was clearly enjoying reclaiming the stage from them at the start of this evening’s show. ‘Someone’s been sleeping in my bed …’ he growled, Goldilocks style, as he prowled the symbol stage, working three snippets of Stones songs (‘Honky Tonk Women’, ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Miss You’) into the set. After ‘Miss You’ he concluded ‘Satisfied’ with the ‘Rules’ song he’d played at the previous Saturday’s after-show, beginning his list of instructions with the taunt, ‘The Rolling Stones may have let you do what you want, but you’re in my house now, and there are rules.’
The Chicago-based rapper Common had supported, and Prince got him up on stage to sing ‘Play that Funky Music’. He proved as hopeless at the song as the dancers Prince usually hauled from the audience, but he made up for it with an anglophile rap (‘I just saw a movie called The Queen,’ etc.) that became increasingly absurd as it went on.
Saturday 25 August (a.m. after-show)
It had become clear that the best sign that we’d be getting a worthwhile after-show was when Prince was supported by either someone he liked or wanted to impress. With Common in the house, it seemed inevitable that Prince would show up, and he was out much sooner than usual, a few minutes after one, playing guitar while Common rapped several tracks. But the highlight for me was when Prince shouted at the poor bartender to jump up and down to ‘Housequake’.
Saturday 25 August
Earlier, I was worried that I would conclude every account by saying it was the best night of the tour; now, my concern was that every subsequent night would be the worst night. There was a sharp decline in quality on this evening, not just from the night before but from the rest of the tour. Friday night’s show had dipped after the opening few songs; this show nose-dived straight after the opener, ‘Planet Earth’, played for the first time this tour, delivered as if it was as important to the audience as ‘Purple Rain’.
The Rolling Stones were clearly still on his mind, as we got a fuller version of ‘Honky Tonk Women’, but he also played a truly horrible easy-listening version of ‘The Long and Winding Road’ that was even more saccharine than Phil Spector’s treatment. The solo piano section seemed to have lost all its energy and it was clear that tonight Prince was going through the motions.
It was no surprise that tonight’s after-show was the NPG only.
Tuesday 28 August
The least interesting show so far. The second half had both the piano and the synth set, plus the ‘Lolita’, ‘Black Sweat’, ‘Kiss’ segment that was still a low point, in spite of The Twinz’s choreography. The encores were familiar too: ‘I Feel 4 U’, ‘Controversy’ and ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. He’d even brought back ‘What a Wonderful World’. I was beginning to worry about how I’d get through the rest of the run.
Wednesday 29 August (a.m. after-show)
And then, two and a half hours later, Prince is transformed. What elevated this show above most after-shows (and the ones that had impressed me earlier in the run, before I properly realised exactly what he was still capable of) was the concentration and focus of the performance. Music fans often talk about Prince after-shows as if they’re always legendary, but that isn’t true. At their worst, they’re a formless jam of cover versions, chanting and cameo appearances from far less talented guests. Even the best aftershows, no matter how great they seem at the time to the audience who witnessed them, often suffer if you hear a recording, as it’s not always that interesting to listen to unfocused noodling. It’s usually a bad sign, for example, if the band is having too much fun.
For this after-show, Prince had stripped the band down to a three-piece, a new variation on The New Power Trio, accompanied only by Josh and Cora Dunham, and concentrated on the blues-influenced, almost heavy-metal side of his oeuvre. This was what fans had hoped for from multiple after-shows: that instead of repeating a similar set each night, he would use the opportunity to display different sides of his work, or as tonight, to remind us of the highlights of long-forgotten albums like Chaos and Disorder.
Prince used his 3121 website to tease the fans, with his scribe writing that he had upset local residents by playing a CD recording of the show in his car stereo while taking photographs [either these photos didn’t end up in the 21 Nights book, or were moved to another night, as Prince posed in his car on the second, fifteenth and twentieth nights, but not the twelfth].
Friday 31 August
I enjoyed this show, mainly because it was the least crowd-pleasing of the run, beginning with a minor hit (‘Musicology’), followed by an unreleased song (‘Prince and the Band’) and three covers (one new to the set – INXS’s ‘What You Need’ – the other two now very familiar – Wild Cherry’s ‘Play that Funky Music’ and The JBs’ ‘Pass the Peas’), so that it wasn’t until six songs in that we got a bona fide Prince hit (‘Cream’). In the piano set, Prince roamed way into the back catalogue for the unreleased ‘A 1,000 Hugs and Kisses’, which Prince’s 3121 website described as a new song, but was originally recorded in 1992. Shorn of the overelaborate instrumentation of the out-take version, it seemed a strange choice for the main show, but I would have paid the entrance fee just to hear this song alone.
Saturday 1 September
Towards the end of a first half stuffed mainly with now-overfamiliar songs and enlivened only by a funny performance of ‘The Rules’, Prince followed the usual ‘Cream’ and ‘U Got the Look’ double bill with a medley of the intro of ‘A Question of U’, ‘The One’ and Alicia Keys’s ‘Fallin’’. ‘The One’ section of the medley was the longest, almost the whole song, and this stand-out track from the underrated New Power Soul has always inspired some of Prince’s best live performances. The nearly two-hour show had most of the high points from previous performances, including the two solo-synth and keyboard sets, and something else new: ‘Strange Relationship’ for the first time. OK, it was only one verse, but it made the evening.
Sunday 2 September (a.m. after-show)
After Wednesday’s after-show, it was inevitable that this next one would seem slightly disappointing, but it was probably the most representative sample of everything Prince does at an after-show performance, with covers of songs by The Cars, the Stones, Janet Jackson, Graham Central Station, INXS, Billy Cobham, Amy Winehouse, Sly and the Family Stone and Beyoncé. I don’t mind the covers – in fact, I enjoy Prince’s version of ‘Let’s Go’ more than almost anything else he plays – but it’s the Prince rarities that make a show special, and there were few of these tonight, although Shelby J sang the Támar song ‘Redheaded Stepchild’ as a second encore, raising hopes that this excellent song may not yet be lost.
Thursday 6 September
Maceo Parker outta the band, off to Japan for his own tour, and much to the horror of his fans, Prince in trainers (the LA Gear kind that light up when you walk), but aside from that, showing no sign of flagging. In the middle of the show, Prince announced that he didn’t think twenty-one shows was enough and that he should do fifty-two in London. I have to confess by this point I hoped he was joking.
Friday 7 September (a.m. after-show)
Tonight started out as a Shelby J show, with her taking vocals for the first eight songs. Only after a long cover of ‘Stratus’ did Prince take the microphone for the first four songs of Planet Earth (for one
glorious moment it seemed like he might be playing the whole album in order). ‘Alright, it’s karaoke time,’ he declared before ‘When U Were Mine’, ‘Anotherloverholeinyohead’, ‘3121’ and ‘Chelsea Rodgers’. It seemed Prince’s latest album had been banished from the main show to the after-show. Maybe he thought it would get more appreciation there.
Sunday 9 September
It was time to mix things up. Prince livened up this show by starting off with a virtual reprise of his Super Bowl performance, a welcome burst of new energy. While there was something unsatisfying about the way he segues from ‘All Along the Watchtower’ to The Foo Fighters’ ‘Best of You’ rather than having a real stab at a Hendrix-like version of Dylan’s song, it does work as one of his many musical history lessons, showing us how one song leads to another in the same way he did when layering ‘One Nation Under a Groove’ over Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’. For the first time on the whole tour he dropped ‘Cream’ from the set, and ‘Prince and the Band’ was continuing to grow from a throwaway epilogue to ‘Musicology’ into one of the more entertaining songs in the set. Planet Earth song ‘Somewhere Here on Earth’ was back in the keyboard set, and he played ‘Adore’ for the first time this tour.
Monday 10 September (a.m. after-show)
At just under two and a half hours, this was the longest aftershow of the run, and one of the best. This was Prince and his band at their most versatile (so versatile, in fact, that tonight’s version of ‘3121’ included ‘The Entertainer’, ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’, and conjuring up horrible visions of what might be in Prince’s DVD collection, the Benny Hill theme tune, ‘Yakety Sax’), and oddly, ended with the same two songs with which he’d concluded the main show. The highlights of this show were a heavy ‘All the Critics Love U in London’, an extremely extended ‘Joy in Repetition’ which began with Prince wandering offstage and Renato looking nervously to the wings to see if they should continue playing and included an elaborate dance routine from one of The Twinz, and best of all, a bluesy improvisation based around ‘Peach’ in which Prince talked to us about his problems with the record industry, based on a conversation he’d had with ‘a cat backstage’. He asked us if he should release ‘The One U Wanna C’ or ‘Chelsea Rodgers’ as a single, then joked that when people said he didn’t sell records any more, he told them he never sold ’em in the first place, just made them.