by Matt Thorne
Wednesday 12 September
Tonight I finally worked out what Prince meant when he said, ‘You’ve got your twins, we’ve got ours,’ during ‘Kiss’. As he’d changed the ‘You don’t have to watch Dynasty’ line to ‘don’t have to watch Big Brother’, it seemed the rumours were true and he was a fan of the show and was referring to BB’s runners-up.6 Although the order of the show was altered, this show was similar to Sunday’s, with the Super Bowl segment shifted towards the end of the performance. The highlights of the show were three songs from 1999 in the piano set: ‘Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)’, ‘Delirious’ and ‘Free’.
Thursday 13 September
Even up close, when tonight’s special guest Elton John first got up, I mistook him for Ozzy Osbourne. His version of ‘The Long and Winding Road’ was horrible karaoke. After he’d gone, Prince added a snatch of ‘Benny and the Jets’ to his synth-set encore. He also teased with a sample of ‘Darling Nikki’, a song he no longer plays. I prayed John would go home before Prince got to the Indigo.
Friday 14 September (a.m. after-show)
Psychedelia night, a style of music he’s only really explored in any depth on one album, Around the World in a Day. And it was the title song from this album that he opened with. Really using his rack of guitar pedals, and yelling at his sound man, Dollar Bill, to turn up the keyboards, he followed this with ‘Beautiful Strange’, Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and an instrumental version of ‘Paisley Park’. ‘Partyup’, from Dirty Mind, signalled the transition into a more conventional after-show, focusing on covers and ending with two songs he’d played in the main show, ‘Musicology’ and ‘Prince and the Band’ – in their best-ever live renditions – with Prince once again outlining his tax-evading land scam.
[After his song at the Indigo about which single to release from Planet Earth, we can see from 21 Nights that Prince relaxed after this show by flying to Prague, where he shot a video for a different song altogether, ‘Somewhere Here on Earth’.]
Sunday 16 September
Undoubtedly the most curious show of the run. The band played three songs before Prince even appeared, much to the bafflement of the audience, with Shelby J desperately trying to get the arena to respond to ‘Chelsea Rodgers’ and covers of ‘Misty Blue’ and ‘Baby Love’. When Prince did appear for ‘1999’, there was a sense that he was going through the motions this evening, with songs cut short or performed speedily. Maybe Prince was in a hurry to get to the Indigo.
Monday 17 September (a.m. after-show)
This was my least-favourite after-show, but it was certainly unique. More of a stand-up comedy night than a musical performance, it featured Prince improvising a song (‘Just Like U’)about how his life had changed since the days when he used to be able to go to the store to buy his mother tampons and cigarettes, and a very silly new song made out of old blues tracks that imagined a scenario where Prince was going out with a cock-eyed, three-handed woman. He also covered the Katie Melua song ‘Nine Million Bicycles’ and ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ (why, Prince, why?). [Following the unwritten law that musicians never know which of their own shows to put out as live albums, half of this show is on the Indigo Nights/Live Sessions CD that accompanied the 21 Nights book, which includes a track, ‘Indigo Nights’, consisting of band jamming and the chant ‘London knows how to party.’]
Thursday 20 September
For the first time, I started wondering if the main shows ever just seem like a job to Prince – if going out and chanting ‘Hey, funky London’ or ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is a trombone’ ever grew old. But then he started playing ‘Chelsea Rodgers’, and I realised that by throwing in a new song he could always wake himself up. On a night like this, the only songs that work are the more recent ones, or the surprises, like a piano segment where he played ‘When Will We B Paid?’ and ‘Money Don’t Matter 2Nite’, which admittedly was enough to make the whole night worthwhile. But it’s still painful to hear ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’ played as if he never cared about it, a cabaret parody of everything it used to mean. And yet, if this was the only show you saw, you wouldn’t feel short-changed. The performance was two hours long, the set list ranged freely over his career, and Prince was focused on giving the audience a good time from the moment he walked out. It just felt, tonight at least, a little bit like a grind.
Friday 21 September
Some shows are special largely because of the sense of occasion. A fully packed auditorium, TV in attendance (every show had been recorded by Prince’s team, but the opening of the set tonight was being broadcast by Sky) and an audience who had taken it upon themselves to equip themselves with purple glow-sticks. Prince acknowledged the event almost as soon as he came on stage – ‘Twenty-one nights, yeah’ – but the main marker of the accomplishment came when The Twinz presented Prince with a jacket onto which had been spray-painted ‘21’. This show started out as Prince in celebration mode, playing familiar songs (he likes to play ‘I Feel 4 U’ and ‘Controversy’ when the cameras are present), before a brief move away from the now familiar set list for ‘Somewhere Here on Earth’. After that, it was back to the hits, ‘Pass the Peas’ the only cover and ‘Chelsea Rodgers’ the only new song. But along with the opening night, it was the best of the run. We even got a brief snatch of one of his seemingly now-forbidden songs, ‘Irresistible Bitch’.
Saturday 22 September (a.m. after-show)
[In writing this account of the 21 Nights shows I attended, I’ve missed out most of the personal details – the friends who accompanied me to the shows, the strangers I met in the queues – partly because this is primarily a critical study, but also because talk about all the beautiful people you met in the audience is strictly for the fan boards, but indulge me for a moment when I say that part of what made the last night so special was that everyone in London I knew who was regularly attending after-shows made it in for this last night, including my editor, Lee Brackstone, here celebrating his birthday. I had some friends who’d been lucky and almost always attended an after-show that Prince had actually played at; I had others who kept showing up for the wash-out nights when he didn’t appear. And there was still a fear that he might yet leave us without a final after-show. But then Lee saw the sax and vocoder man Mike Philips come into the venue, strolled up and asked him if Prince was going to play that night. Mike laughed and showed him a brief glimpse of the marathon set list.]
The show started before the curtains opened, Renato stirring up suspense with his patented weird mix of new-age and sci-fi-sounding keyboards, and Prince letting us know he was there with a ‘1–2, 1–2’ before going into the familiar ‘Love Is a Losing Game’. The curtains opened, and there, at long last, as long promised, was the song’s author, Amy Winehouse. Moved by the duet, Prince hammed it up. ‘I got tears, I’m gonna have to put my shades on.’ During a long version of ‘Come Together’, he bit the hand that feeds in his usual manner, making a dismissive remark about Sky News.
[You can hear some of the show on Indigo Nights/Live Sessions, including a long ‘All the Critics Love U in London’, which was a highlight. But most of the tracks he chose for the CD were the least interesting – the Beverley Knight duet instead of the one with Winehouse; two Shelby J covers – making it an unsatisfactory document of his final night. It was a long and unruly show, filled with crowd-pleasing covers of rock dinosaurs (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix); not the best after-show, but a perfect way of saying goodbye to London.]
34
GIGOLOS GET LONELY TOO (PART 3)
As before, Prince’s collaborations through the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s continued to fit into four categories: there were the protégés and side projects into which he put as much effort (sometimes, it seemed, even more) as he did his own work; the older artists he admired and whose careers he wanted to help relaunch (Chaka Khan, Larry Graham, etc.); the band members and associates he rewarded by collaborating with them and putting out
their albums; and the occasional song he would give to established or up-and-coming bands who requested a track.
A handful of tracks he parcelled out to more established female singers, such as Mica Paris (to whom he gave the old Rebels song ‘If I Love U 2Night’), who, rather like Beverley Knight, has continued to act as a cheerleader for Prince, fronting a well-received radio documentary about him in 2003; Paula Abdul (who got another Rebels song ‘U’); Celine Dion (the suitably lachrymose ‘With This Tear’, which, admittedly, she delivered with such enthusiasm that it transcends its clichés); and Patti Labelle, whose ‘I Hear Your Voice’ exists in a demo version with Prince singing. Versions of Prince singing the songs he gave to rapper Louie Louie (‘Get Blue’) and Shalamar singer Howard Hewett (‘Allegiance’) are also in circulation.
The latter seems a surprising choice for Prince to have given away, as the language he uses in this song echoes how he writes about his past in the Crystal Ball sleeve notes, and though Hewett turns it into bland soul, the original version suggests that with a little more work, Prince could have transformed it into a much stronger track than most of the music he released under his own name in the early 1990s.
For El DeBarge (who had previously worked with Clare Fischer), Prince collaborated with Kirk Johnson – who would play an essential role in Prince’s music in the late 1990s – on an undistinguished song called ‘Tip o’ My Tongue’. Prince and Johnson also wrote the similarly forgettable ‘Qualified’ for Nude tour support band Lois Lane (he also allowed them to re-record ‘Sex’), but Joe Cocker got one of Prince’s very best songs, ‘Five Women’, and though his version is nowhere near as good as Prince’s own recording of the song, it’s better than one might imagine, especially given that Prince had no involvement in the arrangement or playing: in a reversal of his usual approach, whether out of respect or lack of interest, he seems to have allowed Cocker to make the song his own.
His collaboration with Martika is more substantial, and seems evidence of a shared outlook. Already an established artist, it was Graffiti Bridge that drew her to Prince (there is a physical similarity between Martika and Ingrid Chavez, and it is easy to see how she could have imagined herself into a new Spirit Child role. The two collaborated on four songs for her second record. ‘Martika’s Kitchen’, the album’s title song, has dated, and though pleasant pop, has a troubling association for any feminist listener. ‘Spirit’ casts Prince as an angel, his presence clear from yet another lyric about playing cards, while ‘Don’t Say U Love Me’ is about an unworthy man who steals Martika’s credit card. But ‘Love … Thy Will Be Done’, a gospel song, is on a whole different level, with an entirely different sound and seriousness to the rest of the record: it became an important part of Prince’s shows in 1995 and he was still performing it in 2012.
Although Prince’s Paisley Park label would release two more records after Carmen Electra’s1 (Mavis Staples’s The Voice and George Clinton’s Hey Man … Smell My Finger), hers was the last album to receive a full promotional push from Warner Brothers, with $2 million spent on the campaign. Prince took Electra on the Diamonds and Pearls tour as opening support, with a huge band including Morris Hayes, who would later go on to play such an important role in the NPG, but dropped her from the show midway through the tour, and her record is among Prince’s least appreciated projects. Prince had been hyping his audience for Electra’s debut for three years, beginning with a pre-concert spoken intro at the Diamonds and Pearls shows in which, speaking of herself in the third person, she boasted that she was the scariest female on the planet, inevitable, addictive and habit-forming (promises eventually repeated on the CD’s inner sleeve), and that ‘to listen to her music on a loud system is to cum a thousand times’. But it would take three years before the record eventually appeared, and it would go through several permutations, with five major tracks being discarded from the running order during the process.2 In Prince: A Thief in the Temple, Brian Morton even suggests there is some kind of cosmic justice in the fact that ‘posterity has effectively “disappeared” Electra’s lame effort’,3 but the same is true of many of Prince’s most significant side projects or collaborations. I’m not suggesting that it’s a lost classic, but whatever Prince’s motivations in recording the album, he spent an enormous amount of time working on it, and it is an important and revealing part of his mid-1990s output, essential listening for anyone interested in the development of Prince’s writing for protégés over the course of his career, and although the frenetic house-influenced style has dated badly, it remains a startling record.
Electra can be seen as a 1990s version of Vanity, although she seems more comfortable with the persona she’s created, currently alternating between promoting aerobic striptease videos and spoofing her ultra-erotic image in films like I Want Candy and the Scary Movie series and TV programmes like House (she even played a character called Darling Nikki in the comedy show Stacked). That the album lacks the charm of the Vanity 6 and Apollonia 6 records is partly because the sexual and pornographic 1990s imagery that Prince played with on this record is somehow less charming than 1980s erotic iconography, the hard-body gym culture (for the most part) less appealing than lethargic lounging in camisoles.
Both the album itself and the out-takes are based around consistent concepts that hold through the whole project, such as the idea that Electra’s rapping is in ‘Carmenese’, a playful idea that isn’t consciously designed to undercut the singer but which nonetheless infantilises her. The completed album begins with a song that Prince wrote the music for, with lyrics credited to Electra and Tony M. But even if he didn’t write the song, it seems likely to have begun from his suggestions about how Electra’s persona might be established, as it fits so neatly with his usual thematic preoccupations. ‘Go Go Dancer’ takes the topic of confinement to an absurd extreme, with Electra singing from the perspective of a caged dancer, making comparisons between her own situation and that of an animal.4 Although it was later rumoured that while playing his Las Vegas residency in 2006–7, Prince would counsel strippers about their career choice, his music had been connected with strip clubs as far back as Vanity 6’s ‘Nasty Girl’, and it was a connection he seemed to encourage in the mid-1990s, giving ‘319’ and ‘Ripopgodezippa’ to the Showgirls soundtrack and having a group of Erotic City dancers at his Glam Slam nightclub in Los Angeles.
As part of the promotional campaign for Electra’s album, copies of ‘Go Go Dancer’, the album’s first single, a kind of ‘9 to 5’ for strippers, were sent to three hundred and sixty-nine strip clubs in America. The song’s video also plays intriguingly on Prince’s preoccupations. Picking up on the song’s intro, which suggests that the lyric may be Electra’s fantasy, it also echoes Sheila E’s ‘Yellow’ in the way it begins with Electra at high school, doing gymnastics and being ostracised from a clique for being different from the other girls. Proving that it wasn’t just the strip-club dollar Prince was after with this project, the maxi-single includes a radio edit and five remixes (including one by Junior Vasquez for his then-at-its-peak nightclub Sound Factory). Alan Leeds remembers that making this record a success was of great importance to Prince. ‘I was really putting effort into the Ingrid Chavez record because we had a few nibbles, particularly in Europe. In Paris and parts of Italy there was real interest in the record. I decided to dedicate myself to exploiting that. And he came in one day and he had been working on the Carmen Electra record, which I couldn’t give a shit about. It wasn’t his best work as a writer and producer. I didn’t see her as a real artist. It was completely about “Can she make a sexy video?” He was convinced that she could and that this would sell records. I didn’t say anything because she was his girlfriend at the time. And he said, “I bet I’ll sell more Carmen Electra records than you will Ingrid Chavez records.” And I’m like, “What, we’re competing now? It’s your label!”’
Although Prince is not credited as having lyrical involvement in ‘Good Judy Girlfriend’ or ‘Go On (Witcha Ba
d Self)’, both tracks bear more than a trace of his fingerprints, not least in the way the chorus of the latter is partially borrowed from ‘Nine Lives’ and the way both songs emphasise the same point: that Electra, like Prince, has a dual personality, although in her case this is also yet another dramatisation of the Madonna/whore battle that Prince has explored many times before in his music for female artists. ‘Step Up to the Mic’ is further evidence against the accepted wisdom that Prince struggled with rap, featuring Electra rapping lines credited to British rapper Monie Love (to whom Prince gave two songs for her second album, In a Word or 2). ‘S.T.’, built around the Ohio Players’ ‘Skin Tight’, is Electra and Tony M swapping lasciviousness and once again insisting on the uniqueness of the 1990s as a decade.