Prince (1958-2016)

Purple Reign

I remember distinctly the moment somebody raised my awareness of Prince on the schoolyard. It was a garrulous girl by the name of Gracie who couldn't contain her excitement about anything new romantic and oddly attired. Her hit-list of wow artist included (and not exclusive to) such bands as Culture Club, Duran Duran, Adam Ant, Howard Jones, and ABC ('The Look of Love' people not the Australian Broadcast Corporation). Men with makeup were big with Gracie, and clothes with frills were just top shelf for entertainment value. Anyway, Gracie marched up to us on the slope where we used to sit during lunchtime to regale her new obsession, Prince, with the album '1999'. That was way back in the early 1980s when the year 1999 looked like a long way off in the future.

And like the idiot I was I dismissed it because I was into other things. Which is the way things go when you're a teen. That being said...



...Throughout the 1980s I kept glomming on to the music of Prince, like it was some subliminal message. Some albums left more of an impression than others. 'Purple Rain' and 'Sign o' the Times'
stood out as works of a comprehensive artiste with a full vision of what he wanted put together. other times it was covers done by other artists like Tom Jones with Art of Noise doing 'Kiss' or Sinead O'Connor's transcendent 'Nothing Compares 2 U'. His music was infectious and unabashedly commercial.

Strangely enough the album that I thrashed to death was 'Emancipation', the big album he released after he got out of his contract with Warners. The evident sense of release and resentment about the big label reminded me of Frank Zappa's big battle with Warners which culminated in 'Lather'



As a guitar player, he had an extraordinary facility to swap between styles, and his band was legendary in its tightness and adroitness. While the extraordinary couture was hard to get one's head around, there was no doubting the virtuosity and command of his playing, and in the end that was always the opening I had to get into his music.

He was a singular prodigy who rivalled Michael Jackson in cultural influence. During the 1990s when I was in and out of the odd studio in Sydney, there wasn't an audio engineer who didn't carry around a Prince album as their reference disc. During the 2000s and with the advent of YouTube, it became impossible to miss the broad talents of the man.


I don't know what it is about this year. David Bowie, Keith Emerson and now Prince is just too much dying than I want to handle. It's like the rock apocalypse is going on in front of our eyes.
Vale Prince Rogers Nelson, 57 is way too young.