Dickens and Prince by Nick Hornby

Author:Nick Hornby [Hornby, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

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He was, it goes without saying, making several different albums at the same time in 1986, when he was recording all those songs on the Sign o’ the Times boxed set. One of them was for a female alter ego he called Camille, whose androgynous voice was created by changing the pitch on his vocals—the song “If I Was Your Girlfriend” on the original album is perhaps the most notable demonstration of his intention. There was another album called Dream Factory, which, like the Camille album, became folded into the triple album Crystal Ball, which became the original double album Sign o’ the Times. The triple album Crystal Ball, by the way, is not the same as the triple album also entitled Crystal Ball, which came out in 1998 and which comes after the triple album Emancipation in his discography. That’s an awful lot of music. The sixteen tracks on the original album don’t really cohere into a unified whole, but that’s the glory of it; even now it’s possible to come across a great song that you’ve forgotten about because it somehow doesn’t seem to belong. And that way, Prince is given permission to display the full range of his talents. Sign o’ the Times isn’t a funk-jam album, or a robotic electro-pop album, or a Jehovah’s Witness album (there was one of those). It was all of these things and more. For me, Sign o’ the Times is right up there with the great double albums, with Blonde on Blonde, Exile on Main St., Songs in the Key of Life, and London Calling, and is probably the only one of even that august group that I would happily listen to from beginning to end right now. It was, after 1999, his second great double album in five years.

Prince was twenty-eight when he was recording Sign o’ the Times. Dickens was working every bit as hard at the same age, but not because he was on fire, like Prince. On the contrary, he was worried that the embers of his creativity were cooling too fast. He had written three big novels and a couple of plays, and was the editor of a monthly magazine. He had a young family and was living beyond his means, and as a result he had gotten into a mess by promising different publishers work he couldn’t possibly deliver. In 1840, says Claire Tomalin, “he intended to enjoy himself in a more leisurely way by editing Master Humphrey’s Clock, the small miscellaneous weekly magazine.” It would be filled by his literary friends, and, he hoped, would pay him £5,000 a year while he recuperated. But after a promising start, sales of Master Humphrey crashed, and as far as he could see, the only way out was to turn a short story he had written into another full-length serial—which meant he had to improvise week to week a novel he had not even thought of in January. I’m sure it would come as

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