Prince: Purple Reign by Mick Wall

Author:Mick Wall [Wall, Mick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409169239
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-27T23:00:00+00:00

7

Pop Life

After the final show of the Purple Rain tour, at Miami’s Orange Bowl – renamed for the night the Purple Bowl – in April 1985, Prince announced what he described as his ‘retirement from live performance’. He was going off to ‘find the ladder’, he announced. By now not much Prince did in public surprised his fans. But this came as a shock. No more shows from the world’s greatest showman? And what was this ‘ladder’ he spoke of? Jacob’s ladder? A ladder in Sheila E’s stockings? What?

All would be revealed in good – or bad – time: whatever came first. Prince was now thinking of other things. Not least, his next album. It had to be more than just another album, though, he decided. It had to be a musical and artistic statement entirely separate to the one he’d just made with Purple Rain.

Had Prince been just like the others – and that includes Madonna, Springsteen and Michael Jackson – his follow-up to Purple Rain would have been exactly that. A follow-up. Along with the movie sequel: Purple Rain II.

Instead, because he was Prince and he could do whatever he liked, damn the torpedoes, he went in a completely unexpected direction. And he did it fast. The next Prince album, an illicit confection of pop psychedelia, feathered funk and deeply soulful, jazzy ballads titled Around the World in a Day, was released just ten months after Purple Rain. Compared to Madonna, who took two years to release her follow-up to Like a Virgin, or Springsteen, who took three years to follow Born In The USA, or the ubiquitous Michael Jackson, who took five years to build a plausible sequel to Thriller, Prince was moving at light speed.

The critics couldn’t keep up, huffing and puffing as they tried to understand why Prince had strayed so far from the Purple Rain template. ‘Prince’s musical fusions smack more of a dead-end desperation than convincing experiment with form,’ sneered the NME. ‘Let’s not take Prince’s psychedelic trappings too seriously,’ urged Rolling Stone. Only the New York Times got it in one, describing Around the World in a Day as ‘ambitious, complex and stylistically diverse but at the same time a unified whole – a “concept album” in the tradition of such 60s classics as the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’

Indeed, the two albums had much in common, not least their Pop Art covers, though Prince’s childlike drawing was perhaps more redolent of Yellow Submarine. The music though was all swirling incense and one-with-the-universe pop mysticism, and no less refreshing for that at a time, the mid-Eighties, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were leading the world into a tightly Filofaxed money-driven monoculture that didn’t have time to stop and smell the roses.

There were other comparisons with The Beatles of the mid-Sixties. Having announced at the start of 1985 that he was ‘retiring’ from live performance in order to go in search of ‘the ladder’, just as The Beatles had ‘retired’

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