Introduction
In February 2008, together with my friend J.M. Dubis, I began in earnest with re-researching all Prince tour dates of the past for a prospected updated edition of UPTOWN's The Vault. For a starting point I used the dates as we listed them in the 2004 edition of The Vault, since (like many of you) I considered them as correct as they could possible be. However, before long I found all sorts of easily verifiable flaws in that otherwise very impressive list that was originally compiled by Per Nilsen and over the years embellished with help of others. In fact all lists that are found on the internet when I started seemed to be (more or less) verbatim copies of UPTOWN's lists, with little or no changes or updates made.
The listing as we present it here is the most accurate and thoroughly researched matter of Prince concert history outside the walls of Paisley Park. A history of Prince tours in a more correct and more complete form than ever available before.
The original plan on building this Tour History page out to something bigger, with clickable links for all dates under which stuff like set lists, accurate attendance figures, support acts et cetera can be listed is now abandoned. For these statistic I would like to refer to PrinceVault.com another site I am heavily involved in and uses the same set of dates i originally found and confirmed for this project here.
The list here will however be kept up to date as well.
The concerts are presented grouped by tour. This means all 'one-off' shows, award show performances, guest appearances and television-recordings are shown in a separate listing.
Research results
The flaws that were initially found were mostly (slightly) incorrect or missing venue names, but upon closer studying the 'old' list, it became apparent that some shows seemed to be sequenced in an odd, illogical way. After I engaged J.M. Dubis in the project we set out to attempt to confirm each and every date from those The Vault listings by either contacting the venue, or finding concert ads, announcements and reviews in newspapers. Numerous possible eyewitnesses were also contacted and were helpful in supplying us with their ticket stubs. Existing audio recordings of shows were not used as a source in general, because they do not provide any 'uncontaminated' details on exact dates and venues.
Not only did we find missing info on dates and venues, but also new as yet 'unknown' shows, for the tours before 1984. Furthermore we were able to cross a handful of dates off the listings as we found they were previously listed in error.
The Controversy Tour is of special note. In previously circulating listings it had many shows not pinpointed to an exact date or with missing venue information. It is now almost completely overhauled with only very few unknown details left.
Another interesting find concerns the 1999 Tour. In all our research we found absolutely no reference whatsoever in any official, semi-official or even unofficial outing from 1982/1983 that attributed the name 'Triple Threat (or Triple Treat) Tour to the 1999 Tour. So even when a lot of people got accustomed to referring to it under that name, it will not be used here, because it seems it was never that tour's name.
Put aside all the new info we were able to confirm, the list is still a work in progress. The project is not finished and we're still looking for additional info. We do suspect some shows are still missing, mostly on the Dirty Mind and Controversy tours. There's also a slight chance some shows are still listed in error. Should any new details become available the list will be updated accordingly ASAP.
Reporting omissions
Obviously we welcome your comments. If you have been to a show that is not listed here please do notify us by emailing me, so we can further investigate.
Thanks for reading.