The artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is now known as Prince once more. No formerly about it. But keeping people confused is still, it seems, part of the game. An extrovert and a recluse, a man who embodies the celebrity trait of loving attention but loathing scrutiny, Prince grants audiences rarely and with the greatest reluctance.
Prior to my meeting with him, I was given a list of conditions. I was told that he would not discuss his personal life or anything whatsoever to do with the past. Questions should be confined simply to ‘the music now, and in the future’. Furthermore, he would not allow the conversation to be taped.
At the backstage holding area of the Jacksonville Arena in Jacksonville, Florida, where he is to perform, I am obliged to wait (clipboard scrutiny, excessive mobile-phone action) until an aide arrives with the appropriate passes to grant admittance and ferry me in a golf cart into the arena itself. I am parked in a holding area (soft drinks provided). I am reminded that no tape recorders are allowed.
At length, Prince’s PA, an impassive black man in a business suit, leads me ceremoniously into the corridor and some 20 yards along to another door, swathed in curtains. This is Prince’s dressing room. It is a large room, divided by drapes to create a feeling of intimacy. Two velvet sofas are set at right angles beside a low table, where scented candles provide the only light. I think, I tell his assistant, I might have trouble taking notes. He looks at me. ‘You’ll manage.’
Prince appears a few moments later from behind a curtain, as if stepping on to a stage. He is 5ft 3in, slightly built, and moves with tiny dancer’s steps, as if his black suede highheeled pumps are spring-stacked. He is wearing an immaculately tailored black suit (he shares his tailor with Louis Farrakhan and Michael Jackson) and a black shirt. A white knitted tam rests on the back of his processed hair like a halo. He is 46, yet he looks like a teenager, his face remarkably unlined, his complexion babysmooth, suggestive of expensive unguents. A ghost of a moustache dusts his upper-lip.
‘No tape-recorder, right?’ It’s the very first thing that he says. What is this with the tape recorder? It has been variously explained in the past that Prince can’t stand the sound of his own voice – a terrible affliction, one would think, for a singer – or that he doesn’t want his words set in stone to come back and haunt him. A more likely explanation, offered sotto voce by an aide, is that he was angered after a recorded interview was once circulated without permission on the internet. But it’s hard not to think, too, that Prince relishes this small exercise of power over media which he has always viewed with suspicion and distrust, and recognises the psychological advantage it gives him.
Conversation is tricky enough as it is. There is something curiously coquettish, playful, almost flirtatious, in his manner: the way he evades a question by questioning the assumption behind it
‘Well, that’s what you’re saying…’; the quick-fire stream-of-consciousness, butterflying from one non sequitur to the next; the slightly arch, prissy turns of phrase (‘Come now…’ he admonishes me at one point); the way he keeps addressing me as ‘sir’. ‘And…’ he almost flutters his eyelashes as he smiles, ‘no questions about the past, right?’
‘The audience you have is the audience you always have,’ Prince says. ‘You only get famous once.’ But how to hold on to them is another question. For a period in the 1980s and 1990s, Prince was one of the biggest – perhaps the biggest – and certainly the most provocative pop star in the world. Albums such as Purple Rain, 1999 and Sign O’ the Times melted the boundaries between soul and pop, giving him album sales in excess of 100 million around the world. Yet for the past 10 years he has been a negligible, if not quite forgotten figure. An object of bemusement, even ridicule. TAFKAP? Symbol? Sign? The Artist People Formerly Cared About, as the American ‘shock jock’ Howard Stern took to calling him. But now Prince is Prince again, his apparently dormant career in the midst of an astonishing resurrection – not a word Prince himself, a Jehovah’s Witness, would necessarily approve of.
In February, he made a triumphant appearance at the Grammy awards, performing a duet with Beyoncé that included two of his biggest hits, Purple Rain and Let’s Go Crazy. The following month he was inducted in to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. After years of lacklustre and maddeningly self-indulgent recordings, he has released a new album, Musicology, which has been greeted by critics as a sterling return to form. Having vowed to have nothing more to do with the corporate music business, and having experimented with releasing his records only through the internet, he has signed once again with a major label, Sony. And having vowed never to perform his greatest hits, he has been touring in America doing precisely that, once again staking his claim to be the most exciting live performer in pop music.
‘Really, I’m normal,’ Prince says, laughing softly. ‘A little highly-strung, maybe. But normal. But so much has been written about me and people never know what’s right and what’s wrong. I’d rather let them stay confused.’
The son of a jazz pianist, he grew up in Minneapolis (his parents named him Prince Roger Nelson, after a group, the Prince Rogers Trio, which his father had once played in). His parents separated when he was 10, and when his mother remarried shortly afterwards, Prince followed his father out of the family home. But they argued constantly and he later moved in with a family friend, Bernadette Anderson – like Prince’s parents, a member of the local Seventh Day Adventist church. Despite having six children of her own, Anderson raised Prince as if he were her own son. This childhood would later be mythologised in the ‘autobiographical’ film Purple Rain, released in 1984, depicting the rise of ‘the Kid’, from an abused childhood to pop star glory.
A prodigiously gifted musician, he made his first recordings at the age of 18 with an English producer, Chris Moon, who had relocated to Minneapolis. Promoting him as ‘the new Stevie Wonder’, Moon hawked around demos on which Prince played all the instruments himself, and in 1978 he signed with Warner Brothers and released his first album, For You.
Prince’s early albums – For You, Prince and Controversy – served thrilling notice of his eclectism, and his ability to synthesise a variety of his earliest influences: Stevie Wonder’s virtuosity and melodic strength; Sly and the Family Stone’s harmonious melting pot of colour, gender and styles; and, above all, the irresistible rhythmic impulse of the Godfather of modern black American music, James Brown. (Brown, in his autobiography, writes of a night in 1984 when he was joined on stage by both Prince and Michael Jackson: ‘Prince played some guitar but I think he was a little nervous. Michael fit into my thing a little better since he had been studying me for years. But later on Prince practised and he got into it real good. When I was in California later, he came to a show and lay on the floor backstage and watched my feet. Afterward, he asked me if I had roller-skates on my shoes.’)
It’s the first question I ask him. Could he tell me about James Brown’s influence on his music? He smiles, and shakes his head.
‘I really want to focus on the present.’
You won’t talk about your influences?
‘I don’t really do biographies. I don’t want to talk about the past.’
OK, what did you feel when you first heard James Brown?
‘Whoa!’ He laughs. ‘That’s a whole conversation! We haven’t got time for that conversation’.
Whatever you felt, was that the feeling you wanted your audience to experience when you started playing music?
‘Music is everything to me. I love making music. I am making music. Music is spirit, it’s therapy. It makes me feel a certain way, and if played with conviction and soul, the same thing occurs in other people.’
He pauses. ‘So we’re talking about James Brown after all… You’re slick.’ He laughs. ‘But not that slick.’
By the time he appeared on stage with Brown in 1984, Prince had become a bigger star than his hero. The release of Purple Rain that year affirmed his transition from the R&B (a euphemism for black) charts to the pop mainstream, going on to sell more than 14 million copies around the world; affirmed, too, his ascendancy to the peculiar role as pop music’s high prophet of sexual licence. The sly celebrations of lechery and seduction, the songs about incest and oral sex, had been there from the very beginning, along with the frills and furbelows, the highcamp thigh boots and posing pouches. But now Prince had become sufficiently prominent to excite the disapproval of then Senator Al Gore’s wife, Tipper. Darling Nikki, a track on Purple Rain about masturbation, provoked Tipper Gore to set up the Parents Music Resource Centre (PMRC), to monitor ‘pornographic’ content in rock music and lobby the industry to classify records in the same way as films.
Prince was now presiding over his own studio complex in Minneapolis, Paisley Park, turning out music at a frenetic rate, as well as mentoring and producing other artists such as Sheila E and Apollonia 6. Buoyed by the success of Purple Rain, the movie, he directed two more films, Under the Cherry Moon and Graffiti Bridge. Both were expensive flops. By the early 1990s Prince’s star had begun to wane, his music eclipsed by the inexorable rise of hip-hop and rap.
It was then that reason appeared to abandon him altogether. In 1993 he fell out with Warner Brothers over the ownership of his master recordings, and Warners’ refusal to release what they regarded as sub-standard material. On his 35th birthday, in June 1993, he announced that for as long as Warners retained control of his material, he would no longer answer to the name Prince, and would henceforth be known by an unpronounceable glyph. To emphasise the point, he also began appearing in public with the word ‘slave’ scrawled on his face. ‘This is what my record company has reduced Prince to,’ he announced. ‘So now Prince is dead. They’ve killed him… I don’t own Prince’s music. If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you.’
Prince had never before made an issue of his black heritage, stressing the multiracial basis of his music, and actually misleadingly intimating in the past that he was of mixed race – both his parents were in fact black. But the allusion to racial pride was reinforced when he likened renouncing his old identity to Muhammad Ali rejecting his ‘slave name’ of Cassius Clay.
‘I followed the advice of my spirit. I’m not the son of Nell. I don’t know who that is – “Nell’s son” – and that’s my last name. I would wake up nights thinking, “Who am I? What am I?”’
A lot of people asked the same question. His decision was a cause of some confusion even within his own organisation. A photographer recalled turning up a few days after the announcement for an appointment at Paisley Park, when staff were still grappling with the novel problem of how to address their employer. The usual protocol, the receptionist explained, was to page him. ‘But right now we just wait until we see him in the halls, and we run and grab him.’
Vowing to have nothing more to do with major companies, Prince instead began releasing albums on his own label, NPG (New Power Generation),
and through the internet to members of his NPG Music Club – a practice he continues. But the sublime originality which had characterised his earlier work appeared to have deserted him, and the fans followed. Sales dwindled, and rumours multiplied that the years of profligacy had put his finances in a perilous state.
In light of all this, his decision to work with a major label again, to release an album crammed with songs which consciously play to his most accessible, and commercial, strengths, and to take to the road, performing what amounts to a ‘greatest hits’ package, might, quite reasonably, be seen as a strategy to put himself back in the public eye.
But Prince, of course, does not quite see it this way. To suggest he is coming back into the limelight would mean admitting he had fallen out of it; to suggest he is courting public approval would suggest he had lost it. This is not ‘a comeback’, he stresses, because ‘I’ve never been away.’ Emancipation, the triple album which he released in 1996 to celebrate his release from Warner Brothers, ‘sold oodles’. The Rainbow Children (2001), his record celebrating his conversion to being a Jehovah’s Witness (and his first not to register on the Billboard Top 100), was ‘an important album’, because ‘that was me telling the truth for then. And the same thing with NEWS [a 56-minute instrumental improvisation, released two years ago, which received negligible attention].’ Commercial success, he suggests, has always been a secondary consideration to artistic integrity. ‘You do it because it’s right to do at that time. You don’t do it because you can sell a million. But I wouldn’t have stayed independent if I’d been a failure, I’d have been running back and saying, “Sign me back up, put me back on the plantation, boss.”’ He laughs bitterly. ‘I’ve been projected as this petulant person that knows nothing about business and now I’ve run back to Daddy. But it’s not like that at all.’
Under his new deal, he says, he has no binding contract with Sony. ‘It’s all by mutual agreement.’ He provides the record and retains ownership of the masters; Sony undertake simply to manufacture and distribute it to shops, ‘like FedEx’. Like all his most recent albums, Musicology was first available on download to NPG members; and the album is given away free to everyone who buys a ticket to his concerts. It’s an arrangement which appears to set an interesting precedent at a time when the record industry is grappling with a solution for how best to deal with downloading. For Prince, it is a blow for artistic freedom against ‘the system’ which he says has exploited musicians for years. ‘Musicians inherited this system, so that’s how most musicians work, how we get the music to the people. But it used to be the tradition to have slaves on the plantation. Don’t mean it’s right!
‘I don’t need no producer, I don’t need no record company, no A&R man or anyone telling me what to do. I produce my own records in my own studio. Why do I need someone telling me what to do, and owning what I do?
‘Everything has to go back to God, to peace and to justice. There’s no justice in taking somebody’s intellectual copyrights from them. It’s wrong for them to say they own it. They don’t own it. This word ownership…’ He gestures around him. ‘Who owns this candle? Who owns this telephone? Who owns the air? Nobody owns these things really. And then you think about the human genome. Who owns your DNA? And it’s coming to that. You can be hooked up, slaved up… It will come to that.’
This leap from the personal to the global – his ‘enslavement’ by the record industry as a metaphor for mankind’s enslavement by ‘the system’ – seems characteristic. Talking of Musicology, he describes the album as a celebration of ‘spirit’ in an age of technology. ‘That’s really important for me. We need to keep that intact. If you use a computer, you’re pretty much going to follow that and become a computer.’
You don’t use computers? ‘I do. But I don’t let computers use me. It’s more interesting to me to pick up a guitar and create a sound out of thin air. That’s analogue. We’re analogue creatures; we breathe air, we hear soundwaves, we react to spirit and colour. A computer’s binary.’ He pauses.
‘See, spirit is everywhere around us, but there’s so much to keep you from it – computers, pagers, all that stuff. You ain’t gonna hear me beeping! No cellphones. I don’t use a cellphone.’ He gives a cryptic smile. ‘No sir, ain’t nobody going to reach me.’
Spirit. The Truth. You don’t go far with Prince before God joins the conversation. It is the subject where he becomes his most animated, and at the same time his most obtuse. ‘God draws you out,’ he replies when I ask exactly when and why he became a Witness. ‘You seek him or you don’t. You’ll hear his voice or you won’t. You’ll do what he asks you to do, or you won’t.’
And what does being a Jehovah’s Witness mean to him?
‘Words are inadequate! Now you’re talking about the source of truth!’ He rocks forward, eyes shining, as eager as a student in a Bible class, touching my knee to ensure he has my full attention (I’m head down, scribbling to keep up). ‘Feel me now…’, he says. ‘Feel me now… You want to talk about scripture? We can talk about scripture. But that’s a lifetime right there!’
An important figure in Prince’s conversion was Larry Graham, the former bass player for Sly Stone, one of Prince’s musical heroes, and the leader of his own group Graham Central Station, whom Prince first met in the late 1990s, and who has served as his ‘spiritual mentor’ ever since. Prince had always displayed a strongly moralistic streak in parallel with his image as a sexual libertine – disapproving of drink and drugs and forbidding his band from dabbling in either. But with his conversion to the Witnesses his beliefs became progressively messianic.
Shortly after meeting Graham, Prince changed the name of his song The Cross, to The Christ, in light of the Witnesses’ teaching that Jesus died not on a cross, but on a stake. A planned reunion of his early backing group, the Revolution, was aborted after Prince reportedly demanded that his erstwhile guitarist, Wendy Melvoin, who is Jewish and a lesbian, hold a press conference renouncing her homosexuality and converting to Jehovah. (She refused.)
And there were reports that home-owners in Minneapolis had been surprised to answer the doorbell to find Prince and Graham on the doorstep, offering copies of The Watchtower.
When I ask whether it is true that he fulfils the obligation of proselytising from door to door, he simply looks away, refusing to answer.
As his star rose through the 1980s, Prince was linked to a number of women. He reportedly had affairs with Madonna, Kim Basinger, Sheena Easton and innumerable female proteges. In 1996 he married one of his backing singers and dancers, Mayte Garcia, whom he had first met six years earlier when she was just 16. In the same year, Mayte gave birth to a baby boy, who died at a week old of a rare skull disorder, Pfeiffer’s syndrome. The death was kept secret, and for a while Prince attempted to maintain a charade that all was well. Immediately after the death, he gave an interview in which he was asked about his new baby’s gender. ‘Mayte and I have decided to let the baby make its own decisions. Once it becomes public, its personality will become shaped by all the attention, and that’s too much to wish upon it.’
A month later he shot a promotional video for the song Betcha By Golly Wow in which he was filmed dressed up in medical garb and visiting a smiling and noticeably pregnant Mayte in hospital. At around the same time, as rumours of the child’s death were spreading through the media, he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show, insisting that ‘It’s all good – never mind what you hear’.
This poignant catalogue of events could be read in two ways; as evidence either of a man in the grip of a terrible self-denial, or, more likely perhaps, of Prince’s determination not to let his and his wife’s private grief become an object of public prurience and speculation.
The marriage did not survive. In 1998, Prince began seeing Manuela Testolini, a Canadian, who worked at Paisley Park. His marriage to Mayte was annulled (she moved to a villa which Prince had provided in Marbella), and he married Testolini in 2001. At 27, she is 19 years Prince’s junior. The couple purchased a house in Toronto – on the Bridle Path, an exclusive enclave of estate homes, and where their neighbours include the Conrad Blacks – where Prince now spends most of his time, and where Musicology was recorded.
Prince, of course, will say nothing about any of this. It’s the past; it’s ‘biography’. He doesn’t do either. He will say only that he ‘loves’ living in Toronto. Among his idiosyncracies is a refusal to sign autographs, reportedly because he believes the idolatry that an autograph implies is ‘an offence’ against God (an alternative, and more likely, explanation offered by an aide is that he objects to people profiting from his signatures by selling them on e-Bay). When I mention this he complains that people try to ‘shame me, to make me less than’, because of his refusal. Asking for autographs is ‘just a part of the system that people have inherited. It’s another part of the illusion. I would much rather talk to someone for two or three minutes than sign an autograph for them, but people don’t understand that.’ For years, he says, the media have tried to portray him as crazy, eccentric.
‘But this thing of personality, moving for people to see that, is just another distraction, just another illusion. It’s just another way of preventing people from seeing the truth.
‘The epiphany is where you see God, where you live at the level humanity is. You don’t let money, fame, the illusion rule you.’ He pauses. ‘That’s when you see God; you don’t let money rule you.’
So he won’t sign an autograph for my daughter? He looks at me. ‘No, sir. I won’t. But I will give you something for your daughter.’ He pauses. ‘Later.’ (Nothing materialises.)
His religious beliefs have had a more subtle effect on his music. If on one level, Musicology is good-time party music, crammed with the kind of snappy dance tunes and melodically winning love songs Prince used to write, darker currents seem to eddy below the surface.
Call My Name, ostensibly a love song, contains references to the war in Iraq and government surveillance. Cinnamon Girl, a deceptively innocent pop song, is in fact about the climate of fear and xenophobia following 9/11 and the ‘mass illusion’ of the ‘war-on-terror alibi’. Prince describes the song as ‘a snapshot of now. We live in a real xenophobic place.’ He sighs. ‘They talk about all these terrorists. But I didn’t feel no terror until the media told me to feel it. Who am I supposed to be feeling terrified of?’
As a Jehovah’s Witness, does he believe in the Fundamentalist concept of apocalypse – ‘end time’? ‘You calling it that now. I’m not calling it that. You see, sir, you have to be careful what you say. I go back to the Word, what is written, because that’s where the truth is.’
He pauses. Look at what’s happening now in Iraq, he says; soldiers are murdering children. ‘You have to feel the pain of those children. But some people, they can kill because they’ve been programmed to do that. But you’re talking about a metaphysical event. The earth is going through its phase, but it’s all in the Scripture. But the Scripture also talks about that place when it’s all over. That’s the place I want to be.’
The erstwhile prophet of sexual freedom has all but purged his music of sexual references, and no longer performs his more explicit songs onstage. But those, he says, were ‘different times, and I was different then. I pushed the envelope as far as it needed to be pushed, and now it’s on the floor and people seem to want it to stay there. I think people want order again. They don’t want to turn on a football game and see someone with her breasts falling out. And I don’t want to see that either.’
And does he want order, too? ‘Yes. I believe in order. What am I feeling now? Have I got peace? Yes. I’ve never felt this peaceful before. Can I be more peaceful? Maybe not. But I can make a song for this peaceful place? Yes sir. Call My Name [a sweet ballad from the new album] – that’s a song about peace.’ He leans forward on the sofa and half-talks, half-croons the lyrics. ‘I can’t stop writing songs about you, I love you so much. You see, you’re trying to speak the truth in a song like that.’
It sounds, I say, like a love song to your wife Manuela. He smiles. ‘Is it about love, or is it about the Creator? It could be both. I don’t like to talk about my songs. Let people make up their own minds. I can’t stop telling people about you…’ He sings it softly. ‘You see how lovely that is?’
So, I say, you are no longer a hedonist? He arches an eyebrow and smiles. ‘Hedonist? For years, I didn’t even know what the word meant.’ And now you’re satiated?
‘Satiated…’ He lingers on it. ‘That’s a lovely word. I was satiated a long time ago.’
Watching Prince perform later that evening I am reminded of the immortal words of Little Richard, another flamboyantly hellbound rock’n’roller – and in many ways Prince’s spiritual avatar – who found God and became a minister, the Reverend Richard Penniman. ‘The god of Abraham is a true God. Now we gonna do Rip It Up...’
Whatever travails, eccentricities or divine revelations have belaid him in recent years, Prince remains an utterly thrilling performer. The extravagant stage-sets, the inflatables, pyrotechnics and writhing go-go girls that characterised his performances early in his career have gone. Instead, this is Prince in the raw; the spine-jarring funk jams, the Hendrix-style guitar pyrotechnics, the gospel style, drop-to-one-knee theatrics – that moment in a song when it feels like a trapdoor is opening and your heart is falling through it. Hit after hit – one of the finest bodies of soul and pop songs of the last 30 years.
You can take Prince away from the devil, it seems: but you can’t take the devil out of Prince. When he sings a song from his new album, On the Couch – a man’s plea to his lover not to be shut out of the bedroom, and croons the line I wanna go down south… there is a deafening squeal, and you can smell the pheromones flooding the auditorium. He stops the music, and gives a wicked smile.
‘What? I mean down south to Jacksonville…’
Beside me, a woman groans involuntarily. ‘He is sex...’
So, not confusing at all, then.