Publication: Melody Maker [UK]
Date: June 27, 1987
Section:
Page Number(s):
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Title: "Peach In Our Times"
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"Where y'all goin' ?"

Fifty thousand people. Silence

"Well...you ain't all goin' nowhere till we kicked yo ass!"

The last time I spoke to Prince, he told me: "I'm gonna stop this soon. I don't expect to make many more records for the simple reason that I wanna see my life change." That was in June 1981 and it was quite conceivably the last lie he ever told.

Prince is about 100 feet above the stage at Palais Omnisport De Bercy, Paris - an indoor multi-purpose venue shaped, on the outside, like a star-shaped lab from "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" which has surfaced through a lawn. Inside it resembles Wembley Empire Pool. He isn't flying though, as Jim Shelley noticed, his feet have sprouted invisible wings. In fact, he's snogging on a balcony above blazing neon signs advertising "Girls" and "Fun" and "Funk Corner". Prince is in his fantasy township, lording over an imaginary hot LA dusk skyline. It's "West Side Story" eternalised. The girl in his grasp is making all the major moves because, as we all know by now, Prince likes to be the conquering victim, likes to take it slow and tender and passive as a saint. Doubtless he bruises like a peach.

We are nearing the end of "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man", a song that casually deals with the kind of traumatic but true-life sexual encounter that other people are too embarrased or blinkerd by cliche to attempt to sing about. The girl is agoddess, dusky and statuesque, and she's all over his yielding body when the "Sign O' the Times" heart suddenly erects behind them. She pushes him back against it and it slowly reclines, the pair of them groping on the centre piece from a silken honeymoon suite. Sheer camp. Sheer sex. Sheer showmanship. The ultimate in exhibitionism - caught in flagrante, having it off in public without the merest hint of coarseness. Anyone else and it would have been smut, sordid, silly. But for Prince, uniquely, sex and love are synonymous, the spiritual and the carnal are one. Anyone else and it would have been embarrasing, watching Prince it's beautiful.

We now live in the age of post-ecstatic Prince criticism; the sort of situation which, traditionally, is riding for a fall. We're in the era of "We already know words are not enough but..." We're already reading "It's been said before but..." We're already floundering in the beyond. I'm not about to spil the party. I'm not about to drag it back to earth. Prince is the best thing I've ever seen; quite possibly the best thing I'll EVER see. Don't let the musicologists tell you different.

Prince at Bercy was Jimi Hendrix, Fred Astaire, Sly Stone, Charlie Chaplin and, yes, even the man in the moon. This you already know from his Revolution shows at Wembley last year. But Prince was more though his band were less. Prince was both the Ritz Brothers, sliding down balustrades in impossible splits, rising on his ankles with elegance beyond ease. Prince kept his shirt on more than last year abd STILL Prince was a tease.

His band are Madhouse - a jazz-funk-rock regiment as disciplined and supple and subtle and strong as you'll ever hear minus the glamour of the Revolution. They do improbably complex things and sound simple, they are big and capable of sounding tiny, they are flash and capable of sounding humble, they can turn you inside out and back again BUT the brilliant saxophonist has a ginger beard and the FULL version of "Kiss" is pregnant where it should run naked and skittish. They're more suited to the final score "It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night", the live jam Prince included on the "Sign O' The Times" LP, a real parping funk stonker where the big rolling riff pleads for chants and spurts of virtuosity to spread itself, gorged on audience participation, until it rolls of fat wobble, satiated, into its final bloated crescendo. Still and all, Prince is the glammest, smatrest being alive, if he's in love with horns, what do a few musos matter?

the last time I cried at a concert was when Prince played "Do Me Baby" at Wembley. He didn't play it in Bercy. Bastard! I cried all the same. It was "Purple Rain" that got me. Yes, I know...it's melodramatic, OTT, you're SUPPOSED to cry during "Purple Rain"...Oh, I know all that all right but perched precariously, standing on a death-trap folding seat about 80 rows from heaven with bruises emerging from a couple of earlier involuntary backflips into the lap of an unfortunate Parisian B-boy, the precisely epic guitar, so lonesome after all the intricate brass monkey-business, cleaved its way into my emotions and that angelic howl had me sobbing.

I suppose the job calls for some analysis, I suppose it's expected of me. Very well - two things. Firstly, only pain and genius make me cry. Genius? Witnessing somebody doing something RIGHT THERE AND THEN, something, whether rehearsed or not, that brings multitudes into the vicinity of orgasm. Something you or I could NEVER EVER aspire to do, NEVER EVER do. Something so human it's superhuman. Something so right. Something you can't be taught, something surpassing understanding, something instinctive, something on the spur of the moment that only an ABBERATION of instinct could achieve, an image you live with till you die... Denis Law scoring a goal, Pele shooting from the half-way line, the way Steve Martin wears rabbit ears, Prince...ah Prince...ah...the pirouette, the mac peeled off, the pout, the slide through the goddess' legs, the skirt in his hand at the end of it...

Secondly, Prince appreciates, more than any other artist working in his field, the way drama works. He intuitively understands ripeness and nakedness, the rush and the relief. he undrestands that showbiz is an elaboration of real life and, as such is a fraud that can only cut if it is either blown beyond hilarity into extravaganza or reduced to flesh and impulse. The "Sign O' The Times" tour boasts plenty of both.

Though he appears inexplicably tired of "Little Red Corvette" - perhaps because it adapts the falses, most tired metaphor of any of his songs - "1999" is still central to the set, typical of his talent for teetering on the stilettos of overkill. Such a rich song, you can peel its dimensions like a perfumed onion - party down, politics, sex, responsibility, abandon...all human life is here AND the power of protest, the insistence all human life will be here hereafter. It's THICK with meaning, it's treacle and balm.

In deliberate contrast, here's "The Cross". The first encore, Prince back onstage alone with an acoustic...the power of nudity, of naked sense, of pure belief. Okay, it's not all THAT simple. Has any other coloured artist ever mastered the dry detachment of The Velvet Underground, the kind of detachment that makes you feel such harrowing distance is bred of TOO MUCH involvement, so much passion it will kill without the precisioned discipline of song eflecting the ecstatic pain into something shared, something gospel. I'm here to testify "The Cross" was naked fit to burst, the crowd singing the key words unbidden until the caustic electric rauch elicited such a scream from Prince that the idol turned into evangelist, and a chill heightened the celebration. Sex was never more cerebral than this, religion never more sensual!

The last time I fantasised about Prince, it went something like this: I close my eyes, sink into the pillow and instantly a flash of light strobes my eyelids into glowing, red-veined globes. I start up and make the window just in time to see the explosion on the far side of the hill. I'm down stairs, out through the door, up the wooded slope and into the everglades. Behind me I hear sirens and shouts and dogs, I turn and see torch light.

Take the crater before the mob. It's steaming. There's some sort of metallic object in there, a space ship or something. I peer real hard through the steam and catch sight of a figure on the far side of the crater. He's side-on to me but he rolls his eyeballs in my direction, pouts, shrugs, smiles and says "I love you too". Then he's gone.

Years later, I connive my way through the security at a huge hotel Prince is staying at. I knock on his door and am ushered into his presence. I look at him and he says nothing. I'm about to stammer something about his new album when I find myself expounding this Jeff-Bridges-in-"Starman" theory wherein Prince is so extaordinary because he's SUPER_ordinary, because he has no sense of embarrassment, no sense of complication. Emotion, sex, love, religion - they're all logical to him, all one, all smooth and complete. I find myself telling him it's as if he's assimilated all the human characteristics without all the human hang-up. I find myself telling him it's as if...as he's an alien, as if he's ET when he rolls his eyeballs in my direction, pouts, shrugs, smiles and says "I love you too"...

The last time I spoke to Roman Polanski, he said something in French. I said "D'you what?" and he said "How the hell d'you get in here?" Me and Roman, we're creamed into a sidewalk between a huge blue coach and a wet brick wall with 150 other people. It's 12.30 am and pouring with rain. We're at 12 Rue des Petits Ecuries, outside New Morning, a scruffy jazz club about the size of the basement at the Hope And Anchor (RIP). We've been told Prince is going to play inside - one of his infamous post gig workouts, tonight for charity.

"How the hell d'you get in here?"

"Round here...round the aide...follow me."

Sheehan recognises a security guard from the earlier gig at Bercy and we're in, frisked and 10 yards from a low stage upon which several roadies are scurrying about. We watch the soundcheck for an hour. Then another half hour. Then Madhouse appear - sax, bass, drum and keyboards - an hour of intricate instrumental jiggery pokery, solos aplenty, falling to knees, that sort of thing. The small crowd is appreciative but anxious - will he appear?

Madhouse retire to polite applause. It's 3am and I've fallen asleep on my feet twice. More fiddling with microphones and the like...and...there he is, in a mac, strutting on. He stands side-on, rolls his eyeballs in our direction, pouts, shrugs, smiles and says..."I love you too".

A FEW FACTS about Prince in Paris on June 14/15, 1987: Sheila Easton was nowhere to be seen although Sheila E played a spirited drum solo at Omnisport De Bercy. The Sun were invited to New Morning but couldn't find the gig. Prince did not strip. Jonathan Ross was not there but Steve Lillywhite was. A small bottle of heineken cost a fiver. Prince played for 90 minutes.

The last truly great record I received, apart from The Cure's "Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me", was "Sign O' The Times". Both are double albums, both treat moods as colours on a pallet to be mixed and messed with. Both have a wicked sense of fun, a generous, brave over-stretching, a wilful, sketchy sense of underachievement, a promise. There is something glorious in incompletion, a hint that life's like that, that error and room for polish are the essence of existence. hence, maybe, Prince's predeliction for post-gig jams, where the choreography of the rehearsed can give way to informality.

At New Morning, within three minutes, Prince had dine everything with a guitar worth doing in the whole history of pop. Yeah, he did it just to show off, just because he could, just to make us realise there is a BEYOND. Pressed for a description, I guess he played blues but it was too playful for that, too exhibitionist, too searching, too PLEASURED as if he only comes truly to life when he's making love to and in front of an audience.

He played The Temptations "Just My Imagination" and if I'd been wearing mascara, I'd have looked like a panda. He tricked out the intro high, triple echo, like his fingers were charting a course down rivulets of pure sensation. He sang it falsetto, like he sings "Adore", beyond soul, beyond parody, sweet...so sweet...and when the audience joined in, enraptured, he clutched his custom-built peach guitar and waltzed it like a lover. At that moment two things occured to me - there couldn't be a sentient being on earth who wouldn't be MADLY jealous of that guitar and this was a memory I'd carry with me to my grave.

Was it just Prince, was it his presence, was it my imagination running away with me or, at the end of the Bercy show, when the lights went down in the shanty town and the orgy of purity was over, didn't thedry ice or smoke or whatever it was assume the form of a great nuclear fog rolling out over the audience? Wasn't it starkly bloody FINAL? And when "Sign O' The Times" on tape heralded the lights up just as it heralded lights down two hours earlier when Prince had opened the show to that very backing, didn't it suggest some hope, some faith, some belief that together we might... Prince does that to you, gets your symbolism working overtime.

Abiding impressions - Prince's hub-cap sized Ban-The-Bomb earring made trivial of The Beastie Boys' VW ensignia. Madhouse didn't touch a drop all night - in fact they looked kinda terrified. At one point in New Morning, Prince is on the Hammond when he hits a groove, conquers it with one hand, and motions across stage. The saxophonist points at himself - "Uh, what, me?" - Prince shakes his head and motions to the pianist. he scuttles over, Prince teaches him the riff, leaves him to it and takes over on piano. Plenty of play but no doubt who's the boss - the only man in the world who looks cool in flares.

The last time I spoke to Prince, he told me "I just wanna live...until it's time to die". Enigmatic or what?

At 4.15am, Prince unravels "Sex Machine", putting this most basic and incisive of riffs through absurdly OTHER paces. It lasts 20 minutes, then he bows and he's gone, back behind those guards and doors. To what? Black silk sheets? White rooms slick with the scent of hyacinths? I'm drained and brimming and I think I realise what it's like to come face to face with God.

I trust I'll meet him again at Wembley.