REVIEW: Prince
- Posted on October 15, 2007 10:05 AM
- 0 comments
Prince
O2 Arena
12th September 2007
I am distracted. There’s a must win game in progress on the other side of the city and some red faced buffoon has decided that the answer to England’s woes is Emile Heskey. The footballing ambitions of the nation hang by a thread. As I watch the white shirted crowds heading for Wembley I can’t shrug off the feeling that I’m going in the wrong direction.
I am headed in the other direction but I’m not going the wrong way. For the bargain price of £31.21 I’m about to see one of the World’s most famous and accomplished artists. I watched Prince on the Lovesexy tour at the end of the eighties, the fruits of a week’s manual labour in the hot Summer sun. It still remains the best gig of my life, eclipsing more personal epiphanies and apotheoses like seeing The Cure or Julian Cope. So why am I so uncomfortable?
Maybe it’s because the prolific output from his purpleness has been so variable down the years. You can’t argue with the quantity, and there have been enough scintillating moments to fill several careers, it’s just that when he fails – Graffiti Bridge, for example – his own showmanship and pomposity is unbearable. In an interesting synchronicity with those watching the team about to walk onto the field twenty miles away, we just don’t know what brand of talent, potential and genius is going to show up tonight. Rampant egomaniac? Born again religious nutcase? Bob George or ‘The Kid’?
Considering that this is a man who has had at least five names, one of which it is only possible to approximate verbally, the question has often been posed – who is Prince? The answer, it seems, is the guy we are going to watch tonight. He is sombrely dressed, the set is remarkably free of cars and white grand pianos. The guitars are, tellingly, simple Fenders. The women-as-objects are underplayed, even though his well established sexism, never quite misogyny in the real sense, seems fairly tame and old fashioned these days. It is perhaps the most stripped down gig since he really did ride to the clubs in Minneapolis on his bike. The music benefits from this approach, it all seems so easy and familiar, like an old friend coming home, albeit an edgy mischievous friend with a penchant for trouble.
He remains the definition of over the top. He still arrives at the stage in a box and enters via a trap door lift like the demon king in a ghastly pantomime. His intro tape is his Hall of Fame tribute film and that really is rampant narcissism. The vital difference, on this occasion at least, is that his absolute superiority in all things funky is ably demonstrated by the set. He plays the hits, he plays hits other people had with his songs, he plays ‘The Best of You’ by the Foo Fighters to prove he can play anything and then bounces through some Disco standards to prove that nothing before or since can hold a candle to him. When I check my phone and discover that an Emile Heskey ‘inspired’ England have buried Russia three nothing, I am not surprised. Special things have happened. How this has happened every night for several months without some kind of seismic shift in the mood of the capital is, however, beyond me.
The dénouement made even this cynical old hack choke. It was probably for show, probably planned with meticulous attention to detail and enabled by an audience that knew it was coming but when the lights went up and the roadies turned off the amps, nobody would leave. All the thirty / forty somethings stood there and screamed like teenagers waiting for EMF to come back on and play ‘Unbelievable’. Therefore Prince got back in his box and was wheeled back to the stage. He played, houselights on, stage lights off, for another ten minutes, dressed in a sweatshirt and with a towel on his head. Even then it was a piano medley of four truly classic tracks tossed in seemingly at random, each one good enough for most wanabees to build a career on.
As a writer it is not done to be speechless, but in this case, that is all that needs to be said.
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