So many hits, so little time
“he’s a beautiful human being,” said shelby j, a singer from North Carolina. “He’s caring and generous and he doesn’t hesitate to impart his wisdom. He’s one of the most amazing musicians who ever lived but he’s also one of the cats. Working with him is the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me in my life. He’s the general and we’re the true funk soldiers.”
“He’s like a conductor,” said Greg Boyer, trombone. “You keep one eye on him at all times and take your lead from him. It’s like a language, a physical and musical language. You have to keep up. Ever watch a cheetah taking down a gazelle? The other cheetahs better be right there, or they don’t eat.”
“Spending time with him,” said Renato Neto, keyboards, “is as normal as hanging with one of my homeboys. He works hard. But he can also be class clown. The perception from the outside and how things really are, it’s like night and day. He has a blue-collar mindset: wake up, put on the hard hat, go to work.”
“I don’t talk about Prince,” said Maceo Parker, saxophone. “I talk about Maceo Parker.”
“So many hits, so little time,” said Prince, rising from a piano stool and spinning on a Cuban heel.
In the summer of 2007, I was asked if I would like to talk to Prince. He was coming to London to play an unprecedented 21-night residency at The O2 Arena, and he would grant one journalist an interview during his time in the city. I did not have to consult my diary before accepting the assignment.
I didn’t go to all 21 shows. I went only when summoned, which I think I was seven or eight times. I also went to a number of Prince’s famous after-show jams, staggering displays of virtuosity that went on way into the early hours. Night after night, I waited backstage for the call to the royal dressing room. Night after night, it did not come.
I passed the hours talking to members of Prince’s band, his dancers, his management team, his associates, the promoters, the security guys. When I wasn’t badgering members of the New Power Generation for quotes, I was allowed to roam the auditorium, touting my access-mostareas pass. On two extraordinary occasions, I was permitted to watch the show from beneath the stage, with the guitar techs, my head at times just inches from Prince’s dancing boots, or from his hands as he reached down to swap an acoustic for an electric. I’d seen his astonishing live shows before, but this was something else: a close-up glimpse of perhaps pop’s greatest ever showman
at work, his sweat coming at me like sea spray. (Yes, euww! But also, whoa!) Privately I was having a blast, but I didn’t have much to show for it, work-wise. My editor was getting antsy. Where was the interview?
On one occasion I witnessed Prince, head to toe in white, nonchalantly helping himself to crudités in the backstage catering area, but as I scuttled in his direction to introduce myself a panicked PR held me back. “Not now,” she hissed, grasping my shoulder. Another time, in the early hours at a club in east London, I was close enough to touch him when he made an unexpected appearance at a swanky film party. Again, I was prevented from talking to him, this time by a velvet rope and the attentions of a mountainous bodyguard.
I went to the last night of the 21, assured that this time Prince would grant me my audience. I was told he had personally requested my presence and knew all about the time I’d spent waiting. Prince was keen to talk.
I had reams of questions prepared, questions that would sweep away the shroud of secrecy surrounding the legendary enigma. I carried notebooks on which I would jot impressions of searing insight, and pens and pencils with which to jot them. My Dictaphone was in my pocket. There was another Dictaphone in my bag, in case the first Dictaphone failed. I had many backup tapes and multiple spare batteries, should the notoriously private entertainer be moved by a spirit of personal revelation, and request yet more time in my presence, mano a mano, to unburden himself still further.
No, that’s right: the interview didn’t happen. After raising the roof for a final time, Prince vanished — from the building, from London, from my life. I considered opening a pop-up branch of Rymans in the O2 foyer, knocking out unused office supplies.
I wrote all this up at the time, for a Sunday newspaper, the “inside story” of Prince’s 21 nights in London — minus Prince quotes. In 2016, when Prince suddenly and shockingly died, aged 57, I wrote it up again for Esquire’s website. I added a coda: in the summer of 2009, almost two years after the O2 shows, I was having lunch in the south of France with my girlfriend and a group of friends, when my phone rang. An American voice: Maureen, a talent agent, from Los Angeles. Prince, she announced, was ready for his interview.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that?”
Prince, she repeated — yes, the pop star — was ready for me to interview him.
“What, now?”
Now.
Thing is, Prince was at home in Minneapolis. I was in rural Provence. Maureen seemed unsympathetic. I said I would fly to Minneapolis as soon as I could but I would have to go via London. Must it be right now? Couldn’t he wait a day or two? She said she would call me back. I called my office, started making travel plans, and begged forgiveness from my girlfriend, who was pregnant at the time, for preparing to bail on our summer holiday. Then I sat by the phone, by the pool, and waited. Nothing. I left Maureen a message. Should I book a flight to Minneapolis? Still nothing. I called again the following day. Silence. I never heard from Maureen again, and I never met Prince. I’d hesitated, and missed my slot.
Curiously, not to mention uncharacteristically, I couldn’t find it within me to feel resentful. Prince had given me, and many millions more, too much joy, over the years, for me to be angry with him. He had invited me to watch him play, repeatedly, allowed me access to his people, and then mysteriously evaporated, later reappearing as a shimmering apparition, only to vaporise again. Isn’t that what bonkers pop geniuses are supposed to do? Isn’t that the point of them?
This issue, we mark the fifth anniversary of the death of this most extraordinary of musicians with a celebration of his life, and a consideration of his legacy, written by someone who succeeded where I failed. Alexis Petridis is the Guardian’s head rock and pop critic and a longtime contributor to Esquire, and he was the last British journalist to interview Prince, at Paisley Park, in 2015.
Alexis’s tribute to Prince demonstrates why, for my money and many other people’s, he is the finest music writer currently working, and has been for some time. Deep knowledge as lightly worn as a purple bandanna (a look I would love to see on Alexis!), undimmable enthusiasm, clinical insight and a total command of his material. And funny. Like the rest of us, Alexis is dazzled, baffled, amused and amazed by Prince. Most of all, he is incredulous at the abundance of Prince’s gifts and the strange unknowability of the man, the missing element from the biographies: “the hole at the centre where Prince should be”. In a shopworn phrase, especially on these pages, Alexis’s piece has style and substance. That’s what we look for in our writers, and our pop stars.
○