A PhD in Purple Rain
IT was spring 1987. I was at law school. Aman, my travel agent cousin, had been sending me up and down to London working on his new coach service. As in all good Punjabi families, I wasn’t paid. But what price could you put on having a day tae stoat aboot London?
All those shops and cafes. And Hyper Hyper – an amazing fashion collective offering a cornucopia of tiny wee stalls selling prototypes and samples from up-and-coming designers. Prices were cheap; I was a fashion-obsessed student. It was a perfect fit.
Browsing the stalls I stumbled upon something more than magical. Cast your mind back three decades. Remind yourself of the phenomenon that was Kiss by Prince. NME voted Kiss single of the year (with the album whence it came, Parade, receiving Album of the Year). The same song ranked at number four in their list of the 150 Greatest Singles Of All Time and, as the purple one’s third Billboard number one, garnered him a Grammy. As if that wasn’t enough, Tom Jones covered the song. While the film Under The Cherry Moon (for which the album Parade was the soundtrack) was eminently forgettable, the music was astonishing. What I’d found among the Hyper Hyper stalls was the selfsame trousers worn by Prince in the video. Some clever fashionista had recreated the iconic loons at a fraction of the price. I had to have them. While the snakehipped sex god Prince looked lithe and luscious in the massively flared black trousers, studded with silver buttons down the seam, this fat boy frae Bishopbriggs looked more eejit than icon. But compared
to Prince Rogers Nelson we were all eejits. So it’s no surprise that an international academic conference Purple Reign (great pun) is being held this weekend in Salford. The two-day gathering seeks to examine both the commercial and creative components to the Prince phenomenon until his untimely death aged 57.
Some of you will already have started that damning sentence: “These days you can get a degree in dance music and a PhD in pop music …”, but I exhort you to arrest such a response. While almost any other artist might, rightly, be accused of not being substantial enough to carry such an academic endeavour, Prince was the exception. His fingerprints are all over the work of so many artists, songwriters and music-lovers.
Prince, for my generation, represented the through-line from Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder; I’ve yet to see who is carrying the torch into the future. Prince was a multi-instrumentalist, an artist. He battled against the creative shackles of the music business, refusing to be controlled by the business rather than the music.
While not every album was a creative or commercial success, that was the very point of Prince; he could easily have laurel-rested and released mediocre, million-selling albums and filled his bank accounts with cash. But he didn’t. He kept pushing the boundaries, trying, sometimes failing, but never being anything but fascinating.
Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean is oft mentioned as the first video by a black artist to be heavily played on MTV. But the brilliant Little Red Corvette was similarly groundbreaking, played in heavy rotation all over MTV. Purple Rain was not only a mind-blowing album but a brilliant film. The album sold over 13 million in the US alone, spending half a year at the top of the Billboard chart. At one point Prince achieved the unprecedented feat of having the number one film, single and album in the US.
Any songwriter would have been happy to have written any one of the monster songs Prince wrote for Sinead O’Connor, The Bangles et al. He had an Oscar, a Golden Globe, half a dozen Brits and a clutch of Grammys. No-one else has had such breadth and depth of influence.
The day that the 12-inch single of Sign Of The Times was released I walked the two miles to Tom Russell’s at Bishopbriggs Cross and bought it. (I hadn’t enough money for both bus fare and vinyl.) I walked home, read and reread the sleeve notes. I then sat and played that song over and over.
It was 30 years ago, almost to the day. Yet I can still remember every word of that song, and every moment of that afternoon and evening. Sign of the times, huh?