Prince: memories of U

Cultural commentators and artists who grew up with Prince’s music explain what he meant to them and what made him unique

prince in concert 1985
Prince in concert, LA, 1985: ‘He was the last of the great performers.’ Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex/Shutterstock

Mica Paris

Singer and presenter

I went to a Prince show when I was 18 and he called me up on stage to sing. I had only just released My One Temptation – how he knew who I was is a complete mystery to me.

A few months later I was in a club in LA with some friends, and some bodyguard came over and said, Prince wants to say hi. He was so little, the guys who were standing in front of him were like a wall.

So we had a chat, he said: “I love your voice, you remind me of early Chaka [Khan].” I was so nervous!

Later I flew to Minneapolis for him to work on my second album, to Paisley Park. It was a huge complex, a bit like Pinewood. That was in 1990, those futuristic things weren’t really around then, so it kind of felt like you were on a different planet. And he just started playing me all these tunes. He had a vault with thousands and thousands of songs. That was 26 years ago, so imagine how many songs he’s got now. We hung out all night, recording a song.

To this day people ask: “What was it like when you used to hang out?” Well, he didn’t really talk much, we used to just sit there, he’d have a brandy and we’d listen to the music and he’d have his stick in his hand and nod his head a few times and say maybe two or three words to me and that was it, that was our night out. And then the next night I’d get a call again: “Prince wants you to come.” He was mysterious.

He loves voices, he’s obsessed with great voices, with talent. And he loves women, and I don’t mean that in necessarily just a sexual way – I mean obviously he appreciates beauty – but he was crazy for talent. Just think of all those female musicians that he brought through who probably wouldn’t have gotten a look-in if it wasn’t for him. Sheila E. He introduced her to the world; Candy Dulfer, an incredible saxophonist.

He was the last of the great performers: Michael [Jackson] was the king and he was the Prince. Now there are none left. They weren’t human, the way they performed, they were electrifying, and you’re not going to get these kinds of performances again. It’s a big loss.

prince in the 1980s
Prince in the 1980s: ‘Girls loved him, his flouncy lace sleeves, tight trousers, big hats, curly hair.’ Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

Miranda Sawyer

Observer columnist and radio critic

At my school, Prince was considered with suspicion by many: too pervy, too small, too pretty. He wore high-heels and girls’ knickers! Too gay, really, even though he wasn’t. In those masculine times, anything feminine or camp was derided, and Prince’s sexy was lip-licking, flamboyant, emotional. Girls loved him, his flouncy lace sleeves, tight trousers, big hats, curly hair. All as black as could be (Hendrix, Little Richard), though we didn’t get that.

I loved the singles, but the albums I liked the most were the late 1980s ones, Sign o’ the Times and Lovesexy, and I went to see him at Wembley for the second. I hadn’t seen many stadium gigs at that time: the hugeness and sterility was intimidating. But Prince was so flat-out amazing that everything telescoped into him, a tiny figure in Spanish ruffles.

I remember a white bed, a big car, the way he spun a basketball on his finger (while singing) before throwing it casually across the stage and netting it. He was ridiculous, in every way. Plus, there was Cat, wild, in her fur coat and her pants. Prince found amazingly talented women and let them be sexy and strong.

I know now that the Lovesexy tour was full of tension: all the extravagance was costing too much, and Prince was losing money. But you wouldn’t have known from his performance. He was looking for the proper high – the transcendence – that comes with mixing religion, sex, dance and the funk. And other people.

Such bliss was hard to locate in a British city before ecstasy came in pill form. I think it’s hard to locate, full stop. But Prince seemed to have his finger on that particular pleasure button and – even more impressive – he didn’t need to make a joke about it. He was witty about what he could do, but he was serious. No wonder the boys were scared.


Kitty Empire

Observer pop critic

Musicians sometimes helpfully divide themselves into showpeople or studio types. Prince set a torch to that distinction. Cloistered in a vast Minnesotan home studio among umpteen hours of unreleased music, he often seemed the quintessential obsessive-compulsive auteur.

Then, suddenly, he wasn’t cloistered any more. I was blown away seeing him play live three times. They were very different gigs – it was jazz to the fore on the One Nite Alone… tour in 2002, then all the arena hits in 2007, and finally, the electric 3rdeyegirl lineup in 2014ect – but these gigs, while utterly different, were all the same, ultimately: flowing, virtuoso performances by a man who seemed made of all music, able to switch with a smirk between high-kicking soul revue and blues metal, his sky-scraping Eig80s pop hits and funk deep cuts. The guest list pass from that 3rdeyegirl gig is still stuck fast to the inside of my jacket. I very nearly named a boy-child Nate, just because Prince had suggested it on Sign o’ the Times.

To say Prince was a rare figure, even in the glorified secure unit that is pop, is a little trite. Seeing him strut his stuff, actually quite human, you were conscious that here was a straight man of mixed heritage who wore women’s underwear while channelling Jimi Hendrix.

You’d never call him a feminist, but there was always a profound sense that Prince was no Neanderthal, either, an advocate for the reciprocity of pleasure. His funk had a very dirty mind – the self-explanatory title of his 1980 album – but although he established himself as a sex-mad imp, Prince had the emotional breadth to write about HIV, raspberry berets and doves crying, a priapic hippy out of time, in psychedelic paisley. He sang from a place of complexity – noting, not unreasonably, that things were much harder in this life than in the afterworld.

prince on stage in denver 1986
Prince on stage in Denver, Colorado, 1986: ‘He reached out to art as the means to express the hope and heartbreak of life.’ Photograph: John Leyba/Denver Post via Getty Images

Ekow Eshun

Writer and broadcaster

In 1996 I travelled to Paisley Park to talk to Prince. It was one of the strangest interviews I’ve ever done. Not for what we talked about but for what went unsaid.

Prince was promoting Emancipation, his first album after the end of his long contractual dispute with Warner Bros – the cover featured a pair of hands breaking free from a set of shackles – and he seemed keen to celebrate its release. The customary deal with him at that time was that you could talk one-to-one as long as you didn’t write down or record the interview.

Perhaps it’s partly that absence of record-keeping which gave the whole encounter a hallucinatory quality. The night I arrived, Prince played a small, invite-only gig at Paisley Park. It was thrilling enough to see him on stage up close, let alone across a table in a conference room the following day. In person, he was charming, elegant and good-humoured. But the interview was overshadowed for me by what I’d seen earlier in the day during a guided tour of Paisley Park. As well as the recording studios and rehearsal spaces in the complex, I was shown past a room decked out like a nursery. The walls were painted bright colours and the floor was scattered with toys.

Prince had got married a few months earlier to one of his backing dancers, Mayte García. I knew from news reports that she’d given birth to their first baby, a son, just a few days earlier. The nursery was waiting ready for him. But what I also knew from reports was that the baby was desperately ill. He was suffering from Pfeiffer syndrome, a rare genetic disorder affecting the skull.

Prince didn’t mention his baby during the interview, although it’s hard to imagine the boy wasn’t on his mind. He insisted, rather, that he felt great. That he was excited to be free of his contract and to be finally recording on his own terms. Yet, as he talked, all I could do was picture the empty nursery and think about the gulf between his words and what must have been the true state of his emotions. It was snowing when I left Paisley Park, and by the time I landed back in Britain Prince and Mayte’s baby was dead.

Did glossing over his feelings during the interview reveal Prince as insincere or more concerned with selling his album than engaging with real life? I don’t believe so. My guess is that, throughout those most awful of circumstances, he was behaving how he felt most naturally: he was reaching out to art, to music, as the means to express the hope and fragility and heartbreak of life. A recording of the baby’s heartbeat is woven through Sex in the Summer, a track on Emancipation. Every time I listen to the song I think of his ability as a musician to find, in any given situation, a route to beauty, to transcendent joy. I think of that too now in the face of his untimely passing.

prince circa 1980
Prince circa 1980: ‘He was doing exactly and only what he wanted from the very beginning.’ Photograph: Leni Sinclair/Getty Images

John Grant


It’s just a huge loss. I didn’t really think everyone could die: I thought we’d get to keep one or two. We shouldn’t be so shocked because it’s happening a million times every day, but I thought he’d be one of those people that would be granted a reprieve from the whole death thing.

Prince was a little scary to me, especially when I was dealing with my sexual issues, because he was somebody who crossed a lot of boundaries. He was sort of androgynous and people, even a lot of tough, straight dudes, really latched on to him even though he was really pushing the envelope. He did pop music but you could be a fan of Prince and not have to give up any of your alternative scene, you could still be a snob. He was doing exactly and only what he wanted from the very beginning: he was one of those few people that you can say never compromised.

I remember going to school dances and dancing to that music: 1999, Raspberry Beret, Sexy MF – I think that’s one of the greatest things ever. But for some reason my favourite is Computer Blue. Those sounds are engraved on my brain from childhood, and I keep coming back to them whether I know that I’m referencing them or not. He was definitely heavy on my mind when I did this latest record [Grey Tickles, Black Pressure]: it’s a mixture of Cabaret Voltaire and Prince references.

He is one of the virtuosos: he was disciplined, and lived and breathed what he did from a very early age. That’s always intimidating to me because I’ve never been any of those things: it’s taken me for ever to find my voice and I’ve never been very disciplined, because I didn’t think it was worth it. He knew exactly what he wanted and followed through consistently throughout his life. I mean he did thousands of songs and obviously he didn’t get every single thing right, but he was fearless. He was constantly trying things out and probably wasn’t intimidated by failure or by what some people would call failure. He just kept going and there was always one of those clams with a pearl inside.

prince circa 1984
Prince in the Purple Rain era: ‘He was the embodiment of being yourself and living life the way you want.’ Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Gemma Cairney

Radio 1 DJ

For me, Prince has always been a reference point for a kind of pop energy, this embodiment of being oneself and living life the way you want to individually and expressing that through music. What’s important is that he put out music that pushes you to your limit.

While I was growing up, being a mixed-race creative person who didn’t like to be pinpointed, having that presence was really important. It was the pure mystique, the outfit, the sound, the sex, the dancing, the funk in his bones. In a weird way I think he was not even celebrated enough: he has always been taken for granted, his uniqueness.

I can’t even think of new artists that come close. I feel like artists now don’t get the opportunity to push as hard as those before. I hope that people feel inspired enough, maybe in the sheer face of loss, to just do what they should be doing in life. In the way that Bowie always expressed himself, and Prince too.

I’ve just spent about 40 minutes looking at pictures of him and he’s a joy to look at. I’m going out to a huge drag night and I’m gonna do my best Prince: curls stuck to the side of my face with gel, an open ruffle shirt. I don’t think there’s any other man in the world that has made me want to grow a goatee more. And not many people can carry off an intense indigo purple in the same way as Prince. He makes you long for a flamboyant side of life: to kind of walk with your hips snaking and to have a good time.

prince in minneapolis 1977
Heir apparent: Prince in Minneapolis, 1977. Photograph: NC1/RobertWhitman 2014/WENN

Elisa Fiorillo


It’s been a really rough couple of days. I had DM-ed Prince to see how he was last Friday when it was reported that the flight he was on had taken an emergency landing. He wrote back and said “I’m perfect. save your prayers. #controversy”. I said “if you’re not feeling well you need to rest!” That was the last i heard from him.

We were friends for 26 years. We first worked together on my first album at Paisley Park when I was a solo artist signed to Chrysalis Records and he got me to do backing vocals on Graffiti Bridge and Diamonds and Pearls. Twenty years later, in 2009, I was in real estate. He contacted me after seeing a clip I put on YouTube and said, “You should still be singing,” and asked me to join his band.

Being in the band, he expected perfection every night and if you didn’t do it you got to hear about it. He wanted everyone to be the best – that’s what was so special. He was a great teacher. But the biggest lesson he taught me was to put my family first. He asked me to go on the road with him when my daughter was three but he said: “I don’t want you to be away from her too long, I want you to take her to swim lessons. So we’ll go for shorter periods of time and if it’s going to be a long one then I’m not going to take you.” I know he always wanted a family. But his family was a band. He felt most comfortable near us.

His mind was always going, 24/7. He’d want to stay up till all hours and never sleep. I’d say: “You’re so thin. You need to eat.” And he’d joke back: “You need to lose weight!” He wasn’t being harsh, he cared – he just wanted everybody healthy.

We’d do a show and then he’d want us at a club at 2am. So many aftershows would go on to six in the morning. People would chant in the audience, “Six in the morning!” My poor feet!

For the audience, witnessing his presence, his charisma, his control, his talents in every instrument, people couldn’t believe it. A lot of people would say he’s like something from another planet. He didn’t even read music which was crazy. Sure, he eventually learned chord structure and all that, but he wasn’t a reader, note by note. He just knew music instinctively; he played with his heart. He was such a great guy. I’m going to be very sad for a very long time.

prince at the hop farm 2011
At the Hop Farm festival, Kent, 2011: ‘He turned on its head any stereotypical idea of what black art had to look like.’ Photograph: Olivia Harris/Reuters

Attica Locke


I think what his presence did to black cultural life in America is expand what it meant to be black. It could no longer be narrowly defined simply by R&B or blues or funk or pop or rock, because somehow one human being came along who was all of that. So there was a sense that you didn’t have to fit in a slot as a black artist. The idea that Prince, he was 5ft 3in, with heels on, that he looked – for lack of a better word – fey, and yet he was a complete and total badass, with women lined up behind him, was incredible. He just turned on its head any kind of stereotypical idea of what black masculinity had to look like, and what black art had to look like.

He’s been a part of my life since I was a child: I watched Purple Rain, I guess I was eight or nine, and I remember it being magical, like nothing I’d ever seen before. My whole life, there has never not been Prince in it. The overwhelming feeling I had [on Thursday] was, I don’t want to do this without him, I don’t know that I really want to hang out in a world that doesn’t have him in it. And what gave me peace ultimately was gratitude that I got to be alive at the same time as he was alive, and that – I’m in the middle of writing a book – I was going to go make some fucking art. It was the only way I could deal with the day and celebrate him in my own way.

prince portrait
‘Every now and then, Prince would remind us of his unwaning musical power.’ Photograph: PA

Danny Kelly

Former editor of Q

In the spring of 1994, I was editing Q, then the biggest and most important music magazine anywhere. At the same time, Prince was one of the foremost music artists in the world. A decade’s-worth of magnificent albums had made him the planet’s smallest musical giant. And in the live arena he was without peer; the previous summer he had filled Wembley Stadium (not the puny Arena, the actual national stadium) and, in over three hours of pulsating showmanship, blown the proverbial roof off the dump. Prince was great, and Prince was driving me mad.

It wasn’t just the music, though his one-off amalgam of funk, rock, soul and the jazz he inherited from his musician parents had soundtracked a large chunk of my 1980s. No, the cause of my angst was the fact that he, unlike almost every other artist on Earth, was quite happy to keep the media at a very large, very cold distance. By 1994, it had been the best part of a decade since His Purpleness (he’d just changed his name to that symbol thing; but as a magazine trading under a single signifier, Q was in no position to sneer!) had even done an interview. When REM, Madonna and Simply Red were beating on my office door, I was always peering over their shoulders, just in case Prince was lost in the throng.

For the previous two years, I’d kept up the same ritual. On the first Monday of every month, I’d send a fax to Prince’s HQ at Paisley Park, outlining in tedious detail why he should talk to Q, promising to put him on the cover and generally giving his ego a $200 massage. For two and a half years the faxes disappeared into the inner workings of Paisley Park (which, it turned out, actually looked like a B&Q warehouse), unacknowledged, unanswered, and, for all we knew, unseen. Then, on the afternoon of the first Monday of May 1994, the fax suddenly fizzed into life. Out slid a piece of paper, with a Paisley Park logo at the top. Its message was short and astonishing: “Monte Carlo, this week”.

I sent Adrian Deevoy, because he was a terrific conversationalist and a brilliant writer, and Andy Earl, because he was a photographer who worked quickly and didn’t need a studio. The interview took place in a hotel room; Adrian sat on one bed, Prince on the other. The writer was allowed no notebook and no tape recorder; he would have to work from memory. Andy was allotted a couple of minutes for pictures, on the narrow balcony overlooking the streets. As he began, he knocked over the one light he’d brought. There was no time for running repairs; he rattled off as many frames as he could in the fading Monaco evening.

It all worked. We got some decent photos of the great man and Adrian wrote a lovely piece that was as much about the physical reality of Prince as it was about his rather guarded views on the world and his own art. The magazine sold by the truckload. Of course it did: it was Prince.

In recent years the output has become more erratic, and the sales diminished. Yet every now and then (his almost messianic half-time performance at the 2007 Super Bowl; that month of gigs at the O2 in London), Prince would remind us of his unwaning musical power and why it was necessary and right to prostrate yourself once a month in front of a silent, mocking fax machine.

prince at the super bowl 2007
At the Super Bowl, 2007: ‘I practise a lot.’ Photograph: Evan Agostini/Getty Images

Adrian Deevoy


Miles Davis nailed it. Prince was one of the jazz great’s last collaborators, having performed with him on New Year’s Eve in 1987. As economic with praise as he was in his playing, Davis admiringly observed that the Minnesotan showman was “a mix of Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Marvin Gaye… and Charlie Chaplin”.

And Prince never resembled the silent movie star so much as when giving an interview. “If I need psychological evaluation,” he liked to say, “I’ll do it myself.”

So it came as a shock when, after a decade of asking, Prince suddenly agreed to meet during that spring of 1994, in Monaco, for a chat. Less of a surprise was the ensuing four-day wait in the posh principality until Prince felt the moment was right to talk.

You’d glimpse him around the Hotel de Paris: a shadow flitting between the marble colonnades. He would occasionally ghost up beside you, say nothing, then slip tantalisingly away. When he finally deigned to sit down formally, it was in typically theatrical fashion: after midnight, on a big bed in a five-star suite, the Monte Carlo casino winking beneath our balcony, the ocean sighing behind us.

Prince was decked out in a white silk outfit, full makeup and silver high heels. He initially refused to speak, preferring to communicate by lavishly lashed eye contact alone. But once we began talking music – Funkadelic, Elvis, Chuck D, George Clinton, Duke Ellington – you couldn’t stop him.

A couple of hours later and he was still going, pacing the room like an especially antsy panther, bouncing on the bed with childlike glee. He revealed that he had recently completed a blues album, letting out an anguished wail to convey its full magnificence. That record has yet to be released. Prior to meeting with Prince, his people routinely told me that their charge was an instrument of God. So it seemed only fair to ask Prince if he was a conduit for a higher power.

“No,” he replied, “I just practise a lot.”