only American date of Prince’s ‘ Nude tour”, as it was heralded, was • announced on Wednesday, April 25. • The following Monday, 700 people, each of whom had paid $100 for a ticket, crammed into Rupert’s, a Minneapolis nightclub and yuppie haunt. Usually Prince’s club appearances are surprises but this was a benefit for the family of Chick Huntsberry, Prince’s ex-bodyguard (the famous bodyguard, the grey- bearded, tattoo-littered giant who’d bulkily shielded Prince at the 1985 BPI Awards), who had died a few weeks before without nace. When locals complained at the scarcity of tickets, Prince set up another at the 16,000-capacity St Paul Civic tickets were $10 and the audience was asked foodstuffs for the Minnesota Food Shelf). It’s called the Nude tour, says Prince’s bassist Levi Seacer Jnr, not because bare flesh is exposed but because it is “back to basics rock’ n’ roll. You know when you go to a show and all you see is a lot of money being spent? What we’re trying to do is a show that gets back to performing, and to real songs as opposed to dance songs. We play a lot of the older stuff with a lot of chords and really nice melodies.” (They also play a new ballad called A Question Of U, a cover of Respect and a re- claimed version of the world’s best selling single this year, Nothing Compares 2 U.) Levi, guitarist Miko Weaver and keyboards player Dr Fink remain from previous bands, joined by new keyboards player and backing singer Rosie Gaines and drummer Michael Bland. There are three male dancers (last seen in the “Glam Slam” video). And Prince. Naturally, back-to-basics or not, they change costumes four or five times. As yet, report the fashion police, there is no clear hint as to what follows the bikini briefs (1981), the purple regency look (1984), the peach and black regalia (1987), the polka dot, pink and blue affairs, words splayed down every available limb (1988), though early clues hint that tassles and lime-green trimmings may be important. Before one song at Rupert’s, Prince talked for a while about how this was Chick’s favourite, a song his bodyguard correctly predicted would earn him a whole new audience. Chick was now, he said, ‘in a much better place than this. He is looking down, smiling.” As he soared through Purple Rain, in the crowd the tears started flowing. Though Prince shies away from the limelight, “I took my Black Album into a nightclub to see what people’s reactions were to it. And this girl said to me, If you smiled you’d be a really nice person. I looked at my Black Album and I saw my reflection in it and I realised that if I released this album and died, that’s what people would remember me for. I could feel this wind and I knew I was doing the wrong thing . . his life story is pretty well documented. He was born on June 7, 1958. (For a long while this date was massaged to 1960, but these days his press office at Paisley Park studios happily proffer the correct date.) His father John Nelson worked at the Honeywell electronics company by day and played in a band, the Prince Rogers Trio, by night. John Nelson’s wife Mattie had been a singer with them and decided to borrow the group name for her new son, Prince Rogers Nelson, though from day to day he was known, rather less loftily, as “Skipper” Skipper’s father left when he was about seven: Prince rejoined him for a while when he was about 12, but was subsequently thrown out (he once showed a journalist a phone booth where he said he wept for two hours after his pleas to be allowed back had been refused). A short spell with his Aunt Olivia worked no better (apparently she couldn’t stand his guitar playing) so he moved into the basement bedroom of his friend, Andre Anderson (later Andre Cymone, now producer for Jody Watley and Adam Ant). They played music and formed bands (Champagne, Grand Central) with friends but the basement is best known as the site of the early Prince sex romps. Back when Prince gave interviews, he was keen to play up the way he’d put into practice the theories he’d learned from his mother’s porn magazines; Andre Cymone later boasted that their speciality was sharing girls. Whether the sexual antics were just teenage bragging or real, the obsession with music was genuine. Soon he was making LPs on which he played pretty much everything, a practice he has maintained ever since. (He once explained the rationale: “When I’m recording I could have an orgasm on my mind and my bass player could have Dickenson his.”) For a long while he was just the notorious sex-obsessed funkateer but his fifth LP, 1999, made Prince’s name in America (it also marked his walk-out from what he said was his last interview: he has relented rarely, and not at all since 1986). Even so, few people were sitting round waiting to see a Prince film. But no matter that Purple Rain’s plot was wafer-thin — The Kid, a misunderstood youth with family and girl problems, is vying for musical stardom — the music was thrilling and the whole package worked. The storybore uncanny similarities to Prince’s own but, stung by criticism of The Kid’s misogyny, he denied it was simply autobiographical: “We used parts of my past and present to make the story pop more, but it was a study.” The soundtrack LP sold by the shedful and the fans scrutinised its every detail.
Everyone noticed