Tag Archives: prince

Three Angry 1980s Songs About Managers

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Grey_Double-Buttoned_Suit_JacketManagers, eh? In 1997, David Bowie said, ‘They’re a species I really have nothing to do with’, an unsurprising position considering his disastrous earlier experiences.

But, in the rock and pop world, it’s almost a rite of passage to be ripped off by a manager. As the old music biz saying goes: where there’s a hit, there’s a writ.

There were certainly a number of dodgy characters hanging around in the 1980s, generally wearing cheap suits and deafening aftershave. Japan/Wham! manager Simon Napier-Bell knows where all the bodies are buried: he told all in ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay’, his jaw-dropping account of record business skulduggery.

And Giles Smith’s hilarious ’80s memoir ‘Lost In Music’ outlined his doomed-to-fail attempts at pop stardom whilst being hamstrung every step of the way by chronically-inept ‘career adviser’ Pete The Bastard.

Basically, for every Bruce Findlay (Simple Minds), Ed Bicknell (Dire Straits) or Paul McGuinness (U2) – the nominal ‘fifth member of the band’ – there’s probably a Colonel Tom Parker or Defries in the wings. Here are three prime 1980s acts who turned on their ex-managers in the best way they knew how.

3. XTC: ‘I Bought Myself A Liarbird’ (1984)
For many years, songwriter Andy Partridge was unable to discuss this song due to ‘legal issues’ with the band’s former manager Ian Reid (the sticking points seemed to be a huge unpaid VAT bill and also work/life balance, or lack of it…). Partridge delivers a pretty caustic portrait of the ‘starmaker machinery behind the popular song’, as Joni Mitchell called it. XTC settled out of court with Reid in 1989.

I bought myself a liarbird
He came with free drinks
Just to blur the lies falling out like rain
On an average English summer’s afternoon

I bought myself a new notebook
Sharpened my guitar and went to look
If this biz was just as bongo as the liarbird made out

All he would say is ‘I can make you famous’
All we would say: ‘Just like a household name’
Is all he would say

Methinks world is for you
Made of what you believe
If it’s false or it’s true
You can read it in your bible
Or on the back of this record sleeve

I bought myself a liarbird
Things got more and more absurd
It changed to a cuckoo
And expanded, filling up with all I gave

I bought myself a big mistake
He grew too greedy, bough will break
And then we will find that liarbirds
Are really flightless on their own

Methinks world is for you
There’s no handing it back
If it’s false or it’s true
You can read it in your prayer book
Or on the side of a cornflake pack

I gave away a liarbird
A couple less drinks
And now I’ve heard the truth shining out like sun
On an average English winter’s afternoon

2. John Martyn: ‘John Wayne’ (1986)
This Eastern-tinged, dramatic doom-ballad was initially written as a diatribe against Martyn’s early-’80s manager Sandy Roberton. The main problem seemed to be ‘cashflow’, judging from the lyric below… After a rewrite and the adding of a soupçon of humour (as well as some of John’s ‘strangled duck’ vocals, as he called them), it also became a cheeky portrait of the type of ball-busting, all-American bullyboy represented by Duke Wayne and Martyn’s old favourite Ronald Reagan. He even managed to include the Pinteresque euphemism: ‘I’ll measure you – fit you up!’

You know you’ve got it coming
I’ll tell it to you straight
I’m coming for you very soon
I’ll never hesitate
I’ll measure you
And fit you up

I am John Wayne
I do believe I’m John Wayne
I am John Wayne
Drink your milk!

Don’t you dare look behind you
You know I will be there
You’ll feel my breath on your neck
Turn, face me if you dare

I am John Wayne
I believe I’m John Wayne
Get on your horse!

You felt the money flowing
You watched the beast arrive
Watch the money going away
Time to skin the lamb alive

1. Prince: ‘Bob George’ (1987)
Black Album curio ‘Bob George’ was recorded at LA’s Sunset Sound as a present for Sheila E, and premièred at her Vertigo club birthday bash on 11 December 1986. Engineer Susan Rogers explained the genesis of this bizarre, self-mocking, X-rated piece: ‘Prince felt (Billboard music critic) Nelson George had become very critical of him all of a sudden, at a stage in his career where he needed all the help he could get. (Manager) Bob Cavallo also ticked him off.’ Roots of this discord may have lain in Prince’s wish to release the triple-album Crystal Ball as the follow-up to Parade, a wish that fell on deaf ears during negotiations with Prince’s record company Warner Bros. Maybe Prince felt that Cavallo hadn’t pushed hard enough on his behalf, terminally affecting their working relationship – Cavallo was given the push just after the release of the Batman album 18 months later. (Is ‘Bob George’ also a homage to/pastiche of Miles Davis? Ed.)

Book Review: Sheila E’s The Beat Of My Own Drum

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sheila eConsidering he was such a huge star and cultural icon, it’s surprising that Prince’s eventful life and sad death has yet spawned so few ‘kiss and tell’ memoirs.

Let’s hope it stays that way. But while his long-time musical partner and one-time fiancée Sheila E certainly doesn’t shy away from sharing her memories of him in her fine autobiography ‘The Beat Of My Own Drum’ (co-written with Wendy Holden), those recollections form only a small part of a very rich, diverse collection of portraits.

After all, Sheila has played percussion and/or drums with some of the all-time greats: Carlos Santana, Herbie Hancock, Marvin Gaye, George Duke, Lionel Richie, Tito Puente, Diana Ross and Billy Cobham, not forgetting her father Pete Escovedo.

But while there are plenty of tasty music biz anecdotes, the book also provides a fascinating portrait of growing up in a mixed-race family (her mother is African-American and father Mexican) in a less-than-salubrious section of Oakland, California.

Sheila paints a rich picture of a seemingly happy childhood based around music, dancing, sports (she is apparently a pretty useful football player), charity and community, with shared cultural references such as The Carpenters (Sheila was hugely inspired by seeing Karen on the TV), Sly and the Family Stone and The Jackson 5, though there also some racial tensions around too.

But then the book goes in a completely different, unexpectedly harrowing direction when she chronicles the sexual abuse suffered as a young girl at the hands of several cousins. The section rivals James Rhodes’ recent book ‘Instrumental’ in its shocking candour.

Thankfully, if anything, the abuse drives her ambition rather than beats her down, though she admits to seeing it as a dark secret that clouds the rest of her life.

There are fascinating anecdotes about travelling to Colombia at the age of just 15 to play percussion with the Latin/fusion supergroup Azteca. Cobham, Duke and Gaye are mainly described in glowing terms, almost as father figures, and she is unexpectedly candid about her romantic and musical infatuations with Santana. There’s also a hilariously mismanaged backstage ‘meeting’ with Diana Ross.

But it’s easy to forget just how unique Sheila’s talent was in the 1980s when she made it as a ‘pop star’. We had never seen a percussionist/singer/dancer triple-threat before, as she herself points out, and Latin celebrities were very rare.

This pop period is grippingly covered in the book, with tales of disastrous video shoots, crazy tour schedules and much celebrity hobnobbing. Escovedo also very nicely juggles the spicy anecdotes with some genuine, intelligent advice for the modern musician, and just enough technical stuff about playing drums and percussion too.

Sheila also discusses her project Elevate Hope Foundation which focuses on music therapy for victims of child abuse, a noble and important program which continues to go from strength to strength.

So if the last quarter of ‘The Beat Of My Drum’ reads more like a self-help book than a famous musician’s autobiography, we can surely cut her some slack. Highly recommended.

Prince: An Appreciation And Farewell

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Prince_logo.svgIt’s never easy describing why a personal hero meant a lot to you – heaven knows I still haven’t been able to set down anything cogent about David Bowie’s life and work.

But I may be coming nearer to working out why Prince Rogers Nelson had such an effect on the way I heard – and still hear – music.

Before the release of  1986’s Parade, I was a confirmed chart-pop fan, but also into the weird rock of Frank Zappa, fusion of Weather Report and straight jazz of Courtney Pine, Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock.

Parade seemed to offer a perfect synthesis of all these forms. And, quite incredibly, one guy was pretty much responsible for all of it – and he was a brilliant singer and dancer too. Put simply, for fans and musicians of my age, Prince was the nearest thing to a Bowie/Ziggy figure.

His extravagantly-flamboyant stage persona also sometimes blinded people to the brilliance of his musicianship. Pre-Parade, that might have put me off initially too. But has there ever been a better keyboard/guitar double threat? (Steve Winwood, Johnny Guitar Watson and Lewis Taylor are decent competition but he surely outstrips all three.)

He obviously had natural talent but he worked extremely hard too – in his teenage years, he was living Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule. Influenced by Sly Stone, Graham Central Station, Funkadelic, Tower Of Power, Carlos Santana and Joni Mitchell, he was busy getting his chops together in his home music room and during various high-school battle-of-the-band competitions in Minneapolis’s North Side.

As he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1990: ‘Anyone who was around back then knew what was happening. I was working. When they were sleeping, I was jamming. When they woke up, I had another groove.’

On the bass, he took care of business. Along with a few other of his contemporaries (he credited future New Power Generation member Sonny Thompson as being a key early influence), he patented the Minneapolis bass sound, a rumbling, busy style, heavily influenced by Sly and the Family Stone’s Larry Graham.

But he also had a much more effervescent, Stanley Clarke-flavoured side as well, a good example being the incredible ‘I’m Yours’ from 1978’s For You.

On guitar, his sweet, creamy, heavily-distorted lead lines, usually injected with a healthy dose of delay, were coming out of the Carlos Santana and Ernie Isley school, but he also had many licks all of his own. For me, his lead guitar peak was 1985-1989; what an incredible tone, beautiful phrasing and a very ‘vocal’, human sound.

But he also had a funky ensemble rhythm guitar style out of Steve Cropper and Jimmy Nolan school. My favourite examples of Prince guitar would have to include ‘Lady Cab Driver’, ‘Bambi’, ‘My Love Is Forever’, ‘Alexa De Paris’, ‘The Question Of U’, ‘Temptation’, ‘Get Some Solo’, ‘One Of Us’, ‘Joy In Repetition’, ‘Batdance’, but there are many more. His playing throughout the ‘Sign O’ The Times’ and  ‘Lovesexy Live’ concert films is sublime.

On keyboards, he was equally proficient. As NPG drummer Michael Bland pointed out, his piano playing had a touch and rhythmic approach similar to Thelonious Monk. He also patented the Minneapolis synth sound (alongside other influential players such as Ricky Peterson and Jimmy Jam), exemplified by his work between 1980 and 1983 on solo albums and releases by The Time, Vanity 6 and Sheila E.

And he loved playing hot, churchy, gospel-flavoured organ too – check out ‘Hot Thing’ from the ‘Sign O’ The Times’ film or his superb Hammond playing on the Parade tour.

On drums, he was, by contrast, a late developer. Before discovering the Linn LM-1 drum machine in 1981, his playing was functional rather than spectacular. Purple Rain engineer Susan Rogers has talked about how much Prince’s drumming improved once Sheila E came into his life around 1983 – he very much wanted to impress her, and she taught him a few licks too.

But he definitely had his own touch on the drums: check out the 12” version of ‘Mountains’, ‘Tambourine’, ‘Lady Cab Driver’ and ‘Sexual Suicide’ for some good examples. He was also very influenced by The Time mainman Morris Day’s playing – ‘Cloreen Bacon Skin’ on Crystal Ball is quite illuminating.

Of course, it’s all very well playing lots of instruments, but it’s a question of arrangement. Good ingredients are important but you’ve got to know how to mix them up. Prince was a master.

A lot of his ‘producing’ decisions (ie. what to put in and what to leave out) came about because he very, very rarely left a song unfinished – he would work very long hours without a break to achieve exactly the sound he had originally heard in his head. This is why his best stuff sounds so fresh today – it has enough melody and groove for the casual listener but also retains a precious, ‘unfinished’ quality.

As a young musician in the ‘70s, Prince was very much a student of funk, soul and rock, but he came to jazz too later in life, inspired by his work with Eddie Minfield, Sheila E, Miles Davis, Eric Leeds and Matt Blistan in the mid-‘80s.

He tried a ‘one-man-band’ approach to jazz/rock/funk with his Madhouse project, and worked successfully with Leeds on his two Paisley Park solo albums, but was more successful when he integrated the jazz influences into his own ‘pop’ albums and gigs.

My ultimate was the Lovesexy tour, when the band could turn on a dime, going from cool Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker licks to blazing hard rock.

For every great single that came out in the mid-to-late-’80s, there was a great B-side. We fans had to hear as much as possible. My friend Marlon Celestine was our source for amazing bootlegs; the brilliant original demos for The Family album, ‘Others Here With Us’, ‘A Place In Heaven’, ‘Movie Star’.

What will happen to all these tracks now? Was Prince planning to let us hear everything? There was talk of opening the vaults and adding the outtakes to the ‘special edition’ re-releases of the Warner Bros studio albums. I wonder who owns these masters now.

Another important aspect of Prince was his sense of humour. Friends, collaborators and lovers have reported how hilarious he could be away from the media glare. He didn’t let it out very often on his own official albums, but you can hear it loud and clear on ‘Cloreen Bacon Skin’, ‘Mutiny’, ‘High Fashion’, ‘Movie Star’, ‘Housequake’, ‘Jerk Out’, ‘Chocolate’ and Sheila E’s Romance 1600 album.

There are apparently many other ‘comedy’ tracks in the vaults. His cheekiness came out often on stage too – check out ‘Blues In C/If I Had A Harem’ from ‘Lovesexy Live’, and there are plenty of other examples.

He was also a true Gemini, and as such it’s important to note how vitally important many women were to his career, and how often he sought their musical and personal company: Susan Rogers, Peggy McCreary, Wendy & Lisa, Susannah Melvoin, Jill Jones, Mavis Staples, Sheena Easton, Ingrid Chavez, Sheila E, Cat Glover, Boni Boyer, Rhonda Smith, Mayte, Rosie Gaines, Candy Dulfer, Marva King, 3rdeyegirl – just a partial list.

Yes, one might question some of his attitudes towards women when he put together the bands Apollonia 6 and Vanity 6 (and there’s some strange stuff in ‘Purple Rain’) but he was a very young man then. His ‘Camille’ songs (‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’, ‘Good Love’, ‘When 2 R In Love’, ‘Rockhard In A Funky Place’ etc.) present a perfect fusion of his male and female sides, and of course the design of his ‘90s Symbol heavily emphasised both genders.

Prince went out of his way to promote musicians who were important to him, figures such as Larry Graham, Joni Mitchell, Mavis Staples, Bonnie Raitt, Miles Davis and Chaka Khan. He came to George Clinton’s rescue in the late 1980s when George had a huge tax bill to pay – Prince signed him to Paisley Park for one album (The Cinderella Theory) and the sizeable advance took care of his debt.

He later enlarged on his feelings about George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic during this elegant speech inducting them into the Rock’n’Roll Hall Of Fame. Prince was also a musical philanthropist – he gave away instruments to schools and encouraged real playing in an age of samples and loops. He also played many, many charity shows throughout his career, donating hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Then there was the spiritual element to Prince’s music, increasingly visible as the ‘80s progressed. He was a living embodiment of the sacred/profane dichotomy. The man who wrote ‘Sister’ and ‘Lady Cab Driver’ ended the decade by telling us: ‘Look to the light’. He could write ‘I Love U In Me’ one day but then follow it up the next with ‘God’.

The entire Lovesexy live show (and album) was designed as a battle between good and evil. I wasn’t sure if I liked or understood the spiritual stuff back in 1988, but I loved the way he provoked questions. Still do.

In December 1987, when he had a change of heart and pulled The Black Album from release at the eleventh hour, believing it to be too angry, too dark, and an unrepresentative piece of work, he rush-released Lovesexy instead. Here was an artist of integrity.

(Apparently one frame in the ‘Alphabet Street’ video features the words: “Don’t buy The Black Album. I’m sorry.” Or does it? I could never find it back then… Maybe it was a great bit of Warner Bros PR.)

I never saw Prince play live, to my great regret. I passed up a ticket for the famous London O2 run in 2007. It just didn’t sit right. The nearest I got to seeing him perform was a signing session at HMV in Oxford Street with the NPG in 1995.

Around that time, he was way more visible on British TV than he had ever been before, memorably appearing on ‘The White Room’ and also being interviewed on the BBC’s ‘Sunday Show’. He seemed quite happy subsuming himself into a group ethos – there are shades of Bowie and Tin Machine.

Over the last few weeks, the press has frequently reported that the essential book about Prince is Matt Thorne’s biography. It’s good, but the killer is surely ‘Prince: The First Decade’ by Per Nilsen. There you will read about the recording of every single one of his albums from 1978 to 1988, find out what was happening in his private life throughout that time and also hear from all his key collaborators. Nilsen’s ‘Prince: The Documentary’ is also superb.

Though I struggled with a lot of Prince’s music in the ’90s and beyond, he seemed to live a pretty ‘noble’ life in a period when many musicians of his generation and popularity kind of lost their way.

There was certainly a conscious retreat towards the end of the ’90s, but then look at what was happening in the wider world around that time – the Disneyfication of the music business, the dumbing down of culture generally.

He chose not to play the whole global branding game (he never launched a clothes line or fragrance, for example), he took on his record company, temporarily withdrew the name ‘Prince’, resolutely promoted himself as a musician and spoke up about many of the things that troubled him.

That may explain a lot. We shall see, though I’m not looking for any ‘theories’ or ‘explanations’ concerning his death and trying not to hear news reports.

In 1990, Prince told Rolling Stone magazine, ‘When I pray to God, I say, “It’s your call – when it’s time to go, it’s time to go. But as long as you’re going to leave me here, I’m going to cause much ruckus!”’

He did it. C-ya.

Tony LeMans (1989)

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This is an intriguing, very promising, almost completely forgotten (currently not on any streaming platforms) debut album by a young American singer and songwriter who sadly died in a motorcycle crash only three years after its release (and reportedly the day before he was due to marry Vanity’s sister).

I came across Tony LeMans completely by chance at Mr CD on Berwick Street, Soho. It had piles and piles of CDs at five quid a pop, quite a steal by 1990s standards.

You just never knew what you would find, in the days when you would take a chance on an album just on the strength of the label, cover, musicians and/or producer. I saw the words ‘Sylvester Stewart’, ‘David Gamson’ and ‘Paisley Park’ on the back and had to have it.

Tony-LeMans-Tony-LeMans-1989-Back-Cover-79406

Gamson plays keyboards and produces beautifully, fresh from Scritti Politti’s Provision. Tony LeMans was released on Prince’s Paisley Park Records – rumours were abound of the Purple One’s involvement, but he doesn’t appear.

But other ’80s funk masters do: Bernard Wright supplies some cracking wah-wah clavinet to a few tunes, though bassist Marcus Miller and guitarist Paul Jackson Jr. are fairly nondescript. Prince cohort Boni Boyer adds occasional back-up vocals alongside Michael Jackson collaborator Siedah Garrett (phenomenal on the opening ‘Higher Than High’).

The sonic clarity and mastering of Tony LeMans are outstanding; it’s a brilliant CD for auditioning a hi-fi. It’s also a real relief from the over-loud, over-compressed music of today. Musically and lyrically, it initially comes on like a ‘standard’ late-’80s pop/soul/funk album, but closer inspection reveals a strong psychedelic flavour. Mainly though, due to Gamson’s total involvement, the album sounds like Provision-era Scritti fronted by Sly Stone.

The opener ‘Highest High’ fuses the synth hook from Prince’s ‘Lovesexy’ with Sly’s ‘The Same Thing’ (though neither get a songwriting credit) to great effect. The single ‘Forever More’ is a winning ballad with a fine falsetto vocal from LeMans and some classic Gamson chord changes, while ‘Good For You’ is an infectious, catchy slice of doo-wop-influenced pop.

There’s a bit too much filler on side two, but the closing ‘Different Kind Of Thing’ is possibly the stand-out and the nearest thing to a Prince song (very much influenced by ‘Erotic City’), though it was only an extra track on the original CD release.

LeMans toured the album in the States, sometimes supporting MC Hammer (!), and was recording his second Paisley Park album at the time of his death. It was due to feature a Prince composition called ‘Fuschia Light’. Sadly, it’s likely that it’ll never get an official release.

Prince Rogers Nelson (7 June 1958 – 21 April 2016)

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Prince_at_Coachella‘He’s got it all! As a drummer, he can hold it down, you know what I’m sayin’? As a guitar player, he puts out! Plus he’s a great piano player. Matter of fact, he’s about as good as they get, and I’ve worked with the best, I should know! Do you know who he reminds me of? Duke Ellington. Yeah, he’s the Duke Ellington of the ’80s to my way of thinking.
MILES DAVIS

‘Music is made out of necessity. You’re not even its maker, you’re just there to bring it forth. It’s a fact of life, just like breathing.’

PRINCE

‘I’ve got people to feed. They depend on me to put bread on the table. I can’t just go away.’

PRINCE

‘I crave the experience of writing and sharing with others. It is what I do as an artist; as a human being.’

PRINCE

‘He seems to have his own voice on every instrument, really. What’s funny is that he reminds me of Thelonious Monk on all of them. His feel’s instantly recognisable.’

MICHAEL BLAND

‘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 the 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…’

PRINCE

‘For You’
‘My Love Is Forever’
‘Bambi’
‘Dirty Mind’
‘Annie Christian’
‘All The Critics Love U In New York’
‘Automatic’
‘The Beautiful Ones’
‘Erotic City’
‘Purple Rain’
’17 Days’
‘The Ladder’
‘Pop Life’
‘Condition Of The Heart’
‘Kiss’
‘Alexa De Paris’
‘Crucial’
‘Movie Star’
‘Crystal Ball’
‘Sexual Suicide’
‘Bedtime Story’
‘Susannah’s Pyjamas’
‘Nothing Compares 2 U’
‘The Question Of U’
‘Violet Blue’
‘A Love Bizarre’
‘The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker’
‘Forever In My Life’
‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’
‘Sign O’ The Times’
‘Alphabet Street’
‘When 2 R In Love’
‘Vicki Waiting’
‘Scandalous’
‘Still Would Stand All Time’

Wish U Heaven.

Prince Rogers Nelson, born 7 June 1958, died 21 April 2016

Prince: Parade 30 Years Old Today

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princeOn 17 April 1985, just ten days after the end of the Purple Rain tour, Prince walked into LA’s Sunset Sound studios, sat at the drums, taped the lyrics of four new songs onto a music stand, picked up his sticks and instructed engineer Susan Rogers: ‘Don’t stop the tape when I stop playing. Just keep rolling.’

He then played through ‘Christopher Tracy’s Parade’, ‘New Position’, ‘I Wonder U’ and ‘Under The Cherry Moon’ without pausing. This guy worked fast. The recording sessions for Parade had begun.

The album would see Prince continue his extraordinary mid-’80s run of form, surely comparable to Stevie Wonder’s fabled 1972–1976 period. He couldn’t release albums fast enough and the wider world was waking up to just how prolific he really was.

His striking new horns-and-orchestra-driven sound, by turns jazzy, funky and psychedelic, lost him some fans in the States but made him a huge star in Europe. Parade showed off the amazing versatility of Prince (drums, bass, guitar and keyboards) and his main collaborators Wendy (guitar) & Lisa (keyboards).

It’s an anti-boredom album full of glorious contradictions – it features his first instrumental track but still contains four classic dancefloor singles; it’s his densest, most ‘produced’ ’80s album (alongside Lovesexy) and yet features his first all-acoustic track, recorded completely live in the studio; Clare Fischer’s orchestral arrangements are always high in the mix but rub shoulders with the Sunset Sound’s ancient sound effects library; Prince utilises ultramodern tech like a guitar synth and a Fairlight sampler, but the main solo instruments are Eric Leeds’ tenor and baritone sax. And there is zero electric lead guitar, barely 18 months after Purple Rain.

References this time around were The Beatles, ’80s Miles Davis, show tunes and funk-era James Brown. The biggest influence though is late-’70s Joni Mitchell. Parade is the nearest Prince ever got to the kaleidoscope range of her classic albums Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and Hissing Of The Summer Lawns.

There were also more vocals in Prince’s music than ever before: Wendy, Lisa, Susannah (Wendy’s sister and Prince’s fiancée) and Sheila E all contributed massively to the occasional West Coast/Bangles sound.

By 2 June 1985, nine songs for Parade were in the can, though three would later be left off the final album – the spooky ‘Others Here With Us’, fantastic ‘All My Dreams’ and superfunky ‘Sexual Suicide’. Prince was also now working on not one but two other albums, Jill Jones and Mazarati’s debuts. By late June, he was also scouting locations in the south of France for the upcoming ‘Under The Cherry Moon’ movie. But, true to form, he couldn’t stop recording – he set up a makeshift recording studio in his Antibes hotel suite.

Parade‘s first three tracks – ‘Christopher Tracy’s Parade’, ‘New Position’ and ‘I Wonder U’ – pass by in the blink of an eye, gloriously odd, genuinely psychedelic funk miniatures. Very few have taken on the mantle of this style of music since 1986, though D’Angelo had a good go on the superb Voodoo album.

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‘Under The Cherry Moon’ is almost a ’30s-style jazz number featuring asthmatic synths, fantastic piano playing and a daring melody line. I’d like to hear Tom Waits’ cover. If you listen very closely, you can hear the rattle of Prince’s necklace as he lays down the drum track.

‘Girls And Boys’ is a classic one-chord funk tune whose blaring guitar synth adds an engaging weirdness. Saxophonist Eric Leeds makes his mark on Prince’s music for the first time (though had already featured prominently on The Family’s album).

‘Life Can Be So Nice’ features fake harpsichord, sampled flute, piercing cowbell, some intricate acoustic guitar and a heavily-treated kick drum. It’s discordant and thrilling with an envelope-pushing vocal arrangement and some bizarre lyrics. The last minute of the song is a Latin/fusion jam in the Santana or Weather Report vein.

‘Venus De Milo’ is a sumptuous piece of symphonic muzak with some gorgeous trumpet from Matt Blistan (renamed Atlanta Bliss by Prince) while ‘Mountains’ is another classic single, largely penned by Wendy & Lisa. The 12” mix has to be heard. ‘Do U Lie’ is an intoxicating little slice of soft jazz with cocktail guitar, spoken word, strings and accordion.

‘Kiss’ is another effortless classic. It was the first single to be released from Parade, hitting US number one in April ’86, though apparently loathed by the Warner Bros suits. Initially given to the band Mazarati for their debut album, it was reclaimed by Prince when he realised the potential of the track. He kept their backing vocals and gave them some money.

‘Anotherloverholenyohead’, recorded on 16 December 1985, was the last track recorded for Parade. Lisa’s crystalline, densely-voiced piano sounds like it was recorded in a school assembly hall, and there’s more peculiar guitar synth and a few incredible bass runs from Prince. The full-length version made for another classic 12” single. Album-closer ‘Sometimes It Snows In April’ is Joni all the way. Its improvised, rubato prologue is very reminiscent of the opening to Mitchell’s ‘Cotton Avenue’.

Prince delivers an amazing lead vocal but the song needs a stronger chorus (‘Sometimes I feel so bad’) and Wendy & Lisa’s backing vox are extremely rough. The track divides opinion – some find it moving, some mawkish (I’m in the latter camp) – but it was a pretty brave choice to close such an important album.

The Parade sessions also spawned some fantastic B-sides: ‘Alexa De Paris’, ‘Sexual Suicide’, ‘Power Fantastic’, ‘4 The Tears In Your Eyes’, ‘Love Or Money’, ‘All My Dreams’ and the notorious ‘Old Friends 4 Sale’. All are well worth seeking out. Despite the success of ‘Kiss’ in the States, three follow-up singles peaked outside the top 50. Prince believed that Warner Bros’ choice of second single (‘Mountains’) was wrong – it should have been ‘Girls And Boys’.

Parade sold considerably less (1.8 million) in the States than Purple Rain (10 million) and Around The World In A Day (4 million). But in Europe, it was a huge hit. Then came the European tour. A funk revue. Horns, dance routines, backing vocals. Again, virtually no lead guitar. Europe loved him – there were riots in Holland – but the tour didn’t even make the States, which many insiders believe was a big mistake. Instead, there were several separate shows under the banner of the Hit & Run Tour.

But then it was all change: Wendy & Lisa were out of the band, Prince and Susannah had broken off their engagement and ‘Under The Cherry Moon’ had stiffed. But there were still a couple of amazing albums left in the tank before Prince’s ’80s were out.

Crap Lyrics Of The 1980s (Part One)

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dynasty_wallpaper_by_mabmeddowsmercuryDuring a 1981 interview, Peter Gabriel said: ‘Many great songs have really appalling lyrics, but no great songs have had appalling music. If you’re going to write lyrics, you might as well make them try and communicate something.’

Sadly, it was a maxim ignored by many of his contemporaries in the ’80s pop pantheon… But these sad wretches have our sympathies; anyone who’s ever tried to pen a song knows the potential pitfalls.

Got a good melody? Great, but you’ve got to sustain the lyrical narrative across the whole song in a cogent way (got that, Coldplay and Keane?). Got some words? Handy, but it can be very tricky to fit a melody to ‘poetic’ ramblings. Basically, for every ‘Talking Scarlet‘, there’s a ‘With Or Without You’.

So join us as we take a trip through a collection of the sometimes inane, occasionally coarse, often totally meaningless ramblings of the 1980s. And don’t forget – sometimes these lexical disaster-areas didn’t detract from the quality of the song at all. But sometimes they did…

‘Sittin’ on a mountain, looking at the sun/Plastic fantastic lobster telephone’.
THE CULT: ‘Electric’

‘Heart of mine, sewing frenzies of steel to the sky/By night, a child in a harvest of virginal mines’.
IT BITES: ‘Midnight’

‘This morning there was joy in my heart cos I know that I loved you so/Scrambled eggs are so boring, for you’re all, all that I want to know’.
PRINCE: ‘Life Can Be So Nice’

‘She’s got eyes like saucers, oh you think she’s a dish/She is the blue chip that belongs to the big fish’.
ELVIS COSTELLO: ‘Big Sister’s Clothes’

‘I know that I must do what’s right/As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti’.
TOTO: ‘Africa’

‘Only time will tell if we can stand the test of time’.
VAN HALEN: ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’

‘I’m so bad I can suck my own d*ck’.
LL COOL J: ‘Clap Your Hands’

‘Late spring and you’re drifting off to sleep/With your teeth in your mouth’.
REM: ‘You Are The Everything’

‘Let’s go crazy, let’s get nuts/Look for the purple banana til they put us in the truck’.
PRINCE: ‘Let’s Go Crazy’

‘You set my teeth on edge/You think you’re a vegetable, never come out of the fridge/C-c-c-cucumber/ C-c-c-cabbage/C-c-c-cauliflower!’
ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN: ‘Thorn Of Crowns’

‘Where does it go from here/Is it down to the lake I fear/Ay-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya/Ah-ya/Ah-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya’
HAIRCUT ONE HUNDRED: ‘Love Plus One’

‘Oh babe/I wanna put my log in your fireplace’.
KISS: ‘Burn Bitch Burn’

‘A stripping puppet on a liquid stick gets into it pretty thick/A butterfly drinks a turtle’s tears/But how do you know he really needs it?’
ELVIS COSTELLO: ‘Deep Dark Truthful Mirror’

‘Every second counts when I am with you/I think you are a pig, you should be in a zoo’.
NEW ORDER: ‘Every Second Counts’

Miles Davis: You’re Under Arrest 30 Years Old Today

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As a teenage jazz/fusion fan and burgeoning muso, 1983’s Star People caught my ear but it was You’re Under Arrest that really captured my imagination and made me a Miles fan for life.

Everything about the package was designed to be provocative, from the garish cover design to the in-your-face but always funky music. It’s a far more colourful and multi-layered listen than the previous year’s Decoy, partly because Miles was going public with his views on police intimidation, racism and the nuclear threat for the first time (and also getting involved with the anti-apartheid movement on the Sun City project).

In the era of ‘We Are The World’, even Miles was demonstrating that he had a social conscience, but he used gallows humour and an uncanny ear for a gorgeous melody to make his points.

Between 1981 and 1984, the primary musical style of Miles’s comeback had been so-called ‘chromatic funk’, a hard-driving, minimalist style consisting mainly of one-chord vamps, heavy bass lines, frantic Latin percussion and fleet-fingered melodic heads, usually played by sax and guitar in unison (and more often than not based on transcribed John Scofield guitar solos).

But in early 1984, Miles took his band into New York’s Record Plant studios to record a whole host of pop and AOR tunes, including ‘Wild Horses’ by Nik Kershaw, Tina Turner’s ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’, Dionne Warwick’s’ ‘Deja Vu’, Michael Jackson’s ‘Human Nature’ and Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time After Time’.

Though of course Miles was by no means new to recording pop songs, it’s doubtful whether any of these were anywhere near the calibre of ‘My Funny Valentine’ or ‘It’s Only A Paper Moon’. Various 1985 band members have since expressed their dissatisfaction Miles’s ‘pop’ direction and it’s telling that only ‘Time After Time’ and ‘Human Nature’ made the cut for You’re Under Arrest (and, to be fair, became centrepieces of his live gigs until the end of his life). The other covers are yet to see the light of day.

By all accounts, the album eventually came together very quickly and just under the wire; Miles took his band into the studio and re-recorded much of the 1984 material over a very short period in January 1985, later saying that the tempos had been wrong on the original takes and that they didn’t have enough punch.

The opening ‘One Phone Call/Street Scenes’, with its sound effects, darkly-comic spoken-word shenanigans (‘Smokin’ that marijaroney’!) and fleet funk, is the kind of thing you might expect from Prince or George Clinton, but not the most famous jazz artist in the world. The track was surely a big influence on Prince’s Madhouse project and also B-sides such as ‘Movie Star’.

John McLaughlin delivers an exciting modal guitar blowout on ‘Katia’ (named after his then wife the pianist Katia Lebeque) finding endless lines to play over the one-chord vamp. Despite the dated Simmons drums and synthesized horn blasts, the track is still gripping and dramatic after all these years.

Ditto the title track, the ultimate take on ‘chromatic funk’. The ‘Jean Pierre/And Then There Were None’ medley is also arresting with its eerie sound effects and childlike celeste. Listen out for Miles’ mordant closing remark too, intended either for Reagan or recording engineer Ron Lorman (or both?).

The only tracks I really can’t take are the two ballads, ‘Time After Time’ and ‘Human Nature’. Although the latter became a really powerful live number, Miles’s playing is fairly underwhelming and the arrangements don’t add anything to the originals. But, in general, You’re Under Arrest is a really strong album and quite a stunning statement from a 59-year-old ‘jazz’ musician.

Watching footage of Miles playing live in 1985 shows what an extraordinary presence he still was – stalking the stage, sometimes whispering into his bandmates’ ears, sometimes throwing mock-right-hooks towards the camera lens – coupled with possibly his best trumpet chops during the last decade of his life.

Sheila E In Romance 1600: 30 Years Old Today

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The music biz is littered with successful solo artists who were tempted out from behind the drums.

Marvin Gaye, Teddy Pendergrass, Phil Collins, Karen Carpenter, Dave Grohl, Frank Zappa and Iggy Pop all graduated from the engine room to centre stage.

But while Sheila has never been on that level in terms of record sales or cultural impact (though trumps all of them in terms of drumming chops), her transition from sidewoman to frontwoman led to a couple of really infectious, interesting albums in the mid-’80s.

She had an enviable CV long before going solo, including percussion work with Billy Cobham, Herbie Hancock, Marvin, George Duke and Diana Ross. Prince and Sheila were a similar age and had followed each other’s careers since the late-’70s. When he tasted his first mainstream success and was looking to mentor new artists, she was top of the list.

Their first collaboration was the superb B-side ‘Erotic City’, swiftly followed by Sheila’s debut album The Glamorous Life, a hit. But its follow-up, Sheila E In Romance 1600, was a far more expansive and experimental piece, even though recording sessions were squeezed in on days off during the Purple Rain Tour between December 1984 and January 1985.

Despite Sheila’s obvious musical pedigree, Romance 1600‘s liner notes and song credits are misleading – this is a Prince album in all but name. According to biographer Per Nilsen (and as listed at the ASCAP offices), he wrote all the tracks here bar one (kicking Latin/fusion instrumental ‘Merci For The Speed Of A Clown In Summer’) and played all instruments except drums, percussion and sax.

But lucky for us, Romance 1600 was recorded smack-bang in the middle of his golden period and features some of Prince’s finest performances as a musician. His guitar solos on ‘Dear Michelangelo’ and ‘A Love Bizarre’ are simply tremendous, the latter throwing in some ridiculous bass too.

But Sheila also brings out the best in him. There’s much more humour here than on his own albums of the period. She turns in some hilariously hammy vocal performances on ‘Sister Fate’, ‘Toy Box’ and dramatic ballad ‘Bedtime Story’. Sheila and Prince were having a lot of fun and you can hear the results. Sometimes the rushed nature of the recording shows, though – the mix is very murky and the album is short of a few memorable pop hooks.

Prince’s ‘movie’ concept was in full effect here. He was leaving behind the ‘street’ style of Vanity 6/Purple Rain/The Time and embracing a romantic, ‘Amadeus’-influenced image which also crossed over into The Family project and his Parade album.

Thinking of Romance 1600 as a movie also opened up the album musically, allowing Sheila and Prince to embrace jazz (‘Yellow’), fusion, wacky synth-pop (the title track), Latin and even Third Stream. This eclectic outlook was no doubt also influenced by his Revolution bandmates Wendy and Lisa.

Sheila E In Romance 1600 was a reasonable hit, going gold in the US and reaching #50 on the Billboard chart, no doubt helped by the success of the ‘Love Bizarre’ single (US #11). Sheila toured the US for the second time in two years.

She followed up Romance 1600 with a disappointingly bland self-titled album in 1987, which featured far less contribution from Prince. More successfully, she played some fantastic drums on the Sign ‘O’ The Times and Lovesexy tours.

Ray Parker Jr.: Woman Out Of Control/Sex And The Single Man

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Years before his huge hit ‘Ghostbusters’, Ray had played guitar on some great albums of the ’70s (Stevie’s Talking Book and Innervisions, Rufus/Chaka Khan’s Rags To Rufus,  Harvey Mason’s Funk In A Mason Jar, Marvin’s I Want You, Leon Ware’s Musical Massage), not to mention sessions with the likes of Boz Scaggs, Barry White, Tina Turner, Herbie Hancock and Bill Withers.

He also enjoyed a few big hits as part of Raydio before going solo in ’82. Either side of ‘Ghostbusters’, he put out two interesting albums which are now released as a good-value two-fer by Cherry Red/Soulmusic.com.

’83’s Woman Out Of Control unleashes a kind of feminist funk with various tracks unashamedly taking the laydeez’ side in the battle of the sexes, creating something pretty original. ‘Electronic Lover’ and ‘Invasion’ also rock the kind of psych-synth-funk sound that Prince and his contemporaries were tapping into at the time.

‘85’s Sex And The Single Man, the post-‘Ghostbusters’ album, ups the stakes with a lot more fuzz-toned lead guitar and also some weird synth-pop fun on ‘Girls Are More Fun’ and ‘I’m A Dog’. ‘One Sided Love Affair’ is an amusingly-shameless ‘Hello’ rewrite and there’s some cracking Cameo-style funk/rock on the title track.

‘Men Have Feelings Too’ demonstrates more of his rhythm-guitar mastery. I was going to say that his playing sounds very Prince-influenced but it’s the other way round; check out this masterclass for the evidence. The albums were only minor hits – apparently Arista boss Clive Davis wasn’t blown away by their modest chart placings and was slow to return Parker Jr.’s call when contract-renewal time came around.

While it’s true that there’s nothing as immediate or hook-laden as ‘Ghostbusters’ on these two records, they’re definitely worth reappraising and make nice companion pieces to Miles Davis’s You’re Under Arrest, Cameo’s She’s Strange, Prince’s Purple Rain and The Time’s Ice Cream Castle. Ray’s still going strong too, playing festivals and turning up on the occasional session.

N.B. Parker Jr. has recently been subject to an out-of-court settlement regarding the similarity of ‘Ghostbusters’ to Huey Lewis And The News’ ‘I Need A New Drug’. Judge for yourself…