Purple rain --- Prince --- 1984 (Warner Bros)
A true classic album and one every serious music fan should hear, "Purple rain" marked the beginning of an, ahem, purple patch for Prince, who had come from relative obscurity via albums like "Dirty mind" and "Controversy" to explode upon the scene with 1982's "1999" (if that doesn't sound a contradiction in terms: it isn't) and grab the charts by the balls with hit singles such as "Little red Corvette" and the title track. Although "1999" is seen as his breakthrough album --- and it was: prior to this, if you mentioned his name people would ask "Prince? Prince who?" --- his biggest success and mainstream acceptance would come with this album. Whereas "1999" was essentially a disco/dance/funk album, "Purple rain" established the dimunitive one forever as a true rock artiste. There are few rock fans who will tell you they don't have this in their collection, or have at least heard it, and while it still retains the lingering influences from the previous album in hits like "When doves cry" and "I would die 4 U", the title track, "Let's go crazy", "Take me with U" and others have rock writ large all over them.
A man who would change his image more frequently than most of us change our socks, who would reinvent himself more times than Kylie, Prince rose to international fame both on this album and on the film to which it is the soundtrack. Being such, it is also quite staggering that the album has to date sold in excess of twenty million copies worldwide, and is ranked as one of the most important albums in music history. It features his sometime band, The Revolution, whom he would later part company with, and would go on to become one of the best-selling albums of 1984, define a sound and an era, and raise Prince to iconic superstar status, a position from which he would only voluntarily retire, later eschewing even his name and becoming known as a symbol, "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince".
But all that was in the future, and at the time of release this was the must-have album, and whether you saw the movie and then bought the album or vice versa, most of us did both. To be honest, the movie's not much to write home about, as I'm sure our resident movie buff Exoskeletal will tell you: you see it mostly for the music, which is kind of ironic really as you can hear that on the album. But the album: well, that's something else entirely. Nobody would claim it's a perfect album, and there are tracks on it which are weaker than others, but the strong ones are so strong that they more than compensate for the less impressive ones. It starts and ends well, and in between there are some real gems.
"Let's go crazy" opens the album, with a deep church organ and Prince's voice intoning a prayer, then the percussion hits in like a a hammer, squealing guitar and keyboards join in and we're off a a rip-roaring pace on a rocker with a lot of dance and funk energy, featuring a guitar solo that helps cement Prince as one of the most innovative axemen of the eighties and nineties. A song that's hard to stay still while listening to, it also rides along on the bubbly keyboards of the equally bubbly Lisa Coleman, who with bandmate Wendy Melvoin would later go on to form the duo Wendy and Lisa. Big heavy guitar ending and we're into "Take me with U", almost eighties Genesis in its melody, slower but still moving along nicely; sense of The Bangles' "Manic Monday" in it too, not surprisingly as it was Prince who wrote the number one hit for the girls.
Nice solid keyboard arrangement backed up by cellos and violins, but as ever it's Prince's high falsetto vocal that dominates proceedings, a voice which would become almost ubiquitous over the next ten years as he had hit after hit on album after album. Nice backing vocals too from Apollonia Kotero. Much more stripped-down then is "The beautiful ones", carried mostly on a bassline and lilting piano melody complementing Prince's high vocal throughout the song, the first slow song on the album, on which you really hear the man's soul roots coming through. It also features some spoken vocals from Prince, and definitely has a sense of motown smooth soul about it. Great little unfussed guitar solo thrown in too, though the song is mostly driven on the keyboards and piano combination. Near the end Prince's voice gets harsher, more desperate, almost emulating the late Micheal Jackson at times.
Wendy and Lisa get to take the opening lines for "Computer blue", a very funky, poppy number with an uptempo beat and bouncy guitar, not one of my favourites on the album I have to say. When I spoke in the introduction about weaker tracks, this is one I consider to fall into that category. It's okay, but I somehow never remember it when I play the album. It just seems a little empty to me, almost more an instrumental in many ways considering how little there is in the song in terms of lyrics. I guess it's a good workout for the band though. Again I hear Genesis melodies in here, including one from Mike and the Mechanics' later "All I need is a miracle", so I guess you'd have to say Mike Rutherford half-inched that riff for himself from Prince.
Another weak track for me is "Darling Nikki", which marches along on a hard synth line rather like something out of a Tom Waits album, some nice talkbox guitar and heavy percussion, but again it's one I tend to either skip or forget when I play this album. The last two minutes of the song feature a fairly strong and insistent organ passage courtesy of Dr. Fink, sax and then a Laurie Andersonesque vocal ending which segues into some sort of African/gospel chant, sounds like backward masking to be honest. Totally weird.
Luckily, that's the end of the weak tracks, and if you haven't heard "When doves cry", how is Mars these days? A massive number one hit for Prince, it's built on a stop/start synth line and echoing drumbeat, with some of Prince's best vocals on the album, much of them double-tracked. It's also one of the few songs I know that has no bass line at all, and consists of a number of loops. Synthesiser plays of course a large part in the song, painting the backdrop, and Prince's guitar solo in it really adds teeth to what is essentially a dance tune. It ends with a choral vocal harmony and orchestral style keyboard passage. Next up is a rippling disco piece, "I would die 4 U" --- I'm not sure, but I think Prince may have started this whole craze of using numbers to represent words: I know I had never seen it in use before he came along --- with a ticking, sweeping drumbeat and some nice synthy guitar, keyboards naturally the main instrument and Prince's vocal less falsetto than on previous tracks.
The premise of the movie, in case you haven't seen it, is that Prince begins as a support act, trying to make it big, and of course by the end of the film he is the main attraction, and this is the subject of the penultimate track, "Baby I'm a star", which basically runs almost directly from the previous one and maintains the same sort of fast disco beat, but with harder percussion and some dancy piano lines. Guitar is also much more to the fore here, some good backing vocals from Wendy and Lisa, but the undeniable standout is the closer, and title track.
It's more than likely you've heard "Purple rain", but just in case: it opens with a twangy guitar, then develops into one of the most heart-wrenchingly pure ballads you've ever heard, with soulful, emotional vocal from Prince, and though I mentioned that "When doves cry" was one of his best vocal performances on the album, here he's saved the very best till last. Almost a reincarnation of Hendrix, he stands alone onstage, spotlit as the band plays behind him, pouring out his heart to the world ---
I never meant to cause you any sorrow/ Never meant to cause you any pain" --- and it's about as far removed as possible from the dancefloor levity of the last few tracks, a true ballad based in the old blues tradition with some powerful piano backed by violin and cello to create the almost unbearably emotional atmosphere the song weaves. It ends on one of the most evocative and moving guitar solos I've heard in a long time, coupled with a wounded, cathartic vocal from the man who would be Prince. Just a stunning end to an album which, while it is not perfect, nevertheless has gone down, deservedly, as a classic of the time.
TRACKLISTING
1. Let's go crazy
2. Take me with U
3. The beautiful ones
4. Computer blue
5. Darling Nikki
6. When doves cry
7. I would die 4 U
8. Baby I'm a star
9. Purple rain
As time went on, and he became more and more famous, Prince began to see through the sham that is the music business and he shunned celebrity, eventually almost withdrawing completely from the public eye, changing his name and slapping the internet basically with an injunction, forbidding sites like YouTube and Ebay to carry any of his videos, likenesses, or music. It seems he took his own advice in the opener to this album and went a bit mad, draconianally demanding any and all references to him be removed from fansites, blogs, anything at all. As a result of this, his music can never be carried by stores like itunes, which seems a bit silly as they're legal and surely that would only provide more revenue for him? Although it seems he may have relented upon this a little recently.
Two years ago he released his new album as a completely free covermounted CD with daily newspapers, and has been quoted as saying "The internet is completely over". While you perhaps have to take a lot of what the little guy says with a large pinch of salt, you can't deny the power or popularity of his music, and though later albums may have changed, morphed and transformed his sound, "Purple rain" stands as a monument to one time he got it completely right, and wrote for himself a chapter in the history of music.