Music like a river

SO SEXY, freedom. So sexy, he couldn’t begin to explain it. Free to put on mascara, paint his lips, glue on long eyelashes to lower, flutter and seduce. Wear any colour, especially purple, but also electric blue, scarlet, glitter-silver and eye-aching lizard green. Strut in ruffles, squeeze in black leather, preen his naked midriff, shake his naked ass out of a yellow jumpsuit. Stack his heels, until his elfin figure became a giant. Dance with a white man, writhe with a black woman, kiss both, couple with either, be both races and sexes and neither in one cat-like, commanding frame. And, along the way, sell more than 100m records worldwide.

Free in his music, too. Brutal as a rapper, tender as a balladeer, swooping smoothly from bass to falsetto. Astounding on guitar, soaring off into a universe of riffs and improvisations. At the half-time concert at the Super Bowl at Miami in 2007, in torrential rain, he seemed unable to stop; and it was the same on piano, keyboards, percussion, drums. He played 27 instruments on his first album, “For You”, in 1978, but felt he had the hang of thousands.

A thousand genres, too, from funk (“Kiss”), dance (“Uptown”), rock (“The Cross”), techno (“New World”), pop (“When Doves Cry”), obscenity (“Jack U Off”), beauty (“Nothing Compares 2 U”) and all the world in between. Half a dozen genres in the same song, sometimes. The rhythm & blues of Little Richard, the soul of Sly Stone, the clicks and whoops of Michael Jackson, James Brown, Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye, Duke Ellington, were mixed up, fused, made fantastic, and poured in astonishing profusion through his guitar. If he couldn’t get the music out of his head, everyone’s music as well as his, he couldn’t function.

Most necessary of all was the freedom to reinvent who he was, throw the world off his track, and hide. In the mid-1980s he refused to give interviews, reducing any to the statement: “I’m looking 4 the ladder.” When writing songs for other people he hid behind the names “Jamie Starr” and “Alexander Nevermind”. In the wake of his album “Purple Rain” (1984), which sold more than 20m copies, became a film and won him an Academy Award for best score, he made a cult of that colour, like a cloak. The best ruse came in 1993 when he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol that combined, gracefully, the male and female signs. It couldn’t even be whispered; he drew it on the air. If people called him Prince, he didn’t know who they were referring to. His name was right there, beautifully enciphered: all he was, and all his music was about.

There was also a sharp point behind it. He was fighting his recording company, Warner Bros, because they weren’t releasing his albums fast enough to keep up with the music inside him. He was defying them because the name “Prince” was now their property, not his. Not even the rights to his own songs belonged to him. He wasn’t going to be yet another black entertainer selling his soul, as Little Richard had, for a new car and a bucket of chicken. He’d got a pink Cadillac thanks to Warner Bros; that was enough. At the Brit Awards in 1995 his 13 words of thanks concluded: “In concert: Perfectly free. On record: Slave.” “SLAVE” was written on his face too, in bold black pen. After 19 years he wrestled free, putting out an album called “Emancipation” and answering to Prince again.He made a stand for all black musicians, not just himself.

Uncatchable

Could anything pin him down? Not women: his two marriages were unhappy, and didn’t last. Not time: his sense of it was limited to an indefinite future, his appearances onstage usually late. Not expectations, because he could cancel shows on a whim and then as suddenly put them on, impromptu, all-night and free. Not religion, because his fervour as a fresh-minted vegan, teetotal Jehovah’s Witness came and went, together with the spirits who sometimes ordered him around.

Roots defined him slightly. He was born and schooled in Minnesota and stayed loyal to it, supporting the Timberwolves, sneaking into the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis and building his studio complex at Paisley Park in Chanhassen. There, though, he was as elusive as ever, not to be caught on any recording device, including mobile phones. Fleeting impressions only, like vivid strobes. The internet bothered him, and he strove to ban his music from Spotify, iTunes and anywhere where he could not control it. For a while he tried to ban his showman’s likeness, too.

Only one thing held him. He felt its tingling grip when he was seven, struggling to be good enough to be allowed to play his father’s piano. It possessed him at Minneapolis Central High School: all those hours in the music room, his already-high-teased hair nodding over the keys, after his friends had gone home. It roared through his body on the stage like a river without end. At Paisley Park, if he was not at his purple grand piano, he would be recording; and though he produced 39 studio albums, four in his last 19 months alone, he still had shelves of recordings that were not quite ready, not sufficiently perfect, in his vault: enough material (some said) to make annual albums for the next hundred years.

To be bound to music was sexier even than freedom. So he let it fill both his days and his white, unsleeping nights.