The One
9th August 2007, 06:37 AM
Prince at the O2: A musical Christmas pudding
Michael Deacon doesn't quite 'get' Prince at the O2
Early reviews have painted Prince as a Messiah. Picked to cover night three, I planned to stride in as the voice of cool good sense, tossing in a crack about the Purple One attracting purple prose. Then, a couple of songs in, I noticed the man in the row in front. He'd hobbled in on crutches. Now he was dancing. All right, God, you win.
The latest shuffle of the set list gave us Kiss, Pop Life, Nothing Compares 2 U (oddly jolly, his version). No 1999 or The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. Never mind. We all know he moves in mysterious ways. The O2 was sodden with adoration.
It's a startling turnaround. Or so it seems to me. I'm 26. When Prince was at his peak, in the early 1980s, I had ears only for nursery rhymes. By the time I'd got into pop, he was seen as music's dotty, odd-smelling aunt. He'd swapped his name for a symbol. He'd scrawled "SLAVE" on his face. The hits were running out. It was the reign of Britpop, and poor old Prince seemed amusingly passé: he was American, he had a sense of rhythm, and he sang about subjects other than dustmen and commuter-belt wife-swapping.
Even tonight, though, I still didn't quite get him. Technically, he's a genius. But the syrupy sax, the swaggering brass, the come-to-bed cooing, the endless, orgying guitar solos - it was just too rich. The gig was a musical Christmas pudding. He played brilliantly, everyone else had a ball, and I felt both very young and very old.
source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;jsessionid=0W1JLIQKM15GFQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQ WIV0?xml=/arts/2007/08/06/nosplit/bmprince206.xml
Michael Deacon doesn't quite 'get' Prince at the O2
Early reviews have painted Prince as a Messiah. Picked to cover night three, I planned to stride in as the voice of cool good sense, tossing in a crack about the Purple One attracting purple prose. Then, a couple of songs in, I noticed the man in the row in front. He'd hobbled in on crutches. Now he was dancing. All right, God, you win.
The latest shuffle of the set list gave us Kiss, Pop Life, Nothing Compares 2 U (oddly jolly, his version). No 1999 or The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. Never mind. We all know he moves in mysterious ways. The O2 was sodden with adoration.
It's a startling turnaround. Or so it seems to me. I'm 26. When Prince was at his peak, in the early 1980s, I had ears only for nursery rhymes. By the time I'd got into pop, he was seen as music's dotty, odd-smelling aunt. He'd swapped his name for a symbol. He'd scrawled "SLAVE" on his face. The hits were running out. It was the reign of Britpop, and poor old Prince seemed amusingly passé: he was American, he had a sense of rhythm, and he sang about subjects other than dustmen and commuter-belt wife-swapping.
Even tonight, though, I still didn't quite get him. Technically, he's a genius. But the syrupy sax, the swaggering brass, the come-to-bed cooing, the endless, orgying guitar solos - it was just too rich. The gig was a musical Christmas pudding. He played brilliantly, everyone else had a ball, and I felt both very young and very old.
source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;jsessionid=0W1JLIQKM15GFQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQ WIV0?xml=/arts/2007/08/06/nosplit/bmprince206.xml