Publication: Daily Mail [UK]
Date: June 19, 1992
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Title: "He Claims To Have A Relationship With God. Says the Minister: 'The Only God He Serves Has to be Sex…'"
Written By: Staff

IS IT memory playing tricks, or were pop singers once really quite normal? Or did they just seem that way? Perhaps it's an illusion. Thirty years ago the Stones scandalised respectable opinion and even the cuddly Beatles said shocking things. Now, Mick Jagger is about to be a grandfather and Paul McCartney was 50 yesterday . . .

A new generation of rockers took over, violent and threatening Heavy Metal bands like Led Zeppelin, campy Glam Rock singers like Gary Glitter, sexually ambiguous figures like Marc Bolan.

But then came the weirdest of them all. His Royal Badness is back in Britain. No, not the Princess of Wales's name for her husband, but that other Prince, the wildest, raunchiest, lewdest rock star of them all.

On his first British appearance, at the Lyceum in 1981, Prince bemused even a hardened audience, coming on in gear the likes of which rock hadn't seen - a violet mackintosh, black pants and stockings, stiletto bootees.

And that was before he started singing. It was at the time of his third album, Dirty Mind, and the title was no exaggeration. Two of its songs were Sister and Head, daintily discussing incest and oral sex respectively.

Prince opened his new British tour at Earls Court on Monday, and will be playing there before Manchester and Glasgow. The latest number he sings is called Sexy Mf, that being an abbreviation which is spelled out in full on stage.

And he says himself that: 'Sex is the most important thing in the world. That's why I love to write about it. I believe in being honest about sexuality.'

Conveniently enough, honesty is the best policy financially speaking. All these songs are delivered by that extraordinary figure, tiny but dynamic, his pelvis gyrating and pumping, boy-girl, man-child, black- white, designed to discomfit the most laid-back audience.

JUST what is this phenomenon? Can he be real? Is the act sincere, or is it just a commercial confection designed to shock and titivate?

One thing about him is authentic, funnily enough, and unlike any number of other rock musicians from Ringo Starr to Sting and that is his name. There is some learned debate among rock scholars as to whether he was named after a band in which his torch-singer mother sang, or after his father's dog. But he is in fact called Prince Rogers Nelson.

He was born on June 7, 1958 - not 1960 as his publicity material claimed for years. He wasn't born in the South where most blacks Americans originally come from, or in one of the big 'gritty cities' like New York or Chicago. Prince comes from Minneapolis.

This town used to be thought something of a backwater in the far midwest, but nowadays it has its own lively rock scene, and Prince still has his studio there.

If his childhood wasn't happy, that wasn't because he was brought up in the traditional grinding poverty of black musicians, but because he comes from a broken home. His parents were both musicians, and they separated when Prince was young.

His famous first film Purple Rain was more or less autobiographical. His parents weren't mixed, as the parents of The Kid in the film are. They were both black, but the boy did have a hard time emotionally. Other kids screamed 'ugly' and 'Princess' at him in the playground. He was the true outsider.

'Princess' might suggest he was a a cissy, or something for which British schoolchildren have plenty of names. But however androgynous his appearance, however camp his manner, one thing Prince never had any doubt about was his liking for the opposite sex. He was still living at home until his father, a strict Seventh Day Adventist, found him with a girl in his room and threw the boy out.

After that he was shuttled around relatives until he settled into the home of Bernadette Anderson. 'I was constantly running from family to family,' says Prince.

She was a formidable woman, a soul mother living with six children but, like all too many black American woman, without a husband.

It was in the basement of Bernadette's house that Prince created his own private dream world, a wildly over-the-top fur-lined lair which was later recreated in Purple Rain.

His best friend then was Mrs Anderson's son Andre. Years later Andre gave an explicit interview about what he and Prince had got up to with droves of girls in that basement. When it was published, Mrs Anderson told him off, with a nice understatement: 'I said to him, 'Boy, why'd you do that? Makes me look like I'm too fast!' '

PRINCE ROGERS NELSON was a gifted and precocious musician, but playing, to begin with, for a limited audience. Decades ago, the American music industry had what now seems at best a hilarious phrase 'race music', meaning pop for blacks. And Prince's own breathy early songs were aimed at other black teenagers.

But Prince wasn't just 'young, gifted and black', he was very ambitious. He knew where he wanted to go, and he was going there. He soon 'crossed over', in a slightly cynical phrase, to a larger white audience.

There was a good deal about his career which was cynical. The Official Version of Prince's story has him doing it all his way, a brilliant musician struggling unaided and determined to keep his integrity. In real life, things weren't quite as simple as that.

Soft and Wet wasn't all his own work, it was written by Chris Moon, an Englishman living in America who wrote lyrics and had his own studio.

When he met Prince, he took him for a shy and unassuming young man. 'I thought: 'There's a guy with not much ego. Why not work with him?' ' There may have been bigger misunderstandings in rock history, but not many.

Moon then passed Prince on to Owen Husney, a Minneapolis businessman whose background wasn't music but advertising. Maybe that was appropriate enough. Prince's career was about to become - among other things - a triumph of hype.

It was Husney who took the lissom lad to Los Angeles and negotiated an historic deal with Warner Brothers. Not yet 20 (in theory; that was at the time they lopped a little off his age) he was to have a three-album contract, with complete artistic control over the production of the records.

This sounds like a triumph of artistic integrity over the industry moguls. In reality the marketing men had begun the Packaging of Prince. His name was shortened and he was turned into a midsex icon. It was at this time that the carefully worked-out legend of Prince began: He is the musician with the permanent food-taster (even though he never eats anything but macaroni cheese), he bathes in lemon juice and when touring he takes his own bed linen everywhere, even to the most expensive hotels.

With a delicately-built boy of five-foot-two, there are obvious limits about marketing him macho, so they presented him as something else.

On the sleeve of his first album he sat, doe-eyed, fawn-like, stark naked except for a guitar dandled in the right place. It wasn't all hype. As rock musicians go, Prince is genuinely talented. Apart from writing and singing, he claims to play up to 27 instruments.

On stage he can't draw on that technical sophistication and has to rely on something else. It didn't come easily. This dynamic gnome wasn't a natural live performer. In 1981, he supported the Rolling Stones at a concert in Los Angeles. Bill Wyman remembers: 'He could only stay on stage for two or three songs 'cos the crowd threw things at him. He made great records, but he couldn't perform on stage. He's got it together now.'

So he has, and so scores of thousands of fans are witnessing at present. And yet the effect of energy is largely calculated. This is the secret of Prince's success. He is a very tough nut, ambitious and canny under the manic display. Not nmuch ego? He has that and to spare and knows how to channel it. He understands his audience, and the techniques of manipulating them.

Look at Purple Rain, his real breakthrough. In many ways it wasn't much of a film. The plot is feeble, most of the acting is lousy and yet the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, thanks to Prince's intelligent scheming as much as his drive.

Not surprisngly, he boasts about the movie. 'People said it was unreleasable,' he chuckles which in some ways it was, but thanks to shrewd packaging and marketing it grossed $44 million and its soundtrack was a bestseller.

There may even be something a little calculated about Prince's sex-crazed image. He never gives interviews; well, almost never and then for careful effect, and claims to guard his privacy fanatically. Somehow or other though we know all about the women in his life.

There was Sheena Easton, with whom he worked on a number of songs. He took out Kim Basinger and she was to have starred in Graffiti Bridge, Prince's third film (Under the Cherry Moon was the second but it flopped).

And it seems, or we've somehow found out, that Prince has run through the female talent on his Paisley Park label: Apollonia, Jill Jones, Sheila E. Cat. Even this might look nicely calculated. After all, bonking is saucy, but it isn't illegal.

What Prince has adroitly kept clear of is anything that might have got him into trouble, unlike some of his associates. His bodyguard Big Chick Huntsberry, who sank so low that he had to sell his lawnmower to pay for his cocaine habit (at least he may have avoided thereby the 'bizarre gardening accident' in which Spinal Tap's drummer died).

Of course Prince is attacked as a reprobate, by friends as well as foes. His former guitarist Dez Dickerson says that, as a Christian: 'I was having enormous problems going onstage in front of ten-year-olds and singing songs about incest,' and one sees his point.

Easy to understand also the fundamentalist preacher Dan Peters who refuses to believe that Prince has a 'relationship with God'. 'As far as I can tell,' he says, 'the God he serves has to be his genitals.'

But then again, maybe that's a little unfair or naive. The other God Prince Rogers Nelson has served very faithfully is his bank balance.