The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Someone once said of Jimi Hendrix that he was “an ordinary guy, except that when he made his breakfast he had a guitar hanging round his neck”. Prince is the same kind of obsessive. When he tours, he arranges studio time in every city. Booking hotels, he’s been known to ask for his room to be soundproofed and a PA installed. It’s 24/7 with this dude.

Yet Prince’s story is more about inspiration than perspiration. He plays guitar with a grace and effortlessness that likewise recall Hendrix. He’s a singer to rival Curtis Mayfield, a piano player to rival Jerry Lee Lewis, and a pop songwriter to rival pretty much anyone. With his eighties output he lit up the decade like some crazy one-man Beatles. Steeped in soul, blues, funk, jazz and Motown, his songs were enlivened further by a sex obsession so relentless you wondered if he ever actually had sex at all.

After years in decline, Prince broke out the hits for his Musicology jaunt of 2004, with the result that it was that year’s highest-grossing tour. A lesson was drawn, and tonight finds his Purpleness playing the 14th of 21 dates at a 20,000-capacity arena, all fully sold out on the promise that this is the UK’s chance to hear a legend “per4ming his greatest hits 4 the last time”.

The venue is basically a boxing arena vying for space with a food court and a cinema inside the hated Millennium Dome. Yet once they drop the house lights, pump in the dry ice and illuminate the inevitably ‘Symbol’-shaped stage, it matters not a jot. Indeed, the show opens with a moment of heart-stopping drama, as a white-clad Prince rises majestically through a trapdoor and bursts straight into ‘1999’. When that segues into ‘Take Me With You’, you can scarcely keep your jaw off the floor.

It’s such a devastating one-two that Prince can afford to lord it for a while, and he does. He plays a new song, ‘Guitar’, in which a brilliant riff overpowers absurd lyrics. Next, Will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas guests on an elongated ‘Musicology’, which mutates into ‘Play That Funky Music’. Like his cover of Chic’s ‘Le Freak’, it’s fine, but you wonder why someone with such a gem-strewn back catalogue would bother with covers.

We do get plenty of Prince hits tonight, and it’s a joy to luxuriate in the pulsing sleaze of ‘Kiss’, ‘Purple Rain’’s rasping desperation and the all-out mania of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’, particularly if, as a kid, you used to drape a purple towel over your shoulders and mime along to these songs on a plastic guitar. Yet there emerges a gap between what Prince wants to play and what his audiences want to hear. It’s striking that he manages only short snatches of ‘Diamonds and Pearls’, ‘Alphabet Street’ and ‘Sign o’ the Times’, yet finds room both for a bass solo and for ‘The Rules’, basically a Swiss Toni routine set to R&B.

Still, Prince has always been a maverick to the core, and he’d never be comfortable running through the same checklist of hits night after night. Ultimately you can forgive him his indulgences, because his vanity can never quite outrun his rampaging talent, and because when you’ve heard him play a ‘Cream’ or a ‘U Got the Look’ you know you’ve been in the presence of greatness.

At the after-show, he plays for 90 minutes. Like I say: 24/7.

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