February 2014, and a queue of punters outside Camden’s Electric Ballroom have been shivering under purple umbrellas for several hours, their increasingly soggy morale held up only by the odd strawberry milkshake being handed out. Occasionally, they allow themselves to wonder: “Is this really worth it?” And then they remember that this is Prince, and seeing Prince is not like seeing any other artist. Especially not in a venue this tiny.
Looking for ways in which Prince was unique is not, it has to be said, the hardest of tasks. Take a look at the pop landscape and you won’t find an abundance of identity-bending pansexual funk aliens who spelled their name with a wiggly hieroglyph. But if there’s one thing that especially put a mile between Prince and his peers it was his approach to performing live. Alexis Petridis got a taste of that when he went to visit the Minnesotan’s Paisley Park studio last November and ended up sat at his feet with a bunch of fellow journos, while Prince ran through the hits, invited Petridis up for karaoke and even sung back answers to his questions – the interview reframed as a live show.
Prince actually liked to play impromptu gigs for the fans who waited outside Paisley Park all the time. He loved playing shows. And in 2014, he decided to play some shows for people in the UK. Lots of them.
It didn’t start like any other tour from a major artist. The months of warning, the billboards emblazoned with dates – there was none of that. Instead he simply turned up in Lianne La Havas’s living room – as you do – and announced that he’d be playing some intimate gigs, aptly billing the dates as the Hit and Run tour.
A few days later, there he was – at his beloved Electric Ballroom in Camden Town, backed by his all-female band, 3RDEYEGIRL, and wearing a sleeveless jacket while tearing through the likes of I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man, Something in the Water (Does Not Compute) and Fixurlifeup to a crowd of around 1,000.
Even at this stage, the precise details of what Prince would be doing in the weeks to come were hazy – late notice was his thing. He turned up at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, charging a tenner to see him rock through 150 minutes of greatest hits: When Doves Cry, Sign o’ the Times, I Would Die 4 U, Chaos and Disorder. He turned up at the Guardian on Valentine’s Day for not one but two shows at Kings Place to play, among other things, cover versions of Bill Withers’ Who Is He (And What Is He to You)? and the Clash’s Train in Vain. And he appeared at Koko for not one, not two, but three shows on the same night, inviting any fans who were left queuing at midnight into the venue for free (because that’s another thing – Prince didn’t really do curfews).
It was thrilling for fans, of course, but it wasn’t always easy. They had to stay on top of the announcements, they had to drop their plans at any given minute, and they had learn to love queuing. The Guardian’s Ian Beetlestone spoke to one guy, Ian, who had seen Prince over 100 times and still wanted more – he had travelled down from Edinburgh for the Camden Ballroom show and had been waiting since midday when we met him later that afternoon. “It’s like an abusive relationship,” he shivered. He was joking, but only half-joking.
Wrapped up in the hysteria, we started up our Prince Watch series – a blog for every show Prince played, something that seemed increasingly like a foolish errand the more and more gigs the Purple One kept adding. He turned up at Ronnie Scott’s. He turned up at Manchester’s Academy 1. Like a World Cup or Olympics, Prince’s time in the UK seemed to serve as a definable period – a giddy, joyous time that anchored where you were, what you were doing, and where your life was at.
And it made us think: if we’re struggling to keep up blogging about the gigs, how the hell is this man – 55 years old at the time – managing to play them? Because they weren’t short, and they were rarely single shows.
But this was how Prince liked to do things – rather than fit in with a system he deemed woefully inadequate for a man of his bursting talents, he simply created his own system. Fans would be largely in the dark as to what they would be getting – a string of hits? His latest material? An acoustic set? Oh, and would it be £70 or £10 or free? The sheer unpredictability was dazzling.
And it can be said with some certainty that there will be significantly less of this kind of live hi-jinx now that Prince has gone: no other major pop artists have the talent, the versatility and the sheer stamina to do it. Prince may have died at 57, but he’d already performed enough music to fill several lifetimes. And his Hit and Run UK tour served as the perfect snapshot of that.
