Prince’s Around The World In A Day album - which celebrates its 40th anniversary today - might have been released less than a year after Purple Rain, but musically, it’s in another time zone.
The tone is set right from the start, on the title track, as DX7 whistles - Yamaha’s classic FM synth features heavily throughout - play a decidedly non-hummable melody. Let’s Go Crazy this is not.
In fact, Around The World In A Day is remembered as Prince’s psychedelic record. It’s no coincidence that its cover art has similarities to The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper sleeve, and the album feels like a concerted attempt to step back from the level of superstardom that Prince had now risen to.
Condition Of The Heart, for example - easily Around The World In A Day’s most beautiful song - takes an age to get going. There’s a full two minutes’ worth of piano and whistly synth noodling before we get to hear the main melody, and we’re getting close to the three-minute mark before the first verse starts.
But, this being Prince in the mid-’80s, the hooks can’t stay hidden for long. Raspberry Beret, the song that follows, is one of the purest slices of pop that Prince ever recorded, and the spiritual successor to Purple Rain’s Take Me With U. Indeed, Prince would frequently segue from one to the other during his live shows.
Second single Pop Life slaps a little harder and grooves a little quirkier, but was still a Top 10 hit in the US. The lyrically dubious America, meanwhile, has Prince reasserting himself as a lover of the funk jam.
Around The World In Day, then, isn’t so much a concept album as the sound of a man flexing his ability to do whatever he damn well pleased. Accordingly, it sold less than a fifth of Purple Rain’s 25 million copies, and, in commercial terms at least, you could argue that Prince’s career never fully recovered.
But that misses the point. On a creative level, you could also make the argument that Around The World In A Day is actually a more important album in the Prince catalogue than Purple Rain. This was him setting out his stall as someone who was willing to follow his nose, even if it meant declining sales.
After 1986’s Parade - an album good enough to withstand the critical mauling given to Under The Cherry Moon, the movie that it soundtracked - this ultimately led us to Sign o’ the Times, arguably the best record of Prince’s career, and up there as one of the greatest double albums of all time.
As Around The World In A Day turns 40, then, maybe we should say that, rather than derailing Prince’s career, it marked the moment that it really began to take flight.
