Prince: 'I've got more hits than Madonna's got babies!' Photograph: Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images
Prince returned to London last night for the first in a much-ballyhooed 21-night residency of gigs at the O2 arena. While his most recent album Planet Earth (of the Mail on Sunday giveaway controversy) got lukewarm-to-downright poor reviews, the critics were overwhelmingly positive about this master performer's live show.
"The priapic midget, who has concocted some kind of personal mythology equating sex and spirituality, conducts his shows as multi-orgasmic events in which one climax detonates after another," claimed the Telegraph's Neil McCormick. Our own Alexis Petridis agreed in less post-coital fashion, calling the evening "wildly impressive", apart from a section where "he invites crowd members onstage and they dance in the most excruciating manner imaginable, he vanishes for 10 minutes, leaving us in the company of a lengthy instrumental easy listening cover of What a Wonderful World". The Times' Stephen Dalton applauded a "polished and choreographed affair, yet oddly old-fashioned, featuring cheer leader-style dancers and a hefty dollop of vaudeville showmanship." This may have been the slight Las Vegas element long term fan Sanjiv Ahluwalia noticed in the BBC's otherwise glowing appraisal.
Ultimately, the show seemed to work because Prince stuffed it full of hits, of which he has more, as he pointed out in a good joke onstage, "than Madonna's got babies!" As the Sun noted, the audience-friendly tone was set by the fact that opening number was 1984 smash Purple Rain. And if that wasn't enough to remind people of the old glory days, there was speculation that the "perverse pixie" is behaving a) eccentrically and b) pervily. He's supposedly going out with his backing dancers - twins.
Did you see him last night? Are you going over the next few weeks? Tell us what you thought of the purple imp's performance below.
