Yeah, that skinny motherfucker with the high voice released a film in 1987 as well.
Of course, you won’t know my (scientifically correct) opinions on the accompanying album of the same name until the end of year list, but I think it’s fair to say that the March release of Prince’s ninth album had been reasonably well received in 1987. He chose to mark the release with a tour of Europe, which He’d grown attached to since filming ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ in France the year before. Prince never liked long roll outs and advance warnings for tours and gigs, preferring to perform as spontaneously as logistically possible when you’re filling stadiums. This was obviously very fulfilling artistically, but in practice it was a huge pain in the arse for the circle of people around you who were forced to put your insane ideas into practice with little to no notice. Like when you’re tour manager Jeff Mason and Prince has decided He has very specific designs based around the concept of the soon to be iconic record sleeve:
“Prince handed me an 8.5 inch by 11 inch piece of paper with some doodles on it. He was detailing a set. He just tore it from a notebook and said to me ‘Make this'”
The whole thing required casts that were made in the USA and dollies that needed to be sourced in Europe, and a heavy use of LED signs, which were not common in stadiums at the time. Being the home of the only company that could produce massive neon signs that flashed ‘LOVE’, ‘SEX’ and ‘GIRLS’ at such short notice ensured that Redditch, Worcestershire will forever have a place in rock and roll history. Did it inspire Redditchian Harry Styles to call his song that? The location the LED signs were sourced from lead to the tour directors to decide they may as well sort out the stage design in the nearby Birmingham NEC, This meant that Prince and His new post-Revolution band could rehearse there for three weeks, interspersed with Prince challenging people to basketball matches on the NEC’s courts (post-match pancake serving unconfirmed). Then -BAM! – the band were out on tour. Playing to 25 thousand people in Stockholm, 20 thousand in Berlin, 30 thousand in Zurich, 20 thousand in Vienna, 35 thousand in Milan, 65 thousand in Paris, 100 thousand in Utrecht… All building toward a massive two nights at London’s Wembley Stadium..
Except those Wembley shows never happened. Prince’s reason for cancelling potentially two of the biggest gigs of His career are predictably obtuse. Some people say it was because of the weather, with one gig in Utrecht being rained on to such an extent that it convinced Prince not to do another outdoor gig in unpredictable weather. Others say that it was out of concern for the show’s quality and the fan’s experience. Other’s suggest that Prince’s childhood epileptic seizures made Him particularly wary of electric shock in a rainstorm. The tour’s make up stylist Terra Hinrichs says it would have been because He didn’t want to mess up His hair. However, Prince fan and director Jeymes Samuel (The Bullits) has a far more carny explanation that Hulk Hogan would be proud of:
“We all knew Prince couldn’t sell out two nights at Wembley Stadium. Michael Jackson could do Wembley Stadium. Prince couldn’t. He was cool. He wasn’t popular like that… The only person who’s cancelled Wembley Stadium. He wasn’t selling out those tickets”
quoted in ‘Prince: A Sign o’ the Times’ by John McKie
Half empty stadiums? That doesn’t work for me, brother. Just as Prince liked to book shows with short notice, He could also potentially cancel them at equal whims. Ah well, everything was shipped back to Minneapolis in preparation for the American leg of the tour and… Oh, nope, there’s not going to be an American leg of the tour. It would lead Jeff Mason to call the Sign ☮︎’ the Times tour “One of the best tours in the world hardly anyone in the world ended up seeing“. Because, remember, when you’re American, foreign people don’t count. To the horror of his record company, Prince just decided that He wasn’t going to tour ‘Sign ☮︎’ the Times’ in His home country. Instead, He had an idea for another movie: ‘The Dawn’.
By this point, ‘SOTT’ had been released more than three months ago and Prince was understandably eager to move onto His next thing. And He had an amazing idea for a movie, which would be “A black West Side Story” and would star Lenny Kravitz, according to Mazarati member Tony Christian. According to director Albert Magnoli the movie would be set in a “Fantastical city somewhere in the U.S., and in that city was police abuse, violence, crime… all the problems we’re having socially now. Good and evil would battle for supremacy“. Unfortunately, at the point of Prince cancelling His American tour in 1987, ‘The Dawn’ had no script, cast, scheduling or really anything beyond a vague conversation with Albert Magnoli while they filmed the U Got the Look video around the time one of the Sign ☮︎’ the Times tour Paris gigs. No biggie, thought Prince, let’s just shoot a concert movie to keep the Americans happy while we sort out the logistics of the proper film.
Prince was already in the habit of recording every one of His live shows in order to watch back that night after the gig to pick up on any imperfections. Prince flew out a complete film crew from all over the world at less than 24 hours notice in order to capture the last four nights of the Sign ☮︎’ the Times European tour in Rotterdam and Antwerp. Prince insisted that it be filmed on highest quality 35mm, but unfortunately that caused problems catching the shows lighting and so almost all of the footage was unusable. Fuck it, thought Prince, Let’s just do it at Paisley Park.
The newly built Paisley Park had a soundstage 2ith 55 feet ceilings, so why the hell not? So the production crew were informed that, actually, this hugely expensive and extravagant set would not need to be transported to Wembley Stadium, but can you all please arrange for it to come to Minneapolis, please? Chop chop now, no time to waste. Another issue was the European crowds of just under 10 thousand that now had to be spliced into Paisley Park performances that sometimes only around one hundred people. Some performances could contain up to one thousand ‘fans; for which Jeff Mason had to arrange an occupancy permit to be allowed to hire all the extras needed. And then Prince decided that the audio tracks captured in Europe were also not the quality He wanted, so the band just recorded the whole of the music again. Sometimes He’d want to sing to match the audio from the concerts in Rotterdam and Antwerp, sometimes He’d want an entirely new performance, sometimes He’d just lip sync with the intention of recording a singing track later in the studio. The film editor, Steve Purcell, was never let into Prince’s reasoning. And when He wasn’t onstage, Prince would constantly be making demands on set like getting a new neon sign that said “SQUIRREL MEAT!”. “Nobody wanted to be around him”, says Mason, “Because they are going to be told to do more”. The live show recorded in Rotterdam and/or Antwerp eventually just became mostly the band recording and filming for ten days in Paisley Park.
Yet despite this hectic and chaotic production, the film is an unqualified success. So spectacularly shot, acted and directed* that it was honestly only when I started researching for this post that I realised that it wasn’t a completely legitimate concert movie, despite having seen it multiple times. Like, OK, I knew that bit where it cuts to the U Got the Look video wasn’t completely on the level, but the rest of it is kosher, surely?! That energy is too real! The performance too spontaneous! That thousands deep crowd just sounds far too vivid! It’s such an effective piece of live musical cinema that you’d never believe that it was almost entirely a facade, and that incredibly vivid crowd is often little more than acoustic effect using a state of the art Quantec Room Simulator. But it’s still real to me, dammit!! In no other movies – including all the ones that were actually recorded live – is the magical intensity of the very best live music properly captured on film. Honestly, I think the closest challenger would be the ‘Purple Rain’ movie. I guess the unfair advantage of featuring rock music’s greatest ever performer is a bit of a game ending buff that needs to be nerfed in the next update. Seeing it on IMAX for the film’s 2025 (thirty… eighth anniversary…?) rerelease was a near religious experience, and having also once experienced the real thing I can only imagine the movie’s popularity growing over time as it truly is the closest thing you can now do to watch Prince perform live.
(*Prince is credited as the director – proving there was at least one type of movie he was also a genius at making – though ‘Purple Rain‘ director Albert Magnoli was apparently a very close advisor)
Not bad, considering that this was just meant to keep those pesky Americans sweet in lieu of a tour while Prince worked on his next ambitious movie project. And because of that, it really is the Sign ☮︎’ the Times tour – every song is from the 1987 album save Now’s the Time – a Charlie Parker cover performed by the rest of the band while Prince was offstage taking a shit or whatever – and a brief snippet of Little Red Corvette before Housequake. It would absolutely tide Yankee fans over until ‘The Dawn’s big premiere at Mann’s Chinese Theatre.
Erm, no, said Warner Brothers, who had never asked for this fucking film in the first place and weren’t going to just cough up for distribution now having lost millions on ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ the previous year. Prince decided to finance the film’s distribution Himself, giving him early practice of having to circumnavigate media companies in order to get the stuff he wanted out to the public. When I review ‘SOTT’ at the end of the year, we’ll talk about the previous – and first – big bust up with a record label in a relationship that had previously been relatively frictionless. These bumps in the rod would start coming pretty fast.
Hmmm? What’s that you say? ‘The Dawn’?? What the hell is ‘The Dawn‘???
Ooooooh, that movie thing? Yeah, by the time the ‘Sign ☮︎’ the Times’ movie came out, Prince had pretty much moved on from that idea as well (at least for now). I feel it will come as little surprise, dear reader, that (a night falls and a bomb falls) nobody got to see ‘The Dawn’. However, considering that the idea for ‘The Dawn’ is widely believed to have eventually become 1990’s solid turd stinkerino ‘Graffiti Bridge’, we really dodged a bullet by instead getting the most inarguably brilliant film of Prince’s career. Prince moved on quickly from whatever the hell that movie was, confident that the record company wouldn’t dare upset him again once they heard his next project, ‘The Funk Bible’, which was coming out before the end of the year. No, ‘The Black Album‘! That’s the next record!!
I feel it will come as little surprise, dear reader…
