Tag: dez dickerson

2 Prince: Parade

~ Lex Leeson ~ Leave a comment

Yeah, I was completely baiting you when I said that this 1986 stone cold classic and eighth stop on our annual trawl through the most interesting back catalogue in 20th century pop might have been named the best album of 2025. It isn’t, and no Prince album on this journey ever will be named as the album of the year: While these annual lists can contain records from all kinds of points in recent and ancient musical history (this year’s list already has ancient texts dating all the way back from 2022), the #1 album always needs to have been released in the qualifying 12 month period. I’m not saying that my personal favourite ever Prince album would have been named #1 if it could, all I’m saying is that it couldn’t. It also means the competition announced on Christmas Day is still open! Nobody’s won it yet! Nobody’s entered it, admittedly, but I assume that’s because all my millions (and millions!) of readers are still just thinking really hard about it.

By 1986, it had essentially always been Prince and The Revolution. Ever since Prince needed a backing band to tour his recently released (and completely self-composed) debut album in 1979, that group (Dez Dickerson on guitar and backing vocals, Andre Cymone on bass guitar, Bobby Z on drums and percussion, Gayle Chapman on keyboards and, obviously, Matt “Dr.” Fink on keyboards) may not have had an official name yet, but they were the first building blocks of what would soon become by far and away Prince’s greatest ever collaborators. When Gayle Champman was replaced by  Lisa Coleman in 1980 and Brown Mark replaced Andre Cymone the year after, this thrillingly tight and unbelievably exciting live band were considered at least enough of a part of the Prince package to be given… a hidden backwards credit on the ‘1999‘ album cover.

Goodness will guide us if love is inside us?

#7 Prince: Dirty Mind

~ Lex Leeson ~ 10 Comments

We’re into year three of my potentially lifelong commitment to annually live with and reevaluate each one of Prince’s officially released albums. Why? Because shut up, that’s why. We’re due to finish with ‘HITnRUN Phase 2’ in 2046 if we ignore those weird years where he didn’t release an official record (1983, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2005, 2008, 2011-13. What are known as the ‘dark ages’). Currently, we’re still on a somewhat appropriate 40th anniversary flex, so in 2020 we come to 1980’s seminal* ‘Dirty Mind’.

(*or should that be semenal?? No. No, ‘seminal’ is the correct spelling. I just checked)

After his first two albums, all things considered, Prince was really nothing special aside from an admittedly talented performer with the nice little gimmick of being able to play a lot of instruments. Aside from taking a little detour into filthiness with Soft and Wet and proving his rock chops, if only briefly, with I’m Yours, his first album was deserving of little more than a polite applause for the ability on show. His second album, although technically superior in almost every sense, containing his first hit in the heavily disco influenced I Wanna Be Your Lover and, to me, his first stone cold classic in When We’re Dancing Close and Slow* , it was actually frustrating to listen to 40 years later with the benefit of hindsight and knowing exactly what this talent would one day become. There was close to nothing to these albums, they were more often than not box ticking genre albums. Where was the invention? Where was the subversion? Where was the star quality? There was next to no clue where Prince was about to take his sound, his image or his provocativeness.

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