Archive interview with John Blackwell

Purple Reign

He’s one of the greatest performers on the face of this funky earth and he’s about to touch down in Dublin for his first Irish show in nearly a decade. Celina Murphy talks to the people who know and revere him, including drummer John Blackwell – the man Prince himself describes as The Best In The World.

For such a small human being, Prince Rogers Nelson has earned himself a lot of big titles. His Purple Majesty. The High Priest of Pop. The Prince of Funk. And there’s lots more, as you will see. But you know what? Any accolades are more than well deserved. He is a true living legend, who’s sold more than 100 million albums worldwide and retains an extraordinary hold on the popular imagination. But here’s the clincher: Prince is almost unique, amid the rampant self-exposure of the Facebook and Twitter era, in maintaining a genuine air of mystery. He is an enigma, in the best possible sense of the word.

Thing is that, at the age of 53, the Diminutive One is still able to make headlines simply by giving brilliant performances. In fact His Royal Purpleness downright owned the front pages in the UK earlier this month, after his instantly legendary show at the Hop Farm Festival in Kent.

“Overall, we had a fantastic Hop Farm,” says Vince Power, who founded and runs the event. “The weather was great and everyone from The Eagles to Brandon Flowers to Morrissey, of course, and Lou Reed, was really good. But when Prince went on stage on Sunday night, there was something about him. I’ve never seen people in the audience cry before, but they did. People were very, very... ecstatic about him. He has that kind of effect.

“We had no idea what songs he was going to do,” Power adds, “but he went straight in with the hits. It was brilliant. The audience were so in love with him, they just couldn’t get enough of him. He has an amazing band, amazing singers and then when Larry Graham got up with him to do a couple of numbers, it was really electric. For Hop Farm, it puts it up there with all the major festivals. He loved it. I said, ‘Thank you’ to him as he was coming off stage and he said, ‘No, thank you’. Which was amazing.”

Sharing the stage with his Royal Badness at Hop Farm was John Blackwell, a drummer Prince considers “one of the greatest”. It’s a view that anyone who saw Blackwell’s astonishing performance at The Music Show a few years back will agree with – wholeheartedly. Blackwell is an astonishingly potent sticksman, who can make the drums sing – and he talks a good game too!

“The tour’s going great,” Blackwell tells me from his hotel room in Norway. “All our audiences have been very energetic and excited to see Prince and The New Power Generation.”

So reports of tears flowing among the audience are totally founded then?

“Oh yeah,” he shrugs. “That’s normal!”

Even as a kid, virtuoso Blackwell was a superfan.

“One day I was practicing and all my friends were out playing,” he recalls. “We were all eight and nine. As soon as I stopped practicing they ran up to the porch and said, ‘You sound great. Man, one day, you goin’ play for Michael Jackson or Prince!’, and they said, ‘If you had a choice, who would you pick?’, and I actually did say Prince! That’s how highly I thought of him.”

Blackwell got his wish in 1999, when the Purple One saw him in concert with Patti LaBelle. He describes an astonishing scene, in intimate detail.

“I didn’t know they were there,” he remembers. “The bass-player saw Larry Graham and he was like, ‘John, John! Look who’s at the side of the stage!’ I think Larry Graham and Prince saw the bass-player trying to get my attention ‘cause when he did that, they stepped waaaay back, so I couldn’t see who it was. The bass-player was hysterical when he saw Larry Graham. He didn’t put his bass down, he threw it off and he ran over to Larry Graham. And Larry just pushed him out of the way – ‘Get out of here, don’t touch me!’ – he just pushed him away and started walking towards me and as soon as I saw him, everything started moving in slow motion. I was like, ‘Am I dreaming?’ Larry comes up to me and he says, ‘Oh man. Wow! I feel a connection between me and you’.

“Next thing you know these two gigantic bodyguards walk towards me. Then they both move out of the way and here comes Prince. At this point I’m pinching myself. This can’t be real. Prince comes up to me and he says, ‘Wow, you’re unbelievable, I’ll see you soon’. And he just walked away. I was like, ‘You didn’t take my number, you didn’t take no email address, how am I gonna see you soon?’

“But he was as good as his word. We did a show in New York and I was sitting there at the side of the stage and I felt funny, like someone was watching me. Turned out Prince was sitting there looking at me. After the show, he comes up to me and he’s like, ‘How’s the tour going?’ I figured to myself at that point: You know what? It’s not every day Prince is standing next to you, I’m gonna go ahead and talk to him. I thought, ‘All he can do is say no, so I’m going to ask him if it would be possible for me to jam with him one day at Paisley Park.’ Before I could even open my mouth to say what I was going to say, he says, ‘I want you to come to Paisley Park when the tour’s over’.”

Blackwell playfully refers to Prince as The Boss: so what’s it like taking direction from Mr. Nelson?

“It really helps that Prince is an excellent drummer,” he says. “He can play for real. Of course, if you look at all the old records, that’s him playing drums. But with a lot of pop stars, the people in the band are just there to play a part. But with Prince, he gives them a chance to shed light on their gift. He lets you do your thing. All of us.”

Jamming with him for the best part of a decade is probably as close as one gets to the notoriously private musician. What has Blackwell learned from his time playing with the undisputed Prince of Funk?

“To respect the music,” he says, without pausing. “Play the part and play like it’s your first night
every night.”

It seems like even close friends view The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As with a degree of wonder. His protégée and friend, the singer Jill Scott is no different.

“You guys have Prince coming over for a show?” she squeals down the phone, “Woo hoo! What a charming man! Just a lot of fun. I mean, I’ve danced with him ‘til four in the morning a few times and he floats, the man just floats. His body understands music in a way that’s just amazing to see.”

And it’s true. For all the wacky guitars, velour suits and stack heels, Prince has always been a musician’s musician. Gavin Friday doesn’t hesitate to dub him one of the all-time greats.

“For ten years, he had this incredible throne,” he says. “There was this roll of about six or seven albums that were just phenomenal, phenomenal, phenomenal records, one after the other. Very few artists do that.

“I’ve seen Prince numerous times in the RDS and The Point, but the two times I was most blown away by him were the aftershows. He used to always do these spontaneous jams – or pop gigs essentially – after the main show. I remember a time he played The Academy (then known as HQ) after a show at The Point. The gig in The Point was woeful! He played no songs that anyone knew and then went to The Academy and played every fucking hit under the sun! Seeing him in that intimate space of somewhere like The Academy was just mind-blowing.

“I met him, very briefly. The gig he did at The POD, Bono actually sang a duet with him: it was quite an intense song from Sign O’ The Times called ‘The Cross’. This was in the heyday of The Kitchen and the whole dance movement, and Prince wanted to hang out in The Kitchen before going to The POD. So we hung out there and really, it was a little strange. Because he is strange! He had a lot of bodyguards, a lot of chicks around him, and he basically doesn’t look at or talk to people. He was doing his own thing, and I think – if memory serves! – Bono was given about five minutes. That’s his persona. He was dressed up though. It was frightening. Stilettos, skin-tight jeans, the whole lot. That’s Prince. He is a star. And that’s what I loved about him that night.

“Bono adored him, musically. U2 were huge at the time, but Bono hadn’t become what he is now. And Prince was at his peak here. This man wasn’t just huge: he was hip, he was cool, he was everything. Did Bono mind getting five minutes? No, he just laughed! He said, ‘He needs to get out a bit more, have a drink!’”

Also at the acclaimed Academy aftershow was Republic Of Loose frontman and fellow purveyor of funk, Mick Pyro.

“It was fucking unbelievable,” he remembers. “It was mind-blowing.

He played a lot of guitar stuff that he wouldn’t normally do in his gigs. It

was fantastic.”

What does Pyro make of Prince’s legacy?

“He’s a once in a lifetime genius. When you think about it, he’s such a comprehensive artist. He plays every instrument incredibly well. He’s the best guitarist alive, probably; he’s an incredible dancer; his singing is second to none; his command of the visual aspect of his music is beyond conception: even to look at his videos from the ‘80s, he always brought the changes, rather than being affected by the time he was in. In every aspect – songwriting, production, range, his aesthetic choices – we’re very lucky to be alive at a time when a musician like that is still playing gigs.”

Prince has already performed about a dozen shows around Europe this month, giving the set-list a complete overhaul every night. We can safely assume that ‘Purple Rain’, ‘Kiss’, ‘1999’, ‘Raspberry Beret’ and the iconic ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ are on the menu for his upcoming Malahide show, but when it comes to Prince, it’s advisable to expect the unexpected.

In Belgium, he blasted through six encores and included a cover of Rihanna’s ‘Rude Boy’. In Madison Square Gardens, he drafted in half a dozen celebrity dancers for his closing number, including Whoopi Goldberg and Naomi Campbell. In Amsterdam, he paid tribute to the sadly departed Amy Winehouse with a cover of ‘Love Is A Losing Game’. Of course, we shouldn’t ever forget that he spent seven years going by the name of.

“You don’t know what you’re going to get with Prince,” Gavin Friday muses. “But that’s true of many of the legendary artists. Bob Dylan, you never know what he’ll turn up and do. But it looks like Prince is really pushing his career back out there, by playing hits at his recent shows.”

And why not? After all, he’s got more hits than Madonna’s got kids (Prince’s words, not mine). When asked what to expect from the Malahide spectacular, John Blackwell is keeping his cards close to his chest, simply saying, “I’ve seen the castle and I know it will be an awesome show.”

Those lucky enough to hold a ticket will require two things: their dancing shoes and a big ‘ol box of tissues.