From The Archives: Prince Live At The RDS

There is one obvious difference between Prince and Michael Jackson. Prince is Pan, Michael Jackson is merely Peter Pan. Prince really is the fawn with the cheeky, ambivalent smirk of infinite profane knowledge, the sexual play-maker who promises a return to an Eden where "sin" is just a Gaelic word. Curiously and inconsistently, Youth Defence mounted no picket on the RDS to protect the moral hygiene of their generation.
Still it could seem strange afterwards especially if you'd watched the AIDS benefit, "Red Hot & Dance", on Channel 4 the previous night. The AIDS threat is meant to cause paralysis and paranoia yet simultaneously sex has become even more mediated, visualised and fetishised through images and fashion fantasies saturated in baby oil. And if anybody still thinks the Sixties were meant to be the age of the permissive society, well, icons like Prince make that era's pop sex  symbols look  elementary.
But this was also a twin-track show since it wasn't only about sex. Prince is not only Pan but also a polymath; more than a lasciviously imaginative song 'n' dance man too, since this was also Prince the blues, soul and jazz man, the reintegrating historian of black spectacle whose show has antecedents as far back as the Harlem Renaissance and the Cotton Club masquerades of Duke Ellington. In another time, place and gender, he'd probably wishes (s)he were Josephine Baker.

But there was also Andrew Strong. Or in other words ... must I? For after all, I'm one of those stubborn solitary heretics who were never quite convinced by "The Commitments" theory that the blues was born in the Ringsend shamrock plantations of the Liffey delta to later grow into soul in Coolock and Kilbarrack thanks to the enlightened intervention of that champion of civil rights and Soul Brother No. 1, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid.
To be fair, Strong is only the last in a long chain of cultural folly and travesty, a man aboard a career escalator from which he can't leap off. He and his band are highly-regarded but then so are many Irish Dixieland bands at that annual centre of Irish cultural larceny and forgery, the Cork Jazz Festival.
As of now, Strong has force but not knowledge. The best compromise is that he and his allies will find him some convincingly robust rock-soul material since his technique for a ballad is far beyond his experience and the whole therefore remains unconvincing.
At the RDS, Strong and company ploughed through "Land Of A Thousand Dances" but even Tom Jones has progressed as far as "Kiss".
So to Prince and his entry was as an extraterrestrial brother from the same black hole as George Clinton with two dancers  in spacey silver lurex from the cover of 'Astounding Worlds'. Which once Prince slam-jetted into 'Thunder', of course it was.

Extravaganza is the only word for this surfeit of an
all-dancing, singing, rifling and rapping show, crammed with incident. The only source of regret was the usual arena problem that the more telling details could get lost in the translation from the stage to a hundred yards away.
But this truly was black spectacle, the latest in a line with a Seventies base in Earth Wind and Fire, the Funcadeliement Thing; and later, Kid Creole - its jazz analogies in Ellington's Cotton Club and Sun Ra and a sizzling regimentation derived naturally from James Brown.
Prince knows all this and more in a show littered with clues. You could speculate if the encore choices for singer Rosie Gaines of "Doctor Feelgood" and "Chain Of Fools" -the former featuring some heaven-shredding blues guitar from the man himself
- were making a point per "The Commitments" but they weren't the only historical cues. At one point, the horns blurted out a bebop riff - Charlie Parker's "Nights In Tunisia", I think - while earlier Gaines flounced through a verse of "Lively Up Yourself" before the piano rolled into a Fifties New Orleans R'n'B theme.
The gameplan was as follows - lift-off with the first three tracks from "Diamonds And Pearls", "Thunder", "Daddy Pop" and the title track, followed by a reverse into the past for "Kiss" and a gloriously involving "Purple Rain". Then for a brief period after the first hour, he temporarily lost himself in the surf of jazz and soul ballad meditations that make sense in a smaller hall but which got lost in the RDS ozone. And while my partner insisted his black shirt and white tie came directly from Mack The Knife, I was totally nonplussed on his next costume change when he hid his face behind the dangling silver chains of a yashmak.
And yes, there was community singing on "Sexy Motherfucker" but he really slammed back with "Get Off" and its mystical "23 positions in a one night stand" taken full throttle into the encores after "1999" and the RDS was his, neck, crop and all.
What to take away from this splendour? Nothing novel in that Prince is still the advocate of a hedonism beyond shame and duress; of a co­ responsibility whose trust is almost child-like in its accent on play and mischief. Musically, though, he has gradually redressed the balance to emphasise his debts and allegiance to a century of black expression, to prove how all the greatest innovators are the best-informed historians. What collaboration did we lose once Miles Davis died?
But at the RDS, all the Irish girls went boop-be­ shoop-de-boop-de-shoop. This summer, Ireland went searching for its Pan and found him in Prince. Really, it was all most properly pagan.

- Bill Graham

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