Prince

Prince: “Did you come to get yo’ Purple Rain on?”

Crowd: “Rooaaarrrrr!”

Prince: “Then you came to the wroooong place.”

Crowd: “?”

Prince: “This is not 1984; this is 2002… or so they say.”

Crowd: “???????!!”

The above sample of banter should tell you a couple of things about Prince’s Point show. One, he wasn’t about to go flying by the seat of his back pages. Two, he’s a little shaky on the details of what time it is, in the metaphorical hippity-hop meaning of the phrase as much as the old Oxford English. “Did you miss me?” he implored of his audience at one juncture. “Has it been seven years? Or seven days? Or seven minutes?”

But so what, says you – neither does Bob Dylan.

Tonight, during a diamond-hard ‘Sign O’ The Times’ he displayed total mastery using nothing more than a sparse rhythm tattoo, a few blasts of distortion and a devastatingly on-the-money lyric. Elsewhere though, he left us scratching our heads. Me, I can take the fusion noodling for, oh, anything up to five minutes at a time, but longer….

Of course, there were moments to cherish and hold to your beating little bosom – the sombre ‘Money Don’t Matter 2 Nite’ for instance, or the poptastic ‘Raspberry Beret’ and ‘Take Me With U’. And true, the first encore was bizarre but beautiful, moving from Liberace to Debussy to Elvis to Otis Redding via an epic medley incorporating ‘I Wanna Be Your Lover’, ‘Condition Of The Heart’, ‘Diamonds & Pearls, ‘The Beautiful Ones’, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, ‘The Ladder’ and others.

But right now, Prince is caught in the twilight zone between tributary minnow and nostalgia act, unwilling (or unable) to advance, yet refusing to plunder the back catalogue for a classic hits roadshow. He has been gifted with natural talent resources greater than U2 or Madonna, but unlike those acts chooses to shirk the challenge of surfing the filthy modern tide.