The cat in the hat comes back

PROFILE PRINCE:SOME HELPFUL ADVICE from the pop star Prince for his concert at Malahide Castle in July: "Bring your friends, bring your children and bring foot spray, because it's going to be funky."

One person who may not be reaching for the Scholl is Denis Desmond, of the music promoter MCD, who was let down when the star pulled out of a concert at Croke Park in 2008 at short notice, leaving more than 55,000 ticket holders far from gruntled. MCD took Prince to court over his no-show and won €1.6 million in damages and €600,000 in legal costs.

The case yielded a classic quote when it was reported that Prince had told his agent to assure Desmond he would turn up at Croke Park by saying: “Tell that cat to chill.”

The offstage drama has cooled and MCD says it has been paid in full, but the drama that is Prince looks unlikely ever to stop. As the singer gets older – he turns 53 next month – he seems to be getting even more eccentric and irascible. Musical genius is rarely accompanied by anything approaching normality (see Brian Wilson and Michael Jackson), and Prince as a person is as exceptional as his work.

The last in-depth biography concluded that his life had become “so much concerned with rumour, counter-rumour, carefully confected legend, fallings out, gagging clauses and plain nonsense” that it was difficult to separate the truth from the myth. But that is background detail to the many critics and fans who put him beside John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix and James Brown in terms of creative inspiration and lasting influence. Catch him on a good night and his performance will thrill you to your core.

In terms of enigma, professional truculence and creative oscillation, however, he’s known as the “black Bob Dylan”. Sometimes he refers to his father as being black and his mother as Italian. At other times they are both black, or one of them is Native American. We know he was born in Minneapolis in 1958 and was named after the Prince Rogers Trio, a jazz group in which his father, John Nelson, played.

Prince first went on the road aged five, when his father took him on tour with his band after divorcing Prince’s mother, a jazz singer named Mattie Shaw. Prince experienced an epiphany at 10 when he first saw James Brown in concert, and his stagecraft still owes much to what he saw that night. A child prodigy, he is said to have mastered numerous musical instruments before his teenage years were out.

Despite a less than promising beginning to his musical career – his early material was quite derivative – everything fell into place on the breakthrough 1982 album 1999. Seen as a rival to Michael Jackson in the 1980s, he positioned himself as edgier and delighted in his lyrics’ outre salaciousness.

After he became a Jehovah’s Witness, about a decade ago, he stopped playing a lot of the material from that era. One of his early songs, Darling Nikki, was considered so pornographic in its imagery that it led to the setting up of the Parents Music Resource Centre, which lobbied for Parental Advisory labels to be stuck to albums with sexually explicit lyrics or images. It was a stunning success for artists, as teenagers would rush to buy any album with a sticker.

For his record company Prince was that most problematic of propositions: a musician who had his own ideas about how his career should develop. He couldn’t see why he had to ask permission to write for other acts or to release his own material under a different name. When he told his label that he wanted to release an album under the name Camille, a stand-off ensued, with Prince famously referring to himself as a slave and changing his name to a squiggle that looked like a combination of the symbols for male and female. He was soon told that no normal typeface could print it, and accepted the title “the artist formerly known as Prince”.

Like many truly gifted musical mavericks, he has had a career punctuated by releases of staggering wonder bookended by dreadful episodes of musical self-indulgence.

He has been romantically linked with almost every female singer he has performed with – Kylie Minogue summed up his appeal by calling him sex on a stick. He married his backing singer and dancer Mayte García in 1996. The relationship was marked by tragedy when their son, Boy Gregory, who had the rare genetic disorder Pfeiffer syndrome, died a week after birth. It wasn’t until months later that anyone else knew what had happened, so devastating was its impact on the couple, who divorced in 1999. Two years later Prince married Manuela Testolini, who used to post messages on a fan site; that relationship also ended in divorce, in 2006. He is now in a relationship with his protege Bria Valente, who has also become a Jehovah’s Witness.

Tired of trying to explain himself to the media, Prince soon lifted up the drawbridge on his life. On rare occasions when he grants interviews he has insisted that journalists use no recording devices, write nothing down and refer to nothing in the past.

As gnomic as he is unpredictable, Prince reacted with fury to a video on YouTube a few years ago that showed a baby dancing in a kitchen. The radio in the background was playing one of his songs. He got the video taken down for “copyright violation” and then began a “copyright cleansing” operation, telling his lawyers to purge all news sites and fan sites of photographs, images, lyrics, album covers and anything linked to his likeness.

Some of his most devoted fans turned against him and set up a group called Prince Fans United to fight the legal action. Such was the singer’s obsession, the grouping argued, that his lawyers were even trying to remove pictures fans had taken showing off their Prince-inspired tattoos. One man who had customised his car registration plate was allegedly ordered to take down a photograph of his vehicle.

But then all is forgotten after Prince embarks on something like his 21-night residency at the O2 in London, gives away albums with the competitively priced tickets and puts on some outstanding concerts. That’s his appeal and the reason why the 35,000-capacity Malahide Castle concert will sell out. In today’s airbrushed, choreographed and frequently lip-synched live arena, Prince is like a welcome whiff of cordite.

The reviews from the US leg of his tour have been superlative, with revised versions of Raspberry Beret, Nothing Compares 2 U– a hit for Sinéad O'Connor when she covered it in 1990 – Kissand Little Red Corvetteall standouts. A reviewer from the Los Angeles Times, who caught him on a rare off night, noted that "even an off show for Prince is a night to remember".

There’s always the added attraction, because of the seriousness of his Jehovah’s Witness calling, that if you live in the Malahide area you may receive a knock on the door in the days leading up to the show and open it to find a short American in Cuban heels asking, “Would you like to talk about Jesus?”

Curriculum vitae

NameA bit complicated, this. He was born Prince Rogers Nelson but has also been "Slave", a squiggle and "the artist formerly known as Prince". He's back to plain old Prince now, but that could all change by July.

Prodigal sonAfter his late withdrawal from a sold-out Croke Park gig in 2008, he requests the pleasure of your company at Malahide Castle, in Co Dublin, on July 30th.

Will he break into a cúpla focal like Queen Elizabeth and Barack Obama?No. But, then again, if he debuts a new concept album based on the writings of Peig Sayers, would anyone be hugely surprised?

Where will the famous secret second show of the night take place?The Malahide Castle gig is being promoted by Pod Concerts. There's a clue there.