prince

Prince: Best of the Rest

/ UK #1s blog / 5 Comments

April 21st marks the 8th anniversary of Prince’s death. One of the most talented musicians of his generation; and one of the most cheated when it comes to UK #1s. Just the one, in fact: 1994’s ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’.

(We of course shouldn’t forget two very famous, and very good, songs written by Prince, that were chart-topping hits for Chaka Khan and Sinead O’Connor.)

So here are the Prince tunes that came closest: 8 records and 10 songs (thanks to two double-‘A’s) spread over quite a few decades… I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not as up on my Prince as I should be, so I’m not ranking them. We’ll just go by ascending chart position. Hopefully, I’ll learn something about the Purple One as we go…

‘Kiss’ (with the Revolution) – #6 in 1986

We start with the first Prince song I was ever aware of. And as an intro to the man, it ticks most of the right boxes… Outrageous funk, untamed horniness, a painfully high falsetto… check, check, check. But actually, the girl he’s looking for should be a blushing rose: no dirty talk, no flirting… You don’t have to watch ‘Dynasty’, To have an attitude… is the pick of the lines. Fun fact: the ‘ah-ah-ah’ effect is a compressed sample from Brenda Lee’s classic ‘Sweet Nothin’s’. A couple of years after the original, a remake by Art of Noise, fronted by Tom Jones, charted one place higher at #5. No comment…

‘Purple Rain’ (with the Revolution) – #6 in 2016

Title track from both an album and a movie, ‘Purple Rain’ is probably Prince’s signature tune. A gospel power-ballad, about the end of the world, it’s never really connected with me. I can respect it wholeheartedly; but I enjoy other Prince songs more. Originally written as a country song, and intended to be a duet with Stevie Nicks, ‘Purple Rain’ wouldn’t have made this list before Prince died, as it only made #8 originally. Upon his sudden death, this was understandably the song fans flocked to, making it re-chart and peak two places higher.

‘Controversy’ – reached #5 in 1993

Another song that peaked much later. Twelve years after it had failed to chart in the UK, ‘Controversy’ was re-released ahead of a Greatest Hits in 1993 and made #5. It’s tight and funky, with a disco beat, and lyrically lives up to its title. Am I black or white…? Prince asks… Am I straight or gay? In the seven-minute album version, he recites the Lord’s Prayer in full, presumably well aware that it would piss off a lot of people. Prince would spend the rest of his career playing up to similar controversy. For example, when I was at primary school, the one thing we all ‘knew’ about Prince was that he’d had two ribs removed in order to… how to put this… auto-fellate?

‘Sexy M.F.’ / ‘Strollin” (with the New Power Generation) – reached #4 in 1992

It took a while for the UK to catch up to Prince’s talents, but by the early nineties his singles were often charting higher in the UK than in the States. This coincided with what I see people now call Prince’s ‘gangsta period’. He raps most of this tune, classic lines like Can’t you see I’m harder than a man can get, I got wet dreams coming out of my ears… It’s a strangely uncommercial tune, all sharp horns and a monotonously funky beat, and that’s before we come to the x-rated title. So, in the UK it was twinned with ‘Strollin”, in the hope that radio would play that one. In the end, they just played an edit of ‘Sexy MF’ (You sexy mother-AOOW…!) ‘Strollin” is a much more jazzy, innocent number: Strollin’, strollin’, We can have fun just strollin’… and it can’t really compete with a sexy MF shakin their ass…

‘Gett Off’ (with the New Power Generation) – reached #4 in 1991

The crowning glory of Prince’s near-pornographic early nineties era. ‘Cream’, ‘Sexy MF’, and ‘Peach’ are all fun, but nothing matches the utter filth of ‘Gett Off’, from the ear-splitting shriek that kicks things off, through a tale of twenty-three positions in a one-night stand, to a brilliant flute-cum-guitar riff. Other highlights include a nod to that urban legend – Whatcha want to eat? “Ribs”, Ha, toy, I don’t serve ribs – and the crackly, funky James Brown tribute in the middle. If I were to rank these singles personally, then this one would be on top. Prince took himself seriously a lot of the time; but ‘Gett Off’ is a load of fun.

‘When Doves Cry’ – reached #4 in 1984

Early-nineties Prince might have been utter filth, but it’s not as if he was particularly pure and chaste before that… The video for ‘When Doves Cry’ caused consternation, setting up the controversy over the ‘Purple Rain’ album, and the introduction of ‘Parental Advisory’ stickers. The best single from the album, it was his breakthrough in the UK – only his second song to chart. It’s a deeply weird, deeply catchy song, that has no bass line.

‘Batdance’ – reached #2 in 1989

So, yep. Prince’s joint-second biggest hit in the UK is this. Recorded, quickly, for the soundtrack to the Michael Keaton ‘Batman’ reboot, ‘Batdance’ is a deeply, deeply strange song. If you can call it a song, which it isn’t in the traditional sense. There’s a lot going on: samples, audio from the movie, Prince’s raps, spoken asides, the classic Bat-maaaan… refrain all against a clanking, metallic beat… Then there’s a slow and funky middle-section that sounds like the needle has slipped on to a completely different song. Prince lovers may argue this an example of the scope of his talent, others might suggest it’s a classic example of over-egging the pudding. The guitar solo is wild, though.

‘1999’ / ‘Little Red Corvette’ – reached #2 in 1985

One of Prince’s more straight-forward pop moments, albeit one with a deeply cool synth-funk riff, and lyrics about dancing towards the apocalypse. ‘1999’ only made the Top 30 initially but made #2 when re-released in 1985. I wonder if ‘1999’ was ever Prince’s most popular hit, as it seems that the longer we get from the actual year in the title the more its fame is overshadowed by other Prince songs. It charted for a third time, making #10, in… 1999. For the ’85 re-release, it was paired with ‘Little Red Corvette’, which had been an even smaller hit originally. In it, Prince carries on the fine rock ‘n’ roll tradition of comparing beautiful women to cars (baby you’re much too fast…) It’s a fine song: a sort of smokey, disco-power ballad. Recorded in 1982, it’s the sound of the 1980s just starting to come into their own.

Aside from the music, there can be no doubt that Prince was one of, in not THE, ultimate rock star. Beautifully androgynous, deeply strange, myths and legends about him sprouting left, right and centre, and most importantly of all supremely talented. RIP.

705. ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’, by Prince

/ UK #1s blog / 15 Comments

The list of superstar artists with underwhelming singles chart records is long, and complex. There’s Led Zeppelin, who simply didn’t bother releasing them. There’s Chuck Berry, whose ding-a-ling made number one two decades after he’d helped invent rock and roll. There’s Stevie Wonder, whose two chart-toppers don’t begin to do his talent justice…

The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, by Prince (his 1st and only #1)

2 weeks, from 17th April – 1st May 1994

Then there’s Prince – the star with possibly the biggest disparity between talent and number one hits. Not that he has a terrible overall chart record in the UK: seventeen Top 10 hits is nothing to be sniffed at. But only this one chart-topper (the 2nd biggest hit of his long career, apparently…)

And I’m just going to come out and say it… For ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ to be Prince’s only #1 is as big a travesty as ‘My Ding-A-Ling’. It might even be bigger. At least Berry’s novelty is dumb fun. This is syrupy, over-produced tripe, with some queasy lyrics… It’s plain to see, You’re the reason that God made a girl… The fact that the song debuted on the 1994 Miss USA pageant speaks volumes.

As I listen, all I can think of is all the brilliant Prince tunes that came and went without making #1… And not only is this dull, it’s disappointingly chaste. This from a man who recorded songs like ‘Soft and Wet’, ‘Cream’, and ‘Sexy MF’. There’s a spoken-word portion, as in all the worst love songs, in which Prince semi-raps: And if the stars ever fell, One by one from the sky…

It leads on to the most enjoyable bit of the song though, in which Prince provides his own backing vocals in a deep voice before launching back into his more famous falsetto. The song’s odd sound effects – tears dripping, clocks ticking, birds twittering – are interesting too. These moments are where we come closest to the fun, creative-chameleon Prince, who’s sorely missing from the rest of this sludge.

Of course, ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ isn’t technically a ‘Prince’ song. It came at the start of his ‘Love Symbol’ period, AKA the time he was known as ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Prince’, as part of a rebellion against his Warner Brothers contract. He felt they were holding him back, insisting that he chill out and release albums more sporadically. Interestingly, this single – one of his most successful – was released on a small, independent label, rather than Warner Bros. The corresponding album didn’t see the light of day for another year and a half, and is still involved in a lawsuit over plagiarism involving ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ and an Italian song called ‘Takin’ Me to Paradise’.

Prince does already have two other chart-toppers to his name as a songwriter. Two classics: Chaka Khan’s ‘I Feel for You’ and Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’. And of course there’s ‘Purple Rain’, ‘When Doves Cry’, ‘Kiss’… So many that I might have to do a post on Prince’s nearly-number-ones. All these hits kick this one into the long grass… And yet. The charts often don’t play nice…

641. ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, by Sinéad O’Connor

/ UK #1s blog / 12 Comments

Just four weeks, and three number one singles, into the new decade and the 1990s have their first iconic moment…

Nothing Compares 2 U, by Sinéad O’Connor (her 1st and only #1)

4 weeks, from 28th January – 25th February 1990

First things first, I hate overuse of the word ‘iconic’. Yass! Slay! Dresses are ‘iconic’, memes are ‘iconic’, everything’s bloody ‘iconic’. But I think the term is valid here. From the sustained opening note, to the Orwellian opening line: It’s been seven hours and fifteen days… the song grabs you, makes you sit up and listen.

And that is pretty much all down to Sinead O’Connor’s vocal performance. She hits every note perfectly – the soft ones, the angry ones, the ones you don’t expect. Some favourite lines: I went to the doctor, And guess what he told me, Guess what he told me… or All the flowers that you planted mama… Or the way Nothing can take away these blues… hits a really bluesy note at the end. To tell the truth, without O’Connor’s heroics, with a different, less committed singer, this could be a flat, maybe even dull song. The synths are slow, the beat is steady, with a trip-hop edge that will become ubiquitous as this decade goes on.

The most famous of her vocal tricks has to be the key-change in the title line: No-Thing compares, To you… It’s the one hook that ultimately sells the entire song. But we can’t pretend that this song did well on vocals alone. There’s the famous video, another iconic aspect of this whole business (I promise that’s the last time I’ll use that word), in which O’Connor remains in close-up, her face strikingly cat-like, head shaved, a tear rolling down either cheek. (The tears were unplanned, and brought on by the ‘mama’ line, her mum having died in a car crash several years earlier.)

‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ was famously written by Prince, though his version was never released. O’Connor’s version was also famously disliked by its author, perhaps because it outperformed pretty much every song he ever released. It was #1 in thirteen countries, and Top 10 in countless others, overshadowing everything that she has done since. I’d never heard the Prince original, which was finally released in 2018, and it’s nowhere near as good – cluttered with fiddly guitar and a wild sax solo, completely missing the sparse beauty of this definitive version.

Is it surprising that this song did so well? I say that because it is unremittingly miserable: the singer counts down the hours since her break-up, listing all the things that won’t help her get over her loss, all the flowers that have wilted since. And yet, I asked a silly question, really. All the best ballads aren’t about love; they’re about lost love: ‘Without You’, ‘The Winner Takes It All’… Misery hits home. It’s the hopeful, positive ones that often lack an edge: ‘Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love for You’, or ‘Hello’, to name but two.

Sinead O’Connor wasn’t a complete unknown when this, the second single from her second album came out; but none of her earlier, or her subsequent releases, made the Top 10. Her career in the US ended abruptly when she ripped up a picture of the pope on ‘Saturday Night Live’ as a protest against child abuse in the Catholic church, and she has courted controversy in statements about her sexuality, her religion, and her views on Irish politics. She is an eccentric, a contrarian, one who is hard to define. Except everyone can agree that her biggest hit kickstarted the 1990s, and remains one of the decade’s most iconic (sorry) songs.

540. ‘I Feel for You’, by Chaka Khan

/ UK #1s blog / 18 Comments

Chakakakakakaka-chakakhan… 1984 truly was the year of the in-your-face intro. ‘The Reflex’, ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’, now this. The most in your face of the lot?

I Feel for You, by Chaka Khan (her 1st and only #1)

3 weeks, from 4th – 25th November 1984

It probably stands out so much because of the rapping. Only the second example of rap at the top of the charts and, with all due respect to New Edition, this is the real stuff. The Lemme rock you Chaka Khan… lines are delivered at break-neck speed by one of hip-hop’s founding fathers, Melle Mel of Grandmaster Flash. It feels incredibly modern, a female singer being introduced at the start of a song, decades before Beyonce and Jay-Z, or Rihanna and Drake.

I did wonder if the rap might have been supplied by the writer of this song, one Prince Rogers Nelson. Prince is someone with a giant discrepancy between his fame and his UK chart-toppers (one, fairly lame, #1 a decade from now). But here at least is one of his songs, transformed from the slinky disco-soul original into a clattering beast of a record.

It seems that every song which topped the charts in 1984 was either a ballad or a banger, and ‘I Feel for You’ is very much the latter. Like Frankie and Duran Duran before, this record grinds and pounds, chops and changes, with that mid-eighties reimagining of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound that’s become the vibe of the year. But while much of ‘84 has been Brit-dominated, this is a very American sounding disc, with its snatches of harmonica and horns, and its new jack swing energy.

Said harmonica was actually played by the last chart-topper but one, Stevie Wonder, while the song also features samples from his 1963 hit ‘Fingertips’, though you’d be hard-pressed to pick them out. It’s a bit of an all-star ensemble then: Chaka Khan, Melle Mel and Stevie Wonder, on a song by Prince. And it delivers: this is a great dance song, with a brilliantly funky bassline, a song that sounds like nothing we’ve heard at #1 before…

You can tell that this was written by Prince. Few people could throw out a line like I wouldn’t lie to you baby, I’m physically attracted to you… and make it work. Khan, in a brilliant move, delivers the lines like Prince, especially in the chorus: I fee-eel for you-oo… The one thing that I would change is that her voice is a little too far back in the mix.

The video ups the ‘80s Americana even further. Khan performs in an inner-city courtyard, with graffiti and wire fences, while a DJ scratches and spins, and break dancers throw shapes around her. It looks a bit funny now, but again must have looked very modern and very cool to suburban Britain in November 1984. In fact, ‘I Feel for You’ feels both new, in terms of its position in this countdown, and pretty dated, when you listen to it through your 2022 ears.

Maybe that’s why Khan’s only #1 isn’t as well remembered as her two other big hits: ‘I’m Every Woman’ and ‘Ain’t Nobody’, which would both chart twice, before ‘I Feel for You’ and then a few years later in remixes. It’s possibly the hip-hop element – of all the genres, rap ages the worst – but it’s a shame. It’s been great to discover this funky gem. Next up: a recap. Could ‘I Feel for You’ contend for the top prize…? Watch this space…

Advertisements