Prince – Planet Earth

I’ve never really been a Prince fan, but I liked “Purple Rain” and “Sign O’The Times”, even though it wasn’t my sort of music (my staple musical diet at the time was The Fall, Sonic Youth and That Petrol Emotion). I lost interest in Prince around the time he lost contact with reality and became The Artist Formerly etc, aka the funny squiggle thing.

I started to play this CD soon after we got it free with the Mail on Sunday last year, but the appalling opening title track was enough for me. I thought no-one would write bombastic nonsense like this after Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song”, but I was wrong. Listening to it a second time, its impact is unblunted. Who would have thought that something so dire could be followed by something as good as “Guitar” (though musically it owes a certain debt to “I Will Follow” - when it comes to guitar riffs, nothing compares 2 U2)?

Nothing else on this record is so awful or so brilliant (though the closing track “Resolution”, silly as it is, is irresistable), with Prince in his default mode as The Greatest Mister Loverman In The World (like the schoolboy Romeo Jones in the TV series “Stupid”). But it’s hard to dislike songs as laugh-out-loud ludicrous as “The One U Wanna C” (where “concubine” – aren’t they those prickly animals? – rhymes with “waste my time”. And what does “get creamy” mean?). Or most preposterous of all, “Mr Goodnight”. You get tantalising glimpses of a more angst-ridden Prince in “Lion Of Judah”, before he magically transforms himself into an avenging Old Testament hero, but angst isn’t really his thing (but then again, nor is righteous anger).

I would never have bought this, but it was well worth the price of the Mail on Sunday. Which is a good thing, because the Mail on Sunday isn’t.