Praise be, the Purple One has announced that a memoir is due in 2017. That's right, Prince is writing his memoirs in collaboration with Dan Piepenbring of the Paris Review to be published by Spiegel & Grau.
The working title is The Beautiful Ones. Prince is one of the true enigmas in music, but what we'd really like are some elaborations on a few of our most favourite Prince anecdotes, such as . . .
Weird interview rituals
As Prince doesn't allow journalists to record interviews or take notes, they have to be recreated from memory. In 2013, Prince granted an interview to a Billboard journalist – who was asked by Prince's manager to prepare for the interview by watching The Adjustment Bureau.
"Tell the cat to chill"
MCD took legal action against Prince and his agents for a Croke Park no-show in 2008 (which Prince claimed his agents weren't authorised to confirm) after 50,000 tickets were sold. Prince's message to Denis Desmond at the time was "tell the cat the chill, I'll figure it out", provoking much hilarity in court, among the music media, industry and fans. It has since become pretty much the gold standard for what a superstar in a bind should say to a promoter.
Finding Nemo
According to Questlove, Prince once fired him from a DJ set while it was actually underway, replacing the Roots maestro with a DVD projection of Finding Nemo.
Don't call me…
Kraftwerk may have had a phone-less studio in KlingKlang, but Prince went one further with weird non-telephone communication between him and his ex-wife Mayte Garcia. She wasn't allowed to call him, even when they were married. "I had to wait for him to call me. I've no idea why. He never actually said," she said in 2006.
The vault
Last year, journalist and filmmaker Mobeen Azhar wrote about his experience in trying to unearth the details of Prince's secret vault at Paisley Park. Prince's former sound engineer Susan Rogers said she began the vault for his recordings in 1983, and the story goes that since then Prince has consigned large amounts of unreleased music to it under lock and key.
Prince V Sinead In an interview with a Norwegian broadcaster in 2014, Sinéad O'Connor spoke of being summoned to Prince's house after she had recorded Nothing Compares 2 U, where Prince berated her for swearing in interviews. O'Connor claimed their conversation got heated until she "escaped" at 5am.
The drum test
When a Daily Mirror journalist interviewed Prince on the back of him releasing his 20TEN album with the newspaper, Prince made the journalist play Come Together by The Beatles in a jam session, and then "fired" them from the position.
Batman
Prince told a Details journalist in 1991 that the first song he learned to play was Batman, adding "bravery is what creates new flowers".
