There was no party like a purple party. It was the SXSW music festival in Austin Texas, 2013. I had spent the week there, and all week it was clear there was only going to be one place to be when the festival came to a close in the early hours of the Sunday morning.
All week there were superstar jams, and new bands swaggering into town, big acts in small rooms, but Prince playing La Zona Rosa was in another league.
Superstar acts still come through today but not as many and with not the same frequency as before. We also don’t know about their sustainability. Do you really think acts like Coldplay, The Killers and Lady Gaga will still matter 20 years from now?
Real pop stars are in another league.
As the gig began, ten feet away, Prince Rogers Nelson stared back at the audience with a grin on his face. He looked extraordinary. You note the hot pink shirt, the glittering cane and the massive chunky necklace. Then, Prince started to move, the 22 piece band began to play with a confidence and swagger that was quite staggering (there wasn’t a bum note all night) and the go-go funkaganza was on.
We’ve all heard about those classic shows, the ones where artists stretch themselves and take the audience to another place, the ones which are talked about again and again and again. Thing is, Prince often did shows like this. He was known for playing post-show shows where he went on and on until the break of dawn.
This was from that department, a show Prince and co teased and tantalised and punched one way and then the next. This was Prince showing off, though a few costume changes and half-a-dozen encores, just what he and his New Power Generation band are capable of doing. It was a beautiful night.
His band deserve their own paragraph. It wasn’t so much the set’s content (a couple of classics like “1999?, a lot of obscure cuts and some great covers) or the context (Saturday night fever at SXSW in Austin, TX) which mattered as much as the manner of it.
Prince's band were red-hot, turning themselves this way and that on everything from Musicology to Purple Rain to Housequake to a fantastic cover of Michael Jackson's Don't Stop 'Till You Get Enough. Every song was a groove, every groove was a moment to savour.
The frontman? He deserves his own book. When you talk about great pop acts, the ones with soul and funk and panache and pizzazz and wow, the ones who vamp and scream and make you vamp and scream, you’re talking about dudes like Prince.
They don’t make ’em like this anymore – and if they do, they’re cloning them from what he’s done in the past. The man from Minneapolis did not touch a guitar that night and was more band-leader than pop star, but that star quality – that unique, intangiable, unmistakable, unmatchable characteristic which many want and only a few possess – was present from start to finish.
Star power: that’s why we hung around, that’s why we swapped other SXSW closing parties for this one, that’s why we kept yearning for more, that’s why we’re still keen students of the game. Star power: from James Brown to Prince. Star power: you can’t fake that. Star power.
