Prince Rogers Nelson
(7 June 1958 – 21 April 2016)
1979: I WANNA BE YOUR LOVER (OFFICIAL VIDEO)
1980: MIDNIGHT SPECIAL IN ZEBRA UNDERWEAR
➢ Above: For his first TV performance in January 1980 Prince sports zebra-print underwear, black leggings, stack-heeled boots, and long hair giving us the first two tracks from Prince the album, I Wanna Be Your Lover and Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad. On NBC’s The Midnight Special host Wolfman Jack says: “There’s nothing our next guest can’t do. He arranged, produced, composed, and performed his last album entirely by himself.”
1991: GETT OFF FOR MTV
Prince’s 1991 MTV Video Awards performance of Gett Off with The New Power Generation might be the sexiest thing ever aired on TV. Click on pic to run video in new window
2014: BREAKFAST CAN WAIT (OFFICIAL, almost as sexy)
1980: How Prince unveiled himself in Detroit months before his UK debut. His Dirty Mind album stirs controversy, while Uptown makes it to No 5 on the US R&B chart. (Photograph by Leni Sinclair)
Nile Rodgers: “RIP our dearly beloved Prince. Tears and love on our tour bus. I’ll never forget my brother. We’ve had good times.”
Quincy Jones: “RIP to prince… a true artist in every sense of the word. Gone way too soon.”
Mick Jagger: “Prince was a revolutionary artist, a great musician, composer, a wonderful lyricist, a startling guitar player… but most importantly, authentic in every way. Prince’s talent was limitless. He was one of the most unique and exciting artists of the last 30 years.”
Lenny Kravitz: “My musical brother… My friend… The one who showed me the possibilities within myself, changed everything, and kept his integrity until the end, is gone. I am heartbroken.”
Frank Ocean: “He was a straight black man who played his first televised set in bikini bottoms and knee-high heeled boots, epic. He made me feel more comfortable with how I identify sexually simply by his display of freedom from and irreverence for obviously archaic ideas like gender conformity.”
Barack Obama, who was flying from Saudi Arabia to London on Air Force One when the news broke, said he was mourning along with millions of fans. “Few artists have influenced the sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly, or touched quite so many people with their talent. As one of the most gifted and prolific musicians of our time, Prince did it all.”
Shaun Keaveny, BBC Radio 6 Music, deejay: “He’s a virtual Beethoven for the popular song.”
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH SHAPERS OF THE 80S
“ I met Prince in 1981 on his first UK trip when he was booked to play the Lyceum and faced a half-empty venue. In the Embassy club six days before, I spotted him standing quietly at the end of the bar on his own, while nobody else seemed to know who he was – and the occasion was after all Steve Strange’s 22nd birthday party, heaving with Blitz Kids. Prince was painfully shy yet intensely sexy and very receptive when I approached, clearly flattered that somebody in the place had put a name to the face (familiar from his Dirty Mind antics over the previous year). We chatted for a while, enthused about James Brown, obviously, but amazingly he also said he had laughed a lot at the new spoof version of Is That All There Is? by Cristina on the Ze label. Despite which, I can’t claim to have got a single quote from the quiet man of pop that was worth publishing! ” – Yrs Truly
Prince Rogers Nelson: uncovered on the cover of his 1988 Lovesexy album
Chuck D of Public Enemy: “He is walking music. He IS music.”
Alan Leeds, Paisley Park label president, speaking in 2011: “He has outpaced Madonna, he has outpaced Janet Jackson. There really isn’t another phenomenon on the planet like Prince these days.”
Prince: the latest passport picture, February 2016
➢ Prince’s lost Rolling Stone interview: “I don’t think about gone” – Ruminating on sex, music and death in a previously unpublished Q&A from 2014. . . “I can take you out there and hit this guitar for you, and then what you’ll hear is sex. You will hear something where you’d run out of adjectives like you do when you meet the finest woman.”
“I have a couple Revolution albums in the vault and two Time albums, one Vanity 6 album – and tons of stuff recorded in different periods.”
“I don’t think about gone. I just think about in the future when I don’t want to speak in real time.”
2 JUNE UPDATE: “Prince died of accidental overdose” expert says
➢ Accidental overdose – CNN: “Toxicology tests for Prince concluded that the entertainer died from an accidental overdose of the opioid fentanyl, according to a report on his death by the Midwest Medical Examiner’s Office. Fentanyl, prescribed by doctors for cancer treatment, can be made illicitly and is blamed for a spike in overdose deaths in the United States. It is 25 to 50 times more potent than heroin and 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. . .” / Contd at CNN
➢ Music legend Prince was killed by an overdose of the powerful painkiller fentanyl – NBC News: “Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid up to 100 times more potent than morphine that is used for severe pain such as advanced cancer, according the Centers for Disease Control. Although it can be obtained by prescription, many overdoses are linked to illegally made versions of the drug, officials say. . . ” / Contd at NBC News
“ IN JULY 1969 men walked on the moon, a technological leap all but unthinkable 50 years before. Three years later they abandoned it, and have renounced all return ever since. What boosters saw as the great opening act of the space age turned out to be, in effect, its culmination. Within a few years presidential corruption, economic stagnation, military ignominy and imagined catastrophe had warped post-war America’s previously impervious belief in progress, a belief that had resonance across the then free world. After Apollo, the future would never again be what it used to be.
David Bowie’s greatest years began nine days before Apollo 11 touched down in the Sea of Tranquillity, with the release of his single Space Oddity; they ended 11 years later, with the single Ashes to Ashes. Over that decade he used imagined futures to turn himself into something contradictory and wonderful — an epitome of alienation with whom the alienated flocked to identify. In doing so, he laid bare one of the key cultural shifts of the 1970s: the giving up of past dreams. . . ” / Continued online
“In Space Oddity Major Tom, floating in a most peculiar way, had been an isolated spaceman;
by Ashes to Ashes his isolation was a junkie’s”
– The Economist
1980: “Ashes to ashes, funk to funky / We know Major Tom’s a junkie / Strung out in heaven’s high / Hitting an all-time low”
2016: The British astronaut Major Tim Peake – sporting the Union Jack on his shoulder – takes his first spacewalk at 2pm today from the International Space Station (via NASA Television)
NOT FORGETTING COMMANDER CHRIS HADFIELD
❏ This is the cover version Bowie called “possibly the most poignant version of the song ever created”, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station in 2013.
✱ 9:00 BST David Bowie and The Story of Ziggy Stardust — exhilaratingly observant new TV doc narrated by Jarvis Cocker, 2012, directed by James Hale and exec-produced by Paul Bullock who brought us the brilliant Prince, A Purple Reign last year. Tight, total and definitive (in everything but an Angie contribution), it has contemporary rivals queueing to heap on the respect while nailing the genius with several gasp-out-loud revelations (you will sit up when Mike Garson hits the piano!). Quote of the era: “I can’t stand the premise of going on in jeans and being real.” A landmark. Repeated June 23, 25 and on iPlayer
✱ 10:00 The Genius of David Bowie — energised compilation of best archive performances, 2012, with breathtaking mature renderings of Heroes, Ashes and Fashion, plus magnificent Lou Reed and Iggy Pop as guests among others you’d rather ignore. Also June 23, 25
✱ 11:00 Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars — D A Pennebaker’s plodding, murky and utterly amateur film might as well have been bootlegged going by its appalling camerawork, shoddy editing, fudge sound (relieved only by its backstage footage revealing Bowie as the angst-ridden artiste). It was shot live at Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, the night Ziggy made his last stand even with Mick Ronson at peak power. “The first we knew we were unemployed was onstage,” the drummer Woody admitted at the Ziggy plaque unveiling in March. Historical curio worth a first watch just so you can feel the heat of real fan worship. If only the evident genius of Bowie himself could have been more watchably captured! But luckily I saw the whole wowie spectacle from Row C and the Standard was the first paper to break the news next morning. (This was the world pre-Twitter, remember.)
✱ 12:30 David Bowie at the BBC — live concert at the Radio Theatre, 2000, brilliant mix of classic songs (Fame, Man Who Sold The World, Always Crashing, Wild is the Wind) plus Gail Ann Dorsey on bass guitar. Also June 23, 25
✱ TONIGHT — Another brilliant radio doc on The Birth of Glam presented by Gary Kemp goes out June 13 at 10pm BST on Radio 2 … Two years ago under its original title The Glory of Glam it prompted a major assessment of the difference between glitter and glam here at Shapersofthe80s. At that time we said “If this documentary doesn’t win a Sony radio award, there’s no justice.”
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MORE INTERESTING THAN MOST PEOPLE’S FANTASIES — THE SWINGING EIGHTIES 1978-1984
They didn’t call themselves New Romantics, or the Blitz Kids – but other people did.
“I’d find people at the Blitz who were possible only in my imagination. But they were real” — Stephen Jones, hatmaker, 1983. (Illustration courtesy Iain R Webb, 1983)
“The truth about those Blitz club people was more interesting than most people’s fantasies” — Steve Dagger, pop group manager, 1983
PRAISE INDEED!
“See David Johnson’s fabulously detailed website Shapers of the 80s to which I am hugely indebted” – Political historian Dominic Sandbrook, in his book Who Dares Wins, 2019
“The (velvet) goldmine that is Shapers of the 80s” – Verdict of Chris O’Leary, respected author and blogger who analyses Bowie song by song at Pushing Ahead of the Dame
“The rather brilliant Shapers of the 80s website” – Dylan Jones in his Sweet Dreams paperback, 2021
A UNIQUE HISTORY
➢ WELCOME to the Swinging 80s ➢ THE BLOG POSTS on this front page report topical updates ➢ ROLL OVER THE MENU at page top to go deeper into the past ➢ FOR NEWS & MONTH BY MONTH SEARCH scroll down this sidebar
❏ Header artwork by Kat Starchild shows Blitz Kids Darla Jane Gilroy, Elise Brazier, Judi Frankland and Steve Strange, with David Bowie at centre in his 1980 video for Ashes to Ashes
VINCENT ON AIR 2022
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent returned to JazzFM on Sundays 1-3pm in 2021… Catch Robbie’s JazzFM August Bank Holiday 2020 session thanks to AhhhhhSoul with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”.
TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
◆ Who was who in Spandau’s break-out year of 1980? The Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s draws a selective timeline for The unprecedented rise and rise of Spandau Ballet –– Turn to our inside page
SEARCH our 800 posts or ZOOM DOWN TO THE ARCHIVE INDEX
UNTOLD BLITZ STORIES
✱ If you thought there was no more to know about the birth of Blitz culture in 1980 then get your hands on a sensational book by an obsessive music fan called David Barrat. It is gripping, original and epic – a spooky tale of coincidence and parallel lives as mind-tingling as a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Titled both New Romantics Who Never Were and The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet! Sample this initial taster here at Shapers of the 80s
CHEWING THE FAT
✱ Jawing at Soho Radio on the 80s clubland revolution (from 32 mins) and on art (@55 mins) is probably the most influential shaper of the 80s, former Wag-club director Chris Sullivan (pictured) with editor of this website David Johnson
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