Tag: Unreleased

Unreleased (1987) / Private Waters in the Great Divide (1990)
I’ve not listened to my Kid Creole 7″ of The Sex of It since the day it came home from a charity shop in 2003. My narrow expectation of a Stool Pigeon part 2 wasn’t met so the record was relegated to the back of the cupboard where all my vinyl rejectamenta end up. Only recently, when researching this list, I discover the song is a Prince composition and regret not paying closer attention but what need is there for official versions when the Prince-sung original exists? His demos tend to get diluted the further they wander from the purple source. This may be one of his strongest outtakes he gave away – Eric Leeds horn riff is fire, the bass addictive and the hook catchy, but its most interesting element was the one that got replaced. The vocals. Prince starts off normally enough, singing lyrics that accuse his lover of only being interested in sex. It’s a premise that could easily furnish a three verse rebuke but after the second verse, things get weird. His voice fractures into a deranged simultaneous low and high pitch, as an alter-ego climbs through a window he begged you not to open. Is this Camille or another member of his internal cast? Was he singing to a succubus within and has now let the demon out? Later a warning about a cage is similarly ignored, causing the track to end amid a raw torrent of unleashed guitar. Like Data Bank and Cindy C before it, there’s an excitement about the track’s careening loss of control. You feel anything could happen. Musically, the best version of this song is probably heard in a Sign O’ the Times rehearsal where for 30 minutes you can hear its funk muscle strengthen in real-time. But you begin to lose the element which Prince refers to in that rehearsal as “stupid storytelling stuff”. An abundance of songs have a tight horn section but how many paint a frighteningly vivid picture of the creator’s fragmented mind?

Unreleased (1982)
It’s easy to see why Lust U Always never got released. Its hydraulic synth-funk more than justifies an album call-up but the lyrics go darkside quick. It feels like an exorcism. Or a fun ouija game gone wrong. Prince taps into his libido’s vast reservoir but dark forces pull him under, causing what should be a low-status character rendered helpless by desire to become something much more threatening. The first line warns “touch me at your own risk, I’m not responsible for anything I do” and the helter-skelter ride into psychopathy begins. Surprisingly it was offered to Robert Palmer to record in the late 80s but was obviously too monomaniacal for Mr Addicted To Love to consider. Instead, it’s doomed to linger in the darker recesses of the vault. An exorcised demon shocking newcomers with its poisonous, lascivious tongue.

Unreleased (1985) / C-Note (2004)
Empty Room is a colossus of brooding loneliness. Written shortly before Prince was due to leave his girlfriend Susannah to film in France, it takes a moment of private inner-turmoil and scales it up to fill the void of an empty concert hall. A soundcheck staple of amplified anguish. It was considered for many projects over the years before finding a home on an otherwise forgettable album of instrumental jazz, proving once again there’s a purple diamond in every rough. Surprisingly this official version, recorded on the One Nite Alone tour, holds its own against the 80’s original. The guitar no longer thrashes around like a downed power-line but there’s no escaping the devastating gamma rays of long-distance relationship pain. His Montreaux performance in 2009 is a different beast and has a guitar solo that sounds like a polar wind has snapped away the tent fabric, exposing us to the icy elements of an unforgiving universe. Not your usual crowd-pleaser but I envy every single person at that concert with an inhuman intensity. That’s one room I’d trade my aura to be in.

Unreleased (1982/1984) / Purple Rain Deluxe (2017)
Wonderful Ass brings all the boys to the yard with a gait that shimmies more than a catwalk queen. If ever a song could sashay then it’s this one. It struts with the confidence of the song’s muse (Vanity?) if they only paid attention to the chorus. Listen to the verses and it’s clear Prince hasn’t built a totem to these unattributed buttocks of intrigue. He believes they are the subject’s single redeeming feature; a counterweight to balance out her many faults which he details in a long litany. Less of a tribute and more of an over-zealous negging bonanza. At least I think that’s the gist. To be honest I’m usually too distracted by those curvy synths to notice. I can see why they call that drum a snare, amirite fellas!?

Unreleased (1985) / No Sound But a Heart (1987)
Turn the number 8 on its side and you get an infinity sign. Is this why Eternity, a track Prince wrote while working on his eighth album Parade, also appeared on both Sheena Easton’s and Chaka Khan’s eighth albums? The latter was even released in ’88. The universe is playing us. But forget the released versions – Prince’s touch has been polished away and they’re too of their time to merit anything more than a nod of recognition. Go to the source. The raw demo in the vault. The beat is rudimentary and the lyrics are full of ellipses which sound like half-formed thoughts colliding together, but that melody will lure your feet off the floor like Pepe le Pew’s vapours. A purple pick-me-up from the Pied Piper of Paisley Park.

Unreleased (1986)
There’s not much adorning this big tall wall but its foundations are dug deep. Real deep. The music may consist of little more than a drumbeat and vocals; the lyrics, especially in their first draft, may be possessive, dark and even psychopathic. But once that hook is in your head it’s there for life. One of the reasons the song never saw the light of day was down to its personal and negative lyrics. They describe a polygamous Prince wanting to build a wall around then-girlfriend Susannah Melvoin so she can’t leave him. A rewrite the following year portrayed a slightly healthier relationship but there’s no altering the main premise of imprisonment – it’s baked in. Isaac Newton once wrote “we build too many walls, and not enough bridges”: a quote Prince may have had in mind when he originally planned for this song to start the Graffiti Bridge album, sitting next but one to the title track. Isolation to connection within the opening triplet. It would have done wonders for The Kid’s character arc but I guess the motivational, sloganeering Can’t Stop This Feeling I Got was more in keeping with the film’s final direction. You may prefer Prince’s high-energy cheerleading, but give me him on his mountaintop every time, banging his drum and plotting against the villagers down below like an angry witch.

Unreleased (1989)
A fascinating outtake that occupies the space between Fever, Minnie The Moocher and Wade in the Water, yet with the self-love sentiment of stripper staple I Touch Myself. The weaving together of carnal desire and spiritual escape is strong in Me Touch Myself and not only in the hallelujah-peppered lyrics. The sultry beat and bassline are as seductive as Circe’s beckoning finger – or Ripopgodazippa performing the dance of the seven veils – but if you ignore the words the chorus could be an old African-American spiritual. There are not many songs that could sound at home in both a church and a strip joint.

Unreleased (1988)
I imagine after creating the psychedelic and intricately programmed Lovesexy, Prince unwound by churning out something much blunter and single-minded: like this six-minute industrial funk beat with an array of horns fighting for breathing space. It’s sledgehammer stuff but it does the job. In the words of Le Grind, it shows you what your hips are made for, whilst simultaneously pounding you in the face with unrelenting ardour. The track was recorded for use on Tony LeMans’ album and the story goes that Prince pulled it after returning from the Lovesexy Tour to find Tony having an affair with Ingrid Chavez. If true, the line about fuchsia light being a ”symbol of monogamy and trust” suddenly got a lot more relevant.

Unreleased (1985)
A Parade outtake where Prince wrings every last ounce of blood-curdling horror from his Fairlight synthesiser. Howls, screams, sobs and Psycho string-stabs accompany creepy Sixth Sense lyrics. There are very few Prince tunes you could describe as genuinely chilling but Others Here With Us cuts to the bone. In the right frame of mind it’s more unsettling than a Victorian doll’s head outside your window on a stormy night. But the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman: this was kept in the vault with every other that delved too far into scary waters. An alternate version exists with added orchestration but that just distracts from the acid-washed terror and like Mavis Staples once said: “the devil ain’t got no music” – just a backing-track made up of the screaming souls of the innocent. If you’ve never heard the original then do yourself a favour and listen to it once. Alone. With the lights off. And then never ever sleep again.

Unreleased (1985) / Vermillion (1988)
Before the turn of the millennium, my only dalliance with Prince bootlegs was a purchase of the Chocolate Box lp I chanced upon in my local wrecka stow. I felt like I’d discovered the New World but was all too aware that its ten songs (half of which were alternate versions of album tracks I already owned) were barely the tip of the iceberg. I’d read about fabled outcasts with evocative titles like Electric Intercourse and Rebirth of the Flesh but they were just sailors’ tales from distant continents. Unicorns and mermaids. Then Napster arrived and it promised the keys to the vault. I typed in all the unreleased titles I could think of – magic passwords that could beam mythical beasts into my computer – and waited to see if any would materialise. Neon Telephone was the first to arrive. To anyone growing up in today’s fibre-optic age of instant gratification, it’s difficult to relay the anticipation that a night of downloading a single song on a dial-up modem could generate. Especially when a call to your landline is all it would take to land you back at square one. So when the status bar reached 100% my excitement was at fever pitch. I tentatively pressed play. I may have been underwhelmed by the sweet slice of pop psychedelia at first – no song could have matched all the bright colours my imagination had filled it in with over the years – but it had Revolution charm and seemed like a grower. Then a minute from the end, with no warning the song slows down into a slew of phone rings, dial-up noise, and cross talk. I thought the file was corrupt, that an incoming call had not disconnected me but insinuated itself into the audio. Or maybe what I was doing was against the laws of physics and I was being transmitted alien warnings or an admonishment from Prince himself. I still toy with this idea sometimes and like to believe I’m listening to a glitched copy, but this means having to ignore Three o’Clock’s release in 1988, which attempts the same ending. If I could gouge out the part of my brain that holds the memory of their version I happily would. Prince’s first demo is the only true Neon Telephone and it’s experimentation instantly transports me back to those early explorative days in the filesharing Wild West. A morally dubious but infinitely exhilarating time. On one hand, I was participating in the destruction of the music industry, but on the other, I had found my very own unicorn-making machine.