Prince’s rare concert film Sign o’ the Times – released to support the Grammy-nominated album of the same name – is an extraordinary document of his true musical mastery. Shot in June 1987 while on tour in the Netherlands and Belgium and at his own Paisley Park Studios in Minneapolis, the setlist includes some of Prince’s biggest hits.
Ahead of its special screening for Melbourne International Film Festival – which also features a Prince dance party hosted by Triple R’s Fee B-Squared – we asked Fee B to sort through Prince’s extensive back catalogue and pick out some of his most important recordings.
“Anyone who knows me knows I hate choosing favourites so let me be clear, these are the Prince tracks I love because of the stories attached to them, not my top tracks of all time.”
‘Controversy’. This is the first Prince record I ever owned and I paid for it with my own pocket money at a hardware store in Thomastown that just so happened to have a rack of 45s. Kooky. It was 1981 and I was too young to appreciate the lyrics then, but I do now and it’s kind of sad how relevant they remain.
“I just can’t believe all the things people say (controversy)/ Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay? (controversy) / Do I believe in god? Do I believe in me? (controversy”)
Always fun when DJs are still dropping this track with punters chanting: “People call me rude, I wish we were all nude / I wish there was no black and white, I wish there were no rules.”
‘When You Were Mine’. This was the B-side to ‘Controversy’ and I have definitely thrashed this one more. It turns up in a lot of my playlists and still sounds fresh AF to me – maybe because it doesn’t sound super slick. When I grabbed a copy of Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual album in 1983, I was pretty psyched to see she’d covered it.
‘1999’. I’ve danced to this so many times. The opening drags me back to the ‘80s every time. We’d always drop it on New Year’s Eve and it always felt like 1999 was further away than hoverboards. You were never sure you were going to make it there. “I don’t wanna die, I wanna dance my life away” was pretty much my mantra.
‘When Doves Cry’. This song was massive. The film clip was everywhere and it was the lead track from the Purple Rain soundtrack. I went and saw the film with my bestie at a cinema in Greensborough. Look, it wasn’t a great film, but that soundtrack is pretty bonkers.
‘Darling Nikki’. Although there were plenty of tracks alluding to masturbation, this was the first one I could remember that actually used the word, and why not? To be honest, I was a little concerned about Nikki having paper cuts thanks to that magazine though.
‘Raspberry Beret’. My best friend moved to the Gold Coast and I hated it. We’d write letters to each other most weeks because phone calls were pretty exy back then. He would send his top ten’s because we were music obsessives and I remember when he told me this song reminded him of me. Makes no sense really, I’ve never owned a raspberry beret, and he thinks I’m quite bright thank you. I still know how to do the dance from the clip and I still have all of those letters and they’re hilarious.
‘Cream’. Love dropping this saucy little banger to see the d-floor start to get a little freaky.”
