Prince - Welcome 2 Australia Tour

Last night I went to the first Prince concert of my life at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre. In fact it was the first ever concert (in English) I have been to in my life. Before I get to a review of my concert experience I want to give a little background to my following of Prince's music. (Go to Part II - The Concert to skip the background. )

Part I - The Background

For me it started around 1984 when I was in high school in Sydney. Several girls who I enjoyed being in the company of were diehard fans and his most recent Purple Rain album was taking the world by storm. I knew about Prince certainly, and his "1999" song was about the only one I really knew before 1984. What was funny is that I didnt really know what the point of that song was (an anti-nuclear theme) and it's last words had what I though was a child asking "Mummy, why does everybody have a bum? " instead of "bomb" - mainly an American vs Australian accent thing.

Back in 1984 music wasn't cheap. At around $20-30 for an album on vinyl or cassette and having to travel to get to the local record store getting a collection was not straightforward. In any case I ended up with a sizeable collection of vinyl LPs, singles, 12" versions and so on. I bought all the LPs from "For You" all the way through to "Lovesexy" by which time CDs were becoming the norm.

It was around 1991 that Prince started disconnecting from what I felt his strengths were and all his troubles with Warner Bros etc made it difficult to know what was going on. Before that it had been easy. Each year a new album to enjoy compared to the chaos of the 90's releases. I understood Prince's point of view and having heard only a few bootleg (many generation crappy copied cassettes) I was intrigued with the "Vault" which was a vast treasure of his prolific output. So in one sense one wanted more output, but the record companies certainly know about marketing and over saturation etc.

There were huge issues obviously and only Prince knows the truth of those times. Australia was far away, and no internet meant you were isolated from all the goings on. My interest in his music was still present but it lapsed into a dormant phase as I explored other music.

I picked up one last cassette in a bargains bin "Come" his most unloved album it seems but it had a few songs which I still enjoy to this day. I hadn't been able to get Graffiti Bridge locally on vinyl and had it also on cassette. These were my only two Prince cassettes. Then the whole Warner Bros war meant I didn't see another Prince music product till 1996 when I bought the "Emancipation" CD collection and it too had a few songs I enjoy to this day. Until then I had bought another multi CD with the Hits/B-Sides which basically became my usual Prince listening when I felt like it.

But then that was it. I haven't bought another Prince Album since and he had gone off my radar entirely it seemed. I occasionally heard news about him and heard about the sad loss of his child shortly after birth to a craniosynostosis syndrome (Pfeiffer's type 2 or 3) which is autosomal dominant which points to one of the parent's having the condition too. The author of the article had pointed to Prince's short stature etc.

It was here that I began to understand how challenging life can be. You had a superstar performer, talented, one of a kind type who had fame, fortune, women, and so on... but he too was in the same prison of his human condition. There is probably no crueller prison in this world than the realisation that you cannot pass on the genes you have to another generation. So much of Prince's memes - new generation, rainbow children and so on speak to this regeneration needed for the renewal of human society.

The other thing that had happened around 1996 was a high school re-union at which I met for the first time in 10 years a friend who I consider one of the fondest I had. Ben Mourra. One of the most liked people at school, he had a creative streak and was ever pleasant. I attributed this to his background as a Jehovah's Witness. He was the first real religious challenge I had ever experienced in my life. With a Lebanese background I had always been somewhat curious that Ben wasn't muslim and I became aware of his religion I think in a debate that the class once did on creation vs evolution. Ben was on the creationist side and had brought in much material from his Watchtower and Awake magazines to support his arguments.

Being a Jehovah's Witness was I felt a defining feature about Ben. Our friendship was anchored on a common love of the Commodore 64 computing platform. I would go to his place after school and we would work on programs and at one point wrote together a machine language assembler in BASIC that was rudimentary but worked well. He had a hex calculator and we would spend hours compiling hand coded machine language with lookup tables in 6502 assembly language.

This was always spiced up with religious discussion. I was and never have been very aggressive about religious debates. As someone with a Muslim background I have a strong monotheist theme to my belief but am skeptical of any second hand sources of information in this respect. Ben would inject discussion of religion at times I felt as part of his obligations as a Jehovah's Witness but in my mind the logic of monotheism and the discovery of material explaining Charles Taze Russell and his creation of the Jehovah's Witnesses etc definitely made it all very secondary source which I had a natural skepticism towards. Some sources even called it a cult.

My own thoughts towards it was the whole concept of an ever present doomsday cheating people out of parts of their lives. Ben had been encouraged to leave school in 1986 in year 10 and I was genuinely saddened by this. He had I felt one of those truly good minds and personalities that would have enjoyed university life.But everything has its reasons, so it was with great enthusiasm that I met Ben again in 1996.

Things were very different it turned out. Ben had divorced from his wife that he married very early in life and had turned his back on the Jehovah's Witnesses. Apparently he had reached a point at which questions on the 144k chosen ones, could not be adequately answered by 'Elders'. I could only imagine the anguish that would have accompanied this as Ben had an independent and curious character.

I have digressed here, but the curious part about this is that Ben was a Paul McCartney hardcore fan, and liked Michael Jackson more than he did Prince. While I can't remember if he disliked Prince, it was certainly the subject of some ridicule that I was such a huge Prince fan at the time. Curious because Ben would advance Michael Jackson who was also a Jehovah's Witness as a point in the religions favour if I remember correctly. Celebrity driven religious proselytism. I was never into Cat Stevens but I guess he plays a similar role for Islam. More on this later.

Some of the girls who had turned me on to Prince were also at the re-union and I saw how they had matured, and mostly married. I was still studying for my ophthalmology carreer and single.

And that's the last I really heard or thought of Prince for a good while. The internet brought so much more into my life around that time that music was the last thing on my mind. I enjoyed classical, jazz and opera when it came to music. Foreign language films, and arthouse independent films became my thing for almost a decade.

I never bought any other Prince material as he went searching for new angles on how to distribute his music and so on. I think Prince also became a Jehovah's Witness around this time (when he lost his child in 1997, in what must have been a very vulnerable time in his life) but I didn't learn this till only last year when I was researching Wikipedia on something unrelated at first. A familiar phenomenon to most I'm sure where one thing leads to another.

I downloaded online versions of the vinyl albums which I loved. I had no record player and yet had paid for the right to hear this music (and still have the records) so I didnt feel any moral problem in obtaining the material this way. This problem of marketing the same material in different formats over time is an area where I feel work needs to be done. Nevertheless I had this material to enjoy again but having no real connection to the new material and Prince having locked this stuff up in membership requiring schemes I just never heard any new Prince material in a long time.

Then one night as we were working on our respective things a commercial advertising Prince's tour came on announcing the sale of tickets starting the following week. I casually said to my wife that it would be fun to go. He'd come out twice before and I had been to neither for different reasons. First time I was too poor as a university student for his Diamond and Pearls tour, and in 2003 when he last came out I was in England doing an oculoplastic fellowship.

My wife is quite a bit younger than me so had really only a vague idea of Prince's real talent, and knew the big hits ironically from so called cover versions. Her ignorance of Prince was evidence of my own indifference. We'd been married ten years, and my wife's thoughts on Prince resembled his own lyrics and self insight on his Black Album in "Bob George" where he answers a question about 'Prince' with "isn't he the skinny mf with the high voice?".

The so called Black Album has a special place in my Prince fandom. I had first heard a very bad multi generation cassette copy in the late 80s and had a copy of that. God only knows how that copy had got to me. Its providence, and who copied it from whom to whom would be quite a story I would imagine. I had dreamed of being lucky enough o have found the black vinyl album that some had stumbled upon in record stores. But Australia was way too far to have received these so I had only heard about it as part of Prince folklore. Imagine my surprise one day in 1999 or 2000 when I found a copy in the bargain bin at the front of a Target Store in Brunswick Melbourne! It was a limited edition CD and had probably been in their inventory for years. Its presence there probably tells one about Prince's popularity in the 1990's. He had certainly lost the 'presence' that he once had.

To finally listen to the Black Album in CD quality was a real revelation. Lyrics which I only vaguely knew fom the muffled tape I had were suddenly crystal clear. I later learned that Prince actually had turned away from this project having an epiphany that it was 'evil'. I have no idea about whether he believed the content was evil, or whether the concept of blackness etc was evil? It had some very catchy tunes and to this day I think I can still sing along to every song and my favourite on the album is probably "Rock Hard in a Funky Place".

I had listened to Prince every day for some years, so you can imagine that I knew and still know most of the lyrics to this day. What I enjoyed most about his music was the funky tunes, the fearlessness to express anything, the recognition of God, and most of all the ballads. I'm definitely a huge fan of Prince's ballads more than any other type he does. Sure I like the other stuff, but it is Prince's amazing ballads which I truly adore.

Anyhow, we had forgotten about the concert on the Monday the tickets went on sale (due to me being in the operating theatre all day) but managed to pick up 2 seats the following day and we had anticipated yesterday night for that whole time. I had a copy of Purple Rain on DVD that I had picked out of a bargain bin at some point and we watched that the weekend before so that my wife could be familiar with some of the other tunes. And then the big night was upon us.