Unreleased (1995)
Bathing in the waters of Hounds of Love-era Kate Bush, this off-cut from Emancipation is an ethereal breath of poetry. It chronologically nestles nicely between 1999 and 2045: Radical Man and describes a club called Love4OneAnother (the name of Prince’s charity and late 90s website) where “the walls between us will soon disappear”. Everyone in the club has synaesthesia and can “taste the colour” and “smell the fun”, which sound like Skittles slogans but describe a not wholly uncommon condition that affects one in a hundred people in some way. I have a mild form myself and wonder how anyone can visualise Thursday as anything else but a deep luscious green (as an aside, if you can point to where days of the week or months of the year sit in space then you have spatial sequence synesthesia and it may blow your mind, as it did mine recently, to find out that THAT AIN’T NORMAL). So once again Prince visualises a futuristic nightclub but despite it having a 3000-strong dancefloor dancing to a heartbeat drum, it’s not the psychedelic Saturnalia of the Crystal Ball or the apocalyptic blowout of 1999. The barely-there music is more suited to the ghostly and deserted clubs in Graffiti Bridge. Soothing and mediative but frail and susceptible to a vagrant wind. At the time of writing we are only four years away from this peaceful utopia where fear doesn’t exist. We are not on track people!