Tag: Unreleased

Unreleased (1986)
With its courtroom setting and theme of a relationship turned sour, Witness 4 the Prosecution sounds like The Gold Experience’s I Hate U in a former life. It is unreleased but has been leaked in three distinct flavours, morphing from bluesy rock into sparse, electronic funk. The first version is a Prince solo effort and rocks enough bells but was improved on for the second version after being left in the hands of The Revolution to overdub whilst he was overseas working on the Under The Cherry Moon film. Featuring elastic bass and gospel backing vocals they inject the funk that was previously missing, creating a Dream Factory shoe-in. A liminal state of rock/funk. The third guitar-less version was another solo recording, with synthetic steel drums replacing the band, but it’s a cold flame in comparison. The Revolution were disbanded the following day and although his next album was to be the career apogee of Sign O’ the Times, these versions of Witness 4 the Prosecution show that Wendy, Lisa et al still offered him a dimension he couldn’t always replicate as a sole trader.

Unreleased (1982)
A three minute slice of synth rockabilly in the Delirious / Jack U Off mode. Obviously Delirious is an infinitely greater song, meaning that demos like No Call U and Turn It Up are often overlooked, but even so they still retain a dark, unhinged power. Nuggets of delirium found in the vault’s backwaters. If Elvis’s twin brother Jesse had lived to see the eighties I like to think that he would be on a dive bar tour, mimicking his sibling’s gyrations to sleaze funk like this. Half-heartedly leering / sneering at the sparse crowd, as wall-sweat drips from the light fittings into the beaten-up synths. Later, Jill Jones and Vanity also tried lending their vocals to the track but without Prince’s Presley lip snarl they were doomed to fail.

Unreleased (1982)
A highly infectious 1999 off-cut that got bumped by the similar-sounding Delirious. Turn It Up is a whole lot more than the sum of its parts. Elementally there’s not much to it: a simple LinnDrum beat, a few synth lines (including one that sounds like dripping water) and Prince pleading you to turn it up for five minutes. A guitar does sneak in at the end (and the intro) to add some variety but the bulk of the song is just one man with some old, cold technology creating a bumping groove that would keep the JBs up at night. The magic can’t be found in its dissection but there’s some crazy funk neutrinos at play here. Emulators must despair.

Unreleased (1992)
This wee slip of a song is another I’ll Do Anything refugee. A 100 metre dash of full-tilt organ and fret-roaming bass, with lyrics that go meta with a fourth-wall-breaking “it’s only a movie” line. A “funky” remix exists with the musical backing of NPG’s Black M.F. in the House but is far outpaced by the original which crams in ninety seconds of the kind of jazz performance you’d expect to see a 360 spin of a double bass in. Rough around the edges but beautifully arranged, it’s both the dazzle and dilapidation of a film-set combined. It would have been sung by Nick Nolte in the movie (although thankfully I’ve avoided hearing this version) and without the context of the plot I’m unsure whether the lyrics are literal or an echo of the sentiment that we’re all play-acting. I’m going to go and guess the latter. The world’s a stage and like Marilyn Monroe said: “it’s all make believe, isn’t it?”.

Unreleased (1992)
This sprightly tap-dance number was written for the movie of the same name and was elegantly crafted to appear weightless like an Ottoman mosque. Unfortunately it suffered the same fate as the rest of the songs Prince penned for the film, dumped after test audiences reacted against the movie being a musical production. Some of the tracks resurfaced on later albums but I’ll Do Anything got relegated to the Vault to fester – a harsh destiny for such a fleet-footed slice of nimble pop. The lyrics are similar to A Tribe Called Quest’s What? which was released the previous year and two of the three things that Prince lists he would do for you are falling off the Eiffel Tower and painting a beard on the Mona Lisa. I haven’t seen the film so I don’t know if this French connection is apt but maybe he was going through another Francophile Parade phase in 1992. In the same year he wrote Paris 1798430 for Tevin Campbell and wanted you to imagine starring with him “in a movie called ‘Amour'” in The Continental, so c’est possible. It’s a shame this song never made it to Hollywood but it’s probably for the best – when I close my eyes I imagine the winged messenger of the gods dancing an intricate ballet with an entourage of Lionel Messis and the ghost of Phife Dawg. What I don’t imagine is Nick bloody Nolte.

Unreleased (1985)
Ten days after Led Zeppelin’s much-anticipated reunion at Live Aid – a disapointing trainwreck of a performance that they wouldn’t let be included on the official DVD – Prince was inspired to go into the studio and record his version of a Zeppelin-style stadium rocker. Call of the Wild’s music is dark and menacing, evoking breached chain-link fences, searching spotlights and air-raid siren guitars alerting that someone has broken into, or out of, the compound. The drum, described as “pumping blood to your brain”, has a war-like beat and on every alternate bar there’s an amplified wind noise on the 3 and 4 that sounds like either your own exhausted panting or the guard dogs breathing down your neck. Ominously it slows down towards the end, telling you you’re cornered, options narrowing, but when it starts up again for the last thirty seconds you know somehow you’ve Steve McQueened it.

Unreleased (1977)
One of his better early outtakes and the oldest song on this list that never saw a release in any form. It has all the hallmarks of For You era Prince. Falsetto vox. Polished sheen. A guitar solo calling card. The lyrics are directed towards the record company he just signed for and unlike the barbs found in the darker recesses of Chaos and Disorder it’s a message of hope and excitement. “Makin’ music naturally, me and WB.” You can feel the eagerness to please like it’s his first day in the office. And in a way it was. The explosion it ends with was possibly added to show how Prince is about to blow up big, but could be now interpreted as the contractual tumult to follow. To paraphrase John Lennon in the Beatles song of the same name; there’s still time for fussing and fighting, my friend.

Unreleased (1982) / True Confessions (1991)
Sounding like a one man band, a rockabilly Dick van Dyke, Prince describes his Cinderella which for some reason would be a Hollywood actress of the 40s with Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Lena Horne all getting a glass slipper. Quite why he’s infatuated with Golden Age silver screen stars is not altogether clear (although his character’s views on women are in keeping with the era) but this brief bit of rough and tumble musical theatre is a quirky delight that wouldn’t sound out of place in an old MGM flick. The only officially released version appeared on TC Ellis’s True Confessions, an album whose three Prince-penned tracks stand out by a country mile. My memories of the rest of the lp are sketchy and I really should muster the enthusiasm to fish the CD out of the attic but I certainly remember this song being the undisputed highlight, despite being such an odd inclusion on a rap album. Prince’s version is hardly unknown though and was a bootleg regular as a result of being considered for many abandoned projects. Hovering midway between show tunes and Looney Tunes it’s an espresso shot of camp kook. An entertaining explosion of colour in a grey, grey world.

Unreleased (1979)
Prince’s first side project was The Rebels, a new-wave group consisting of Prince and his touring band who collaborated on and recorded an album’s worth of material in just twelve days. The sessions sound like a doodling pad for the Dirty Mind album (indeed he also worked on Head during this time) and birthed a couple of notable songs. If I Love You Tonight is pleasant and sturdy enough to later resurface as covers by Mayte and Mica Paris, as well as featuring on the 1-800-NEW-FUNK compilation. But the highlight for me is You. It’s one of four songs Prince wrote for the project and was later rerecorded by him in 1987, sounding like a blueprint for C+C Music Factory’s Gonna Make You Sweat. Out of the three iterations (Paula Abdul also released a version in 1990 called U) the Rebels’ guitar-heavy version wins hands down. Hard rock riffs over a simple, pulsing synth line with punchy lyrics that unfortunately include a casual rape reference. Less troubling as later uses (due to it being a perverse compliment from a female protagonist) but still crass and unnecessary from a song that features only 44 unique words. But hey, it was never released (Paula Abdul understandably omitted that line) so it feels like wincing at somebody else’s private diary entry. This was never meant for your ears.

Unreleased (1986)
I occasionally feel like I’m on a fool’s errand with this list, especially when demo songs are judged alongside fleshed out album tracks. Admittedly all ‘best of’ lists are semi ridiculous – an attempt to carve in stone something that is both subjective and in flux – but additionally there’s something faintly unfair about comparing songs in various states of completion. Like judging oil paintings against preliminary sketches. My initial idea was to consider only official releases but that forced an inclusion of songs that I’m not totally in awe of and how disingenuous would a 500 greatest song list be if it featured, say, Round and Round and not Big Tall Wall? It would be turning a blind eye to some of the higher peaks of his output. One such track that makes it onto this all-encompassing list is Baby Go Go, an unpolished demo with heart-quickening pulses of cascading synths that breathe life into the slow, rigid beat. It’s undercooked but has a lot to love about it. The vocals are what you expect from Prince in his prime and the bassline is a peach in velvet. There exists, and this can only be of interest to the seriously hardcore fan, a Sign o’ the Times rehearsal bootleg that features almost forty minutes of Prince teaching this song to his post-Revolution band and is a fascinating insight into its development, showing glimpses of what a powerful track it could have ended up as if he had kept hold of it. Instead he gave it to Nona Hendryx whose version saw an official release but lost something in the process. Mark Berry’s Superstitious mix however is 80s-tastic, with a bassline more MJ than Stevie and worth an aural gander.

Unreleased (1991)
A sweet little bluesy number with a spartan beat consisting solely of a laconic bass and a drum machine setting that doesn’t range far from a factory default. But all the better to hear your luscious, multi-tracked vocals my dear. A room full of Princes harmonising over the girl he lost to a “gust of Southern wind”. It’s insanely catchy and it is incredible to think we never saw a release in any form. I guess he just couldn’t find the right fit. The version that’s doing the rounds was recorded in 1991 but rumoured to have been written eight years earlier. This makes sense as the track’s more Parade than Diamonds and Pearls and not only because it’s a letter shy of the otherwise unrelated I Wonder U. More reminiscent to Parade is the way the music takes a back seat to the simple yet emotive wonderings of whether an absent love thinks about him, making it very close to the chanson stylings of Do U Lie? Listen to I Wonder and try not to whistle it for the rest of the day, I challenge you!

Vanity 6 (1982) / Unreleased (1983)
Let’s include Wet Dream Cousin in here too as the unfinished instrumental sounds way too similar for me to separate them. Prince’s early-eighties side-project was Vanity 6, a female trio originally daubed The Hookers, and the ensuing album still remains my favourite Prince protégé release. Wet Dream is an electro-pop study in the delirium of teen deification. Vanity (Prince wanted to call her Vagina but she refused) sings “If he combs his hair, all my girlfriends start 2 scream”, bottling up Beatlemania and Bieber fever and fire-hosing it onto the school crush. Half way through the heavens open and purple rain descends, drenching the song in Proust’s “musical, innumerable, universal” rhythm but doing nothing to quench puppy love’s desire. Wet Dream Cousin was written for the abandoned Vanity 6 follow-up album and takes the action far away from life’s tumult and foam, to an astral plane where unrequited love seems more like a heightened state of consciousness. The dance of tremulous youth played out against a backdrop of shooting stars.

Unreleased (1992)
Unrelated to the track of the same name on Plectrumelectrum, Wow was written by Prince along with ten others for a film called I’ll Do Anything. It was intended as a big production opener and before they all ended up on the cutting room floor there were five further versions of the same song sprinkled throughout the film, ranging from porno light-funk, to incidental muzak soundtracking a childbirth scene where the lyrics change to “ow!” These were re-recorded by the cast though and had no Prince input. His original version, recorded with the NPG in Australia whilst on his Diamonds and Pearls tour, is a cane-twirling, staircase-skipping, show tune extravaganza. Astaire way to heaven. Ginger Rogers Nelson bringing the glitz.

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!

Unreleased (1985)
“Heaven will be here on earth” Prince sings on the opening line of this unreleased track and as the drum machine trudges along, gazing downwards, you don’t expect it to arrive any day soon. It’s curiously non-celestial sounding even if the whole message of the song is of a telluric paradise – Belinda Carlisle’s heaven was on earth and it didn’t shy away from an uplifting key change. Prince’s monosyllabic vocal delivery spirals downward and if it were to soundtrack any afterlife it would be the Inuit’s perpetual summer of Adlivun, deep in the bowels of the earth, caribou boiling on a permanent flame, sanctuary from the ravens and endless void of the sky. That’s not to say Heaven isn’t a great track though and the instrumental second half does justice to the subject matter with synths gamboling and darting over the temporal beat, playing at being harps and organs. Without the sobering vocals weighing the song down cherubs are free to jay-walk through towns and crash through cornfields, creating crop circles with choreographed games of kiss chase. Whippets set loose in a pastoral happy hunting ground.

Unreleased (1981)
Sounding more at home at a Jools Holland Hootenanny than a Glam Slam nightclub, this boogie-woogie piano ditty swings along at a rockabilly pace. A young Prince showing off his chops and rock’n’roll smarts. The lyrics are typical of his early career – he’s alone and heartbroken – but unlike, say, Gotta Broken Heart Again or So Blue they’re so at odds with the underlying, uptempo music that the effect is an enjoyable cognitive dissonance, much like Nina Simone’s Go To Hell. It reminds me of when your mind wanders whilst reading a book. Your thoughts and the story travel to different destinations on the same tracks. Later that year he wrote Jack U Off in a similar style which consigned the less subversive Broken to the back of the vault.

Internet single (2013)
Armed with horns and thistles Prince skips across a bog of squelchy bass to suggest you keep your boyfriend away from him so he can take responsibility for where you sleep tonight. A cockerel collecting conquests. Male ego in war dress. Sold through his 3rdeyegirl site and labelled as a demo this sleek funk number is slow and sparse but with intricate playfulness happening between the beats. This offsets the lacklustre pick-up artistry of the lyrics which sound both creepy and bored. Lothario on auto pilot. Although the line “With the deepest mark of magic. My name upon your walls.” sounds like an incantation worthy of Calypso.

Unreleased (1992)
Prince takes a Bomb Squad-style beat and rolls it into a scampish ball with his signature synths and the hoover sound from Human Resource’s Dominator. Ahhh that hoover sound – very much the sound of my teenage rave years and The P was written for the similarly adolescent Tevin Campell but not included on his album, presumably because the longform title is The Penis and is about somebody hitting on girls in a club asking them how many ways can they work his phallus. Admittedly that’s the context of a large percentage of R&B but generally handled with a soupçon more innuendo than “I waste no time when I take her 2 the booth, I say ‘oh, u wanna be with me, how many ways can u work the P?” Yeah, the lyrics don’t bear close scrutiny but the overall result is the uncontrollable id of a 15 year-old scallywag, grabbing it’s crotch and firing off single entendres in a bid to appear worldly – similar to Kendrick Lamar’s Backseat Freestyle. It sounds like the teenage offspring of Daddy Pop and I just want to ruffle its hair.

Unreleased (1989)
A Batman-era outtake. Sparse and raw but a fantastic framework with a great chorus. The sample machine overfloweth, creating a cutlery-drawer sound that’s as awkward and disjointed as folding a fitted sheet, but keeping an upbeat, quirky character that could be mistaken for Art of Noise (a group who scored a hit with a cover of Kiss the previous year). Here Prince is once again the spurned lover wanting to know Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad but this time he likes it. The third verse starts in a similar way to Batdance‘s “Hey Ducky…” and certainly this track wouldn’t sound out of place on the Batman soundtrack – in fact I’ll go as far as to say that if it had replaced the woeful Arms of Orion no doubt the album would ascend a few rankings in the general consensus. Instead Your Love Is So hard has to live forever in the vault, regretting it’s dateline tattoo of 1989 and secretly enjoying the neglect.