The story of Prince

A musical childhood in Minneapolis

Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis on the seventh of June 1958. His father, John Lewis Nelson, was a jazz pianist and songwriter who led a group called the Prince Rogers Trio, and his mother, Mattie Shaw, sang with that band. The boy was named after his father's stage name. John later said he chose it because he wanted his son to do everything he himself had wanted to do. The child did not much like the name, and friends and family called him Skipper. All four of his grandparents came from Louisiana, and the jazz drummer Louis Hayes was a cousin on his father's side. His sister Tyka, his only full sibling, arrived in May 1960.[1] [2] [3]

Music was everywhere in the Nelson home, and at the age of seven Prince wrote his first song, called Funk Machine, on his father's piano. Health was a worry too. He later said he was born epileptic and had seizures as a small boy. He remembered telling his mother one day that he would not be sick anymore, because an angel had told him so. Years later he told the talk show host Tavis Smiley that the illness had made him feel like an outsider, and that he made up for it by being as loud and as flashy as he could.[1] [2]

Home life was unsettled. His parents separated when he was ten, and his mother married a man named Hayward Baker, who took the boy to see James Brown in concert, a night that left a deep mark on him. Prince did not get along with his half brother Omarr, and he bounced between his mother's house and his father's. His father bought him his first guitar, but after one clash he threw his son out. Prince found a home in the basement of the Anderson family, whose son André, later known as André Cymone, became his closest friend and musical partner.[1] [2] [3]

At Central High School Prince played football, basketball and baseball, and he kept playing basketball for fun as an adult. Less expected, he also trained in classical ballet at the Minnesota Dance Theatre through a city schools arts program. Music was the real obsession, though. With André and his cousin Charles Smith he formed a band called Grand Central, later renamed Champagne, and a boy named Morris Day took over on drums. Day's mother managed them. In 1975 Pepé Willie, the husband of Prince's cousin, brought Prince and André in to record with his group 94 East. Prince was sixteen, and it was his first real studio session.[1] [2] [3]

Discovery, Warner Bros. and For You

In 1976 Champagne recorded a demo at Moon Sound, a small studio run by an English born producer named Chris Moon. During a break Moon noticed one band member staying behind and moving from drums to piano to bass, playing each one well. He offered the teenager a deal. Moon would write lyrics, Prince would write the music, and he could use the studio for free. Prince got his own keys just in time for his high school graduation. Moon said the young singer was so shy that at first his voice barely moved the meters, so he turned off the lights and had Prince lie on the floor under a blanket, humming into a sensitive microphone until his falsetto finally emerged.[1] [2]

Moon tried to sell Prince to New York labels without luck, so he played the tape to a Minneapolis businessman named Owen Husney, who ran an advertising agency. Husney became Prince's manager, paid for a polished demo at Sound 80 Studios with the engineer David Z, and used his agency to build a slick press kit. Several labels got interested, including Warner Bros., A and M and Columbia. On the twenty fifth of June 1977 Prince signed with Warner Bros. It was a three album deal, and remarkably for a teenager, it let him produce his own record and keep his publishing rights.[1] [2] [3]

Prince and Husney moved to Sausalito in California, where the debut album For You was recorded at the Record Plant. It came out on the seventh of April 1978. The sleeve claimed that Prince wrote, produced, arranged, composed and played every one of the twenty seven instruments on the record, and the only outside help was Chris Moon's share of the lyrics on the single Soft and Wet. That song reached number twelve on the soul chart. The album itself stalled low on the pop chart, but Warner Bros. saw a long term talent and kept faith with him.[1] [2] [3]

To play live, Prince put together a mixed race, mixed gender band inspired by Sly Stone, with André Cymone on bass, Dez Dickerson on guitar, Gayle Chapman and Matt Fink on keyboards and Bobby Z on drums. Their first show was at the Capri Theater in Minneapolis on the fifth of January 1979. That October came his second album, simply called Prince, with the hit I Wanna Be Your Lover, which topped the soul chart and sold over a million copies. On American Bandstand in January 1980 he told Dick Clark he was nineteen, though he was twenty one, and when asked how many instruments he played, he stared at his shoes and said thousands.[1] [2] [3]

Dirty Mind, Controversy and 1999

In October 1980 Prince released Dirty Mind, recorded in a makeshift studio in the basement of his home on Lake Minnetonka. He played nearly everything himself and credited the engineering to an invented name, Jamie Starr. It was raw and fast, mixing funk, new wave and punk, and its frank sexual songs shocked plenty of listeners. It only reached number forty five on the album chart, but critics loved it. Around then he opened for Rick James, and in early 1981 he made his first appearance on Saturday Night Live. André Cymone left the band soon after, unhappy about getting too little credit, and was replaced by Mark Brown, renamed Brownmark.[1] [2] [3]

In October 1981 Prince opened two shows for the Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Coliseum. He walked out in a trench coat and black bikini briefs, and part of the crowd shouted slurs and pelted him with food and bottles. He left the stage after three songs and wanted to skip the second night, but he was talked into it, and the same thing happened again. That same month he released Controversy, which included a recitation of the Lord's Prayer, a plea to President Reagan called Ronnie, Talk to Russia, and the first of his trademark spellings, like the number two for the word to.[1] [2] [3]

Prince also built an empire of side projects. In 1981 he assembled the Time around a local funk band, with his old friend Morris Day as frontman, and he secretly played most of the instruments on their records under the Jamie Starr name. He also created a girl trio called Vanity 6. On tour the Time tried hard to upstage their boss, and on the last night of the Controversy tour in Cincinnati, Prince and his crew pelted them with eggs, handcuffed guitarist Jesse Johnson to a coat rack, and started a food fight that spilled into the hotel. Prince then made Morris Day pay for the damage.[1] [2]

Late in 1982 came the double album 1999. Drummer Bobby Z said the title song was sparked by a television documentary about Nostradamus that the band watched in a hotel. By morning Prince had already written it. The album sold more than four million copies. Little Red Corvette became his first top ten pop hit, and along with Michael Jackson's Billie Jean it was among the first videos by Black artists to get heavy play on MTV. The album cover hid a name printed backwards inside the letter I of Prince: the Revolution. Around this time, Time members Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis missed a show and were fired. They became one of the most successful production teams of the decade.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Purple Rain

After 1999, Prince told his manager Bob Cavallo he would not renew their contract unless he starred in a major film. Every studio passed on a movie led by a musician, so Cavallo produced it himself. Allegedly, Warner executives asked whether John Travolta could play the lead instead. Director Albert Magnoli rewrote a darker script, and Prince planned to cast Vanity opposite him. She quit in 1983, and the role went to the virtually unknown Apollonia Kotero. Filming began in Minneapolis on Halloween 1983 and lasted forty two days, much of it at the First Avenue nightclub. Prince made his fellow musicians take acting classes first.[1] [2] [3]

The heart of the soundtrack was captured live. On the third of August 1983, at a benefit for the Minnesota Dance Theatre at First Avenue, Prince and his band premiered the song Purple Rain. It was also the first show for new guitarist Wendy Melvoin, who had replaced Dez Dickerson. Prince had first offered the tune to Stevie Nicks to write lyrics for, but she said it was too much for her. When Wendy found fresh chords for it in rehearsal, it lost its country feel. The live take was trimmed from about eleven minutes to under nine. Later, when Magnoli asked for one more song, Prince came back the next day with When Doves Cry, a track with no bass line at all.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Released in the summer of 1984, the album Purple Rain spent twenty four straight weeks at number one in America. When Doves Cry was the biggest single of the year, and Let's Go Crazy also hit number one. The film opened on the twenty seventh of July and was a hit too, and at one point Prince had the number one film, album and single in the country at the same time. The soundtrack sold thirteen million copies in the United States alone, won two Grammys, and in 1985 won the Academy Award for Best Original Song Score. His band, now officially the Revolution, became stars.[1] [2] [3]

Purple Rain also made Prince a target. Tipper Gore heard her eleven year old daughter playing his song Darling Nikki, which referred to masturbation, and she helped found the Parents Music Resource Center. Its list of fifteen objectionable songs, the Filthy Fifteen, put Darling Nikki at number one and Sugar Walls, a song Prince wrote for Sheena Easton under a fake name, at number two. The campaign led to the Parental Advisory stickers still used today. Prince also missed the famous We Are the World session in January 1985. He offered a guitar solo from another room, was turned down, and donated a song instead.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Purple Rain tour opened in Detroit in November 1984 with Sheila E. as the opening act, ran for ninety eight shows and sold about one point seven million tickets. Bruce Springsteen and Madonna made surprise appearances. It ended on the seventh of April 1985 in front of fifty five thousand people at Miami's Orange Bowl, where Prince told the crowd he had to go and did not know when he would be back. Just two weeks later he released a very different album, the psychedelic Around the World in a Day, which went to number one and gave him the hit Raspberry Beret.[1] [2]

Paisley Park and the end of the Revolution

With his new power, Prince got his own label, Paisley Park Records, funded and distributed by Warner. He also became a hit factory for others, often hiding behind fake names. The Bangles' Manic Monday was credited to Christopher, and it reached number two, kept off the top only by Prince's own Kiss. Chaka Khan's version of his early song I Feel for You won him a Grammy for Best R and B Song. And a ballad he wrote for his side band the Family, Nothing Compares 2 U, would top the British chart for Sinéad O'Connor in 1990. He produced albums for Sheila E., Jill Jones and many more.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

His 1986 album Parade was the soundtrack to Under the Cherry Moon, a romance set on the French Riviera. The video director Mary Lambert started as director, but after disagreements she left and Prince took over. The film flopped and won Golden Raspberry awards, including Worst Picture, tied with Howard the Duck. The music did far better. Kiss had started as a sparse demo that Prince gave to a band called Mazarati, and when he heard their version he took it back, stripped out the bass, and turned it into his third American number one. Warner had not even wanted it as a single.[1] [2] [3]

Behind the scenes the Revolution was coming apart. Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman felt they were not getting credit for their growing contributions, and they disliked the new dancers and bodyguards he had added to the band. Prince, feeling rejected, decided to end it. After the Parade tour, by October 1986, he dismissed Wendy and Lisa along with Bobby Z, and Brownmark quit. A finished double album the band had worked on, called Dream Factory, was shelved. Prince then invented a sped up female sounding alter ego called Camille, and planned an album credited only to her, before scrapping that too.[1] [2] [3]

Out of Dream Factory, Camille and a triple album called Crystal Ball came Sign o' the Times, released on the thirty first of March 1987. Warner insisted on cutting it from three records to two. The title track touched on AIDS, crack and gang violence, and the album ranged across funk, soul, rock and psychedelic pop. Many critics now call it his greatest work. Engineer Susan Rogers said he recorded so fast that songs came out like sneezes. Several songs were inspired by his fiancée at the time, Susannah Melvoin, Wendy's twin sister. That September his huge studio complex, Paisley Park, officially opened in the suburb of Chanhassen.[1] [2] [3]

The next planned release was a dark, hard funk record with an all black sleeve and no name on it. Days before its December 1987 release, Prince called Warner chairman Mo Ostin and pulled it, saying he had realised it was evil. Around five hundred thousand copies had to be destroyed, though a few escaped and became collector's treasures. He told Rolling Stone he suddenly understood that he could die at any moment and be judged by the last thing he left behind. Instead he recorded the joyful, spiritual Lovesexy in about eight weeks, released in May 1988. Its tour was a hit with crowds but lost money because of its lavish sets.[1] [2] [3]

Batman, the New Power Generation and a symbol

In 1989 Tim Burton asked Prince for songs for his Batman film. Prince went into the studio and delivered a whole album, released that June. It went to number one, Batdance topped the singles chart, and it sold over four million copies, but as part of the deal Prince had to sign away the publishing rights to the songs. During this period he had a relationship with the film's star Kim Basinger, and he produced an album for her that was never released. He also wrote and sang Love Song together with Madonna for her album Like a Prayer, and played guitar on several of her tracks without credit.[1] [2] [3]

His next film, Graffiti Bridge, a sequel of sorts to Purple Rain with Morris Day and the original Time, came out in November 1990 and flopped, earning just over four million dollars. Prince was stung. His new managers later said he believed it was as good as Purple Rain. But his live career was booming. On the stripped down Nude Tour of 1990 he unveiled a new group, and at Rock in Rio in January 1991 it was officially launched as the New Power Generation. The powerhouse singer and keyboard player Rosie Gaines and drummer Michael Bland, who was still in college when Prince offered him the job, were among its stars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

With the New Power Generation he released Diamonds and Pearls in October 1991. It became his best selling album in years, and the single Cream gave him his fifth American number one. In 1992 he signed a new contract with Warner Bros. reported to be worth one hundred million dollars for six albums. That October he released an album whose only title was an unpronounceable symbol, a blend of the male and female signs. It was built as a rock soap opera about an Egyptian princess, played by a young dancer named Mayte Garcia. It sold about two point eight million copies, short of what everyone hoped.[1] [2] [3]

Then, in 1993, Prince announced he would no longer be called Prince. He took the symbol as his name, describing it as unpronounceable and about thinking in new ways. Warner Bros. mailed floppy disks with a custom font to the media so the symbol could be printed. Everyone else fell back on the clumsy phrase the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, or simply the Artist. Many people thought it was crazy, and his sales dipped. But Prince said it was about freedom. He argued Warner had trademarked the name Prince and used it to sell his work, and that he had become a pawn in their business.[1] [2]

Slave, marriage and loss

The real fight was about control. Prince wrote songs constantly and had hundreds of unreleased tracks in the vault at Paisley Park. He wanted to release music as fast as he made it, while Warner feared flooding the market. In protest he began appearing in public with the word slave written on his cheek. In 1994 Warner let him release The Most Beautiful Girl in the World through an independent label, and it reached number three in America and became his only number one single in Britain. To escape his contract faster, he delivered albums at speed, including an official release of The Black Album and, in 1995, The Gold Experience.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On Valentine's Day 1996 Prince married Mayte Garcia. He was thirty seven and she was twenty two. He had first met her in 1990, when she was a sixteen year old dancer, and according to her memoir he became her legal guardian when she moved to Minneapolis at seventeen. On the sixteenth of October 1996 their son was born with Pfeiffer syndrome, a rare and severe condition. He could not breathe without a ventilator and died about a week later. Mayte later said that when they appeared on Oprah Winfrey's show soon after, they acted as if their baby was still alive, because neither of them could accept that he was gone.[1] [2] [3]

After a miscarriage and deep grief, the marriage came apart, and the couple divorced in 2000. Mayte said she had thought about suicide in that dark period. Musically, 1996 was the year Prince finally walked away from Warner. After handing in Chaos and Disorder and a collection of old recordings, he released Emancipation on his own NPG Records label with distribution by EMI. It was three discs, thirty six songs, each disc exactly sixty minutes long, and it included his first cover versions of other people's songs. It was certified platinum. In 1998 he sold a five disc set of vault material called Crystal Ball, largely directly to fans online.[1] [2] [3]

In 1999 he tried a major label again, signing a one album deal with Arista for Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, and he closed the century with a pay per view concert on New Year's Eve 1999. His old song 1999 re entered the American chart that January, making it the only song named after a year to chart in that very year. Then, on the sixteenth of May 2000, his publishing deal with Warner expired, and he announced he was taking back the name Prince. The symbol era was over after seven years.[1] [2]

Faith, the internet and a second peak

Around 2001 Prince became a Jehovah's Witness, guided by his friend Larry Graham, the bassist who invented slap bass in Sly and the Family Stone. Prince called it a realisation rather than a conversion, and compared Graham to Morpheus guiding Neo in The Matrix. He studied scripture, attended a local Kingdom Hall, and sometimes knocked on doors to talk about his faith. His songs grew less explicit. That August his father John died at eighty five, and Prince dedicated a Joni Mitchell cover to him. In 2001 he also married Manuela Testolini, a Canadian businesswoman, in a private ceremony. They separated in 2005 and divorced in 2007.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Prince was far ahead of the music business online. Through his subscription sites, later called the NPG Music Club, he sold music straight to fans for years, and in 2006 he received a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for it. In February 2004 he opened the Grammys with Beyoncé, and a month later he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At that ceremony he joined a tribute to George Harrison and played the long guitar solo that closed While My Guitar Gently Weeps. That April his album Musicology came bundled with concert tickets, and Rolling Stone named him the top earning musician of the year.[1] [2] [3]

The comeback kept rolling. His 2006 album 3121 became the first of his records to debut at number one. He won a Golden Globe for a song in the animated film Happy Feet, and ran a weekend residency at his own nightclub in Las Vegas. Then, on the fourth of February 2007, he played the Super Bowl halftime show in Miami on a stage shaped like his symbol. It began to pour just as he reached Purple Rain, the first time it had ever rained on a halftime show. Crew members said he asked if they could make it rain harder. It reached about one hundred and forty million viewers and is often called the greatest halftime show ever.[1] [2]

In 2007 Prince played twenty one nights at London's new O2 Arena, capping ticket prices at thirty one pounds twenty one to echo his album 3121. He also gave away his album Planet Earth free with the Mail on Sunday newspaper, which angered music retailers and his own distributor. In 2008 he headlined Coachella for a reported fee of more than five million dollars. That same year he cancelled a concert at Dublin's Croke Park on ten days' notice, and the promoters sued. He settled in 2010 for two point nine five million dollars. In a 2009 television interview he said he had never voted, and voiced belief in the chemtrails conspiracy theory.[1] [2] [3]

The final years

In his fifties Prince kept surprising people. In 2010 he gave away his album 20Ten free with newspapers in Europe, and in 2011 he headlined the Hop Farm Festival, his first ever British festival. In 2014, after eighteen years apart, he re signed with Warner Bros., and the deal gave him ownership of his classic master recordings, the very thing he had fought for in the slave years. That February he played surprise gigs across London with his new band 3rdeyegirl, starting at the London home of the singer Lianne La Havas, with many shows announced on Twitter only on the day.[1] [2]

He also used his platform for causes. In 2015, after Freddie Gray died from injuries suffered in Baltimore police custody, Prince released a song called Baltimore and played a Rally 4 Peace concert in the city. At the Grammys that February he told the audience that albums still mattered, just like books and Black lives. After his death, many of his quiet good deeds came to light. He had secretly paid tens of thousands of dollars toward the cancer treatment of the funk drummer Clyde Stubblefield, a man he had never met, and anonymously saved a historic Black library branch in Louisville.[1] [2]

In early 2016 Prince began a new kind of tour called Piano and a Microphone, just him alone at a piano. It opened in Melbourne in February, and he had also begun work on a memoir. But behind the scenes his health was failing. He had become addicted to prescription opioids, and on the seventh of April he postponed two shows in Atlanta, with the venue saying he had the flu. He came back and played them on the fourteenth. It was his final concert. On the flight home early the next morning, he became unresponsive, and his jet made an emergency landing in Moline, Illinois.[1] [2]

At the hospital in Moline, Prince was given naloxone, a drug used to reverse opioid overdoses. Once he came round, he left against medical advice. His team said he was dehydrated and fighting the flu. The next day he was seen cycling near home, and that evening he shopped for Record Store Day at the Electric Fetus in Minneapolis, then appeared at a dance party at Paisley Park to tell fans he was fine. On the twentieth of April his staff called Howard Kornfeld, a California doctor who specialised in addiction, asking for urgent help. Kornfeld sent his son to Minnesota with medication to begin treatment.[1]

On the morning of the twenty first of April 2016, Kornfeld's son had just arrived at Paisley Park, and it was he who called for an ambulance. Prince was found unresponsive in an elevator. Paramedics could not revive him, and he was pronounced dead at seven minutes past ten. He was fifty seven. On the second of June the medical examiner ruled that he had died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl. Investigators found he had taken counterfeit pills made to look like the painkiller Vicodin, but which were laced with fentanyl. As the prosecutor later put it, Prince had no idea he was taking a pill that could kill him.[1] [2]

Aftermath, the vault and legacy

The grief was worldwide. President Obama paid tribute, cities lit bridges and buildings in purple, and in the week after his death Prince sold four point four million albums and songs in America. Five of his albums were in the top ten at the same time, a first in chart history. At First Avenue, his star on the club's outside wall was secretly repainted in gold leaf one night that May. The artist turned out to be Peyton Russell, who had once worked at Prince's club. In 2017 the colour company Pantone created an official shade of purple in his honour, named after his symbol.[1]

In April 2018 the Carver County prosecutor announced that no one would be charged. There was no evidence of where the counterfeit pills came from. The investigation confirmed Prince had been addicted to opioids. A local doctor, Michael Schulenberg, agreed to pay the United States thirty thousand dollars to settle civil allegations that he had written an opioid prescription meant for Prince in the name of Kirk Johnson, Prince's friend and former drummer, to protect the star's privacy. The doctor did not admit liability, and Johnson's lawyer said his client had nothing to do with his friend's death.[1] [2]

Prince left no will. Within weeks, about seven hundred people claimed to be his relatives or heirs. The court eventually recognised his sister Tyka and five half siblings as heirs, and a trust company took temporary charge of the estate and had his vault drilled open. Heirs later sold large shares to the music company Primary Wave. In August 2022, six years after his death, the estate, valued at about one hundred and fifty six million dollars, was finally settled. Tyka, his only full sibling, died in November 2024 at sixty four. His ashes were placed in a small urn shaped like Paisley Park, which opened as a museum in October 2016.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The vault has slowly opened. A planned release called Deliverance was blocked by a court in 2017. Then came his original demo of Nothing Compares 2 U, a solo piano rehearsal from 1983, an album of his own versions of songs he gave away called Originals, the shelved 2010 album Welcome 2 America, and a vast Sign o' the Times box set. In 2019 his unfinished memoir, The Beautiful Ones, was published with about fifty handwritten pages. In 2026 the estate announced Timeless, ten previously unreleased recordings from 1977 to 2016, released at the end of August. As of 2026, much of the vault remains unheard.[1] [2] [3]

His legacy has also been argued over. A nine hour Netflix documentary by Ezra Edelman included former girlfriends accusing Prince of physical and emotional abuse, according to the New York Times Magazine writer who saw a rough cut. The estate called it sensationalised, and in February 2025 the film was cancelled in favour of a new estate backed project. What is beyond argument is the music. Prince sold more than one hundred million records, won seven Grammys and an Oscar, and influenced artists from Beyoncé and Bruno Mars to Janelle Monáe and the Weeknd. He was, as Billboard put it, the greatest musician of his generation.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Prince

Prince and Morris Day. Morris Day was the drummer in Prince's teenage band before Prince made him the swaggering frontman of the Time. On record Prince played most of the parts and Day had to copy his guide vocals note for note. Their rivalry was real, and Day's refusal to show up disrupted days of filming on Purple Rain. He left in 1985 after arguments, but returned for Graffiti Bridge in 1990, and after Prince's death he performed a tribute with Bruno Mars at the Grammys.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Prince and André Cymone. André Cymone's family took Prince in when his father threw him out, and the two boys grew up making music in the Anderson basement. André played bass in Grand Central and in Prince's first touring band. He quit in 1981, bitter that he got little credit, and later said Prince used his ideas for the Time and the bass line of Do Me, Baby. They patched things up, and Prince wrote Cymone's biggest solo hit, The Dance Electric.[1] [2] [3]

Prince and Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman. Lisa Coleman joined on keyboards in 1980, and her girlfriend Wendy Melvoin replaced Dez Dickerson on guitar in 1983. The two shaped the lush sound of Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day and Parade, writing and arranging with him. Feeling uncredited, they clashed with Prince, who dismissed them in 1986. After a painful estrangement they reconciled around 2004, and in 2006 they played Purple Rain beside him at the Brit Awards. Lisa once said he was like a brother.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Prince and Sheila E.. The percussionist Sheila Escovedo met Prince in the late seventies, and he launched her solo career with The Glamorous Life in 1984. She opened the Purple Rain tour, then became drummer and musical director for his Sign o' the Times and Lovesexy tours. They were romantically involved for years, and she says he once secretly proposed on stage by mouthing the words. They grew apart, but kept working together until shortly before his death, and she has said she is still angry that he is gone.[1] [2]

Prince and Vanity. Prince met the model Denise Matthews at the American Music Awards in 1982, renamed her Vanity and made her the leader of Vanity 6. They lived together in Minneapolis for about a year. She later said the lingerie image was his idea and made her uncomfortable. In 1983 she quit the group and the Purple Rain film to go solo. She struggled with drug addiction, became an evangelist, and died of kidney failure in February 2016, just two months before Prince.[1] [2]

Prince and Susannah Melvoin. Susannah Melvoin, Wendy's twin sister, sang backing vocals in the expanded Revolution and became Prince's girlfriend and later his fiancée in the mid eighties. She recalled a close household in which she, Wendy and Lisa welcomed him like family. According to engineer Susan Rogers, songs on Sign o' the Times such as If I Was Your Girlfriend and Adore were like diaries of their relationship. They never married.[1] [2] [3]

Prince and Mayte Garcia. Mayte Garcia was a teenage belly dancer whose audition tape reached Prince on tour in Germany in 1990. She joined his show, starred in the concept of the symbol album, and married him on Valentine's Day 1996. The death of their newborn son that October, followed by a miscarriage, broke the marriage, and they divorced in 2000. In 2017 she published a memoir about their life together.[1] [2]

Prince and Manuela Testolini. Prince married Manuela Testolini, a Canadian businesswoman of Italian and Egyptian descent, in a private ceremony in 2001, the same year he became a Jehovah's Witness. Their life together was kept almost entirely out of view, and she appeared beside him at the Oscars in 2005. They separated that year, filed for divorce in 2006, and the divorce was finalised in October 2007.[1] [2]

Prince and Michael Jackson. They were the two great Black pop stars of the eighties, and the rivalry was fierce. Jackson reportedly came to several Purple Rain shows to study him. Prince turned down a duet on Bad and a role in its video, joking about who would sing the opening line to whom. In 1983 the pair shared a stage with James Brown, and in 2006 Prince played bass in Jackson's face in Las Vegas.[1] [2] [3]

Prince and Madonna. Prince and Madonna dated briefly in the mid eighties and recorded Love Song together for her 1989 album Like a Prayer, where he also played guitar without credit. Things soured. Madonna called him a little troll and complained he only sipped tea on a dinner date, and in 2007 he joked on stage that he had more hits than she had children. They made peace years later, when she cheered him on at Madison Square Garden.[1] [2]

Prince and Larry Graham. Larry Graham, the bassist of Sly and the Family Stone and inventor of slap bass, became Prince's close friend and bandmate in the late nineties, touring with him from 1997 to 2000. Graham, a Jehovah's Witness since 1975, introduced Prince to the faith. Prince compared their bond to Morpheus and Neo in The Matrix, and in 1998 they produced an album together.[1] [2] [3]

Prince and Kim Basinger. During the Batman project in 1989, Prince had a high profile romance with the film's star Kim Basinger. He produced an album for her called Hollywood Affair that was never released, and she appeared on his Scandalous Sex Suite. His new managers remembered first meeting Prince at Paisley Park while Basinger read a magazine in his all white apartment.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Prince

• As a boy, Prince disliked his name so much that he went by the nickname Skipper. He was named after his father's stage name, Prince Rogers, from the jazz group the Prince Rogers Trio. His father said he wanted his son to do everything he had wanted to do himself.[1] [2]
• Prince trained in classical ballet as a teenager and later used his money to help save the Joffrey Ballet. He studied at the Minnesota Dance Theatre through a Minneapolis schools arts program. In the nineties he helped rescue Chicago's struggling Joffrey Ballet, and he remained an advocate for dancers.[1]
• The jazz drummer Louis Hayes was Prince's cousin on his father's side. Music ran through both sides of the family. His father was a jazz pianist and his mother a jazz singer, and a cousin by marriage, Pepé Willie, gave him his first studio session.[1] [2]
• Morris Day, later the frontman of the Time, started out as the drummer in Prince's teenage band. The band was called Grand Central, then Champagne, and Day's mother acted as its manager. Prince played guitar and André Cymone played bass.[1] [2]
• Prince was so shy as a teenager that a producer recorded his first vocals with him lying under a blanket in a dark studio. Chris Moon said Prince's voice barely registered at first. He turned off the lights, put a pillow on the floor and asked him just to hum into a sensitive microphone until he found his falsetto.[1]
• On American Bandstand in 1980, Prince told Dick Clark he played thousands of instruments. He also claimed to be nineteen when he was twenty one, and explained that he had turned down record deals because labels would not let him produce himself.[1]
• Jamie Starr, the engineer credited on Dirty Mind and the producer of the Time, did not exist. Jamie Starr was one of Prince's many pseudonyms. Others included Christopher, used for Manic Monday, and Alexander Nevermind, used for Sheena Easton's Sugar Walls.[1] [2] [3] [4]
• Keyboardist Matt Fink wore surgical scrubs on stage because another band was already using his first costume idea. Fink originally wore a striped prison jumpsuit, but a member of Rick James's band did the same. Prince asked for another idea, Fink suggested a doctor's outfit, and he became Doctor Fink.[1]
• The idea for Little Red Corvette came while Prince dozed in Lisa Coleman's pink 1964 Mercury after an all night session. The lyrics came to him in fragments during catnaps. The song became his first American top ten hit and one of the first videos by a Black artist in heavy MTV rotation.[1] [2]
• 1999 was the only song named after a year to enter the Billboard Hot 100 in that very year. The 1982 song re entered the chart in January 1999. After Prince's death it charted again, becoming the first song to reach the top forty in three separate decades.[1]
• Phil Collins admitted his hit Sussudio sounds very like Prince's 1999. Collins said he had listened to 1999 constantly while touring with Genesis, and critics had long pointed out the resemblance between the two songs.[1]
• Prince asked Journey's Jonathan Cain to check that Purple Rain did not copy Journey's ballad Faithfully. Cain reassured him that the songs only shared a few chords. Purple Rain went on to become Prince's signature song and the finale of his Super Bowl show.[1]
• When Doves Cry originally had a bass line, which Prince removed after talking with singer Jill Jones. He decided the song sounded too ordinary with it. The bare result was the best selling single of 1984 in America.[1] [2]
• Prince required the musicians in Purple Rain to take acting classes, and Morris Day was supposedly thrown out for clowning around. The film was shot over forty two days in Minneapolis, with First Avenue closed for twenty five days and paid one hundred thousand dollars.[1]
• Kiss was nearly a Mazarati song. Prince gave his demo to the band Mazarati, then took it back when he heard how good their version was. The backing vocals were adapted from a Brenda Lee hit, and Warner did not want it as a single.[1]
• The Bangles' Manic Monday was kept from number one by Prince's own Kiss. Prince wrote Manic Monday but credited it to Christopher, the name of his character in Under the Cherry Moon, so he effectively held both of the top two spots.[1] [2]
• The song Bob George on The Black Album was named after two men Prince felt stung by. The title combined his former manager Bob Cavallo and the critic Nelson George, who had become critical of him. In the song Prince voices a jealous, gun waving man.[1]
• A rare original copy of The Black Album sold at auction in 2018 for forty two thousand two hundred and ninety eight dollars. About five hundred thousand copies were destroyed when Prince cancelled the album in 1987. The few survivors are among the most valuable records in the world.[1] [2]
• An early pressing of Prince's cancelled Camille album sold for fifty eight thousand seven hundred and eighty seven dollars in 2016. Camille was credited to his high pitched female alter ego and was meant to come out with no mention of Prince at all. He scrapped it weeks before release.[1]
• In the video for Alphabet St., Prince hid a quick scrolling message telling fans not to buy The Black Album and saying sorry. It was his way of addressing the bootlegs that circulated after he withdrew the record in 1987.[1]
• Studio B at Paisley Park was built as a copy of Studio 3 at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, where Prince loved to record. The ten million dollar complex opened in 1987 with four studios and a huge sound stage, and was used by artists from R.E.M. to the Bee Gees.[1]
• Meat is still banned at Paisley Park. Prince, who was vegetarian or vegan for much of his life, required staff and guests to keep the complex meat free. The museum still asks visitors to leave the premises if they want to eat meat.[1]
• Andy Warhol made twelve different paintings of Prince. The first, Orange Prince, accompanied a 1984 Vanity Fair article. Warhol kept all twelve in his personal collection, and four now belong to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.[1]
• When Prince became a symbol, Warner Bros. mailed floppy disks with a custom font to the media so it could be printed. The symbol blended the male and female signs. Prince called it unpronounceable, which led to the nickname the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.[1] [2]
• Prince secretly paid tens of thousands of dollars in cancer bills for the Funky Drummer, Clyde Stubblefield, whom he had never met. Stubblefield was one of Prince's drumming idols. Prince asked that the donation be kept quiet, and Stubblefield said he still did not understand why he did it.[1] [2]
• Prince anonymously gave twelve thousand dollars to save a historic library branch in Louisville, Kentucky. It was the Western Branch Library, the first full service library in the country for African Americans. Much of his charity only became known after his death.[1]
• Charlie Murphy's famous sketch about losing a basketball game to Prince was true. Prince confirmed it in an interview, joking that the whupping was true. He later used a photo of Dave Chappelle dressed as him on the cover of his single Breakfast Can Wait.[1] [2]
• During Prince's Super Bowl show, a crew member held the two ends of a cut cable together with his bare hands for the whole performance. The cable was accidentally severed during the stage setup. It was also the first halftime show ever performed in the rain.[1]
• Prince capped tickets for his 2007 London O2 run at thirty one pounds twenty one, echoing his album 3121. The original seven shows sold out in twenty minutes, and the run grew to twenty one nights.[1]
• In 2017 Pantone created an official shade of purple for Prince, named after his symbol. The colour was called Love Symbol Number Two, the copyrighted title of the symbol he used as his name in the nineties.[1]
• Prince once jammed on stage with both James Brown and Michael Jackson on the same night in 1983. At a Brown concert in Hollywood, the Godfather of Funk called up Jackson and then Prince, who played guitar and then showed off his acrobatic dance moves.[1]
• Prince and Miles Davis recorded a song together that stayed unreleased until 2020. The track was called Can I Play With U. Davis saw Prince as a mix of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye and Charlie Chaplin, and they performed together at Paisley Park in 1987.[1] [2]
• Prince played guitar without credit on Madonna's hit Like a Prayer. Besides duetting with her on Love Song, he played on Like a Prayer, Keep It Together and Act of Contrition for her 1989 album.[1]
• MC Hammer's hit Pray, built on When Doves Cry, was one of the few samples Prince ever officially allowed. Prince was famously protective of his recordings, and much of his later catalogue only reached streaming services in 2018, two years after his death.[1] [2]
• On his 1990 tour, Prince carried a cheap notebook that he filled with twenty one new songs in a few months. He told Rolling Stone he had been a night owl since his school days, jamming while others slept, and said he was as insane about work as ever.[1]
• Prince's father has songwriting credits on Purple Rain and later albums. John L. Nelson is credited on Computer Blue, whose bridge came from his piece Father's Song, as well as songs on Around the World in a Day, Parade and Batman.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.