Most acts spend months promoting their gigs; Prince favours a more ad hoc approach. Fans of the Purple One were given only 48 hours’ notice of his intention to play two shows at the Roundhouse last night. It’s called the Hit and Run tour for a reason.
Those who were alert enough to grab a ticket were in for a treat. Backed by 3rdEyeGirl, an all-female band who managed to upstage even Prince in the sartorial stakes, he cherry-picked the classics from his enviable, 32-album back catalogue.
Let’s Go Crazy kicked off proceedings with a mass of heavy-riffing and call-and-response vocals. The joyous Raspberry Beret came next, followed by the staccato synths of When Doves Cry. I feared for the Roundhouse’s foundations during 1999, such was the level of dancing inside the venue, while Little Red Corvette featured one of the night’s many spectacular guitar excursions.
“How many hits was that? Have I got anymore?” asked the Minneapolis man, answering his own question by launching into the slinky funk of Kiss.
Music’s ultimate multi-tasker, he was variously a guitar hero, piano virtuoso, slap bassist and rabble-rouser — sometimes within the same song — and, at 55, remains an impossibly energetic frontman.
Given that he was about to play another show an hour later, he’d have been forgiven for providing no encore. Instead, he threw in two, including a glorious cover of Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You and a 10-minute, show-stealing Purple Rain. Live music simply doesn’t get better than this.
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