This started out as a post to Ben on my family blog but has ended up here. This year, the passing of some of our best celebrities has affected us all in different ways. On the one hand I'm fed up with the name dropping (David Walliams actually thanked Bryan Ferry for inviting him for dinner with Prince -yuck) but I'm more fed up with people telling me how I should feel! I'll feel how I bloody well like about it. "But you didn't know him!", "You value his life more than migrants dying on boats!" No and no. Of course I didn't know him, I know I didn't particularly want him to be tainted with the same kind of death as Michael Jackson (he's far better than that) but no, I don't know him.
But I do know how I feel now when I hear his music. From 1982's 1999 album, through Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, Parade, Sign 'o the Times, Lovesexy, to 1989's Batman soundtrack, then dipping back to 1980's Dirty Mind and the following year's Controversy (I must get For You!), he literally was the soundtrack to my 80s. Sheila E's Belle of St Mark, I love it. Most of those are either on vinyl or cassette. Hearing them is like putting on an old comfy jumper. I know every line of every song. I know which song follows every song. I can't say I listened to the lyrics like I did perhaps The Smiths, but musically Prince took me through my life from age 11 to, well, until today. Everyone loved him. We went to see him on his Lovesexy tour, one of the first times I'd been far away on my own (to Birmingham from Cornwall!). We had t shirts (wish I'd kept my Batman one). We giggled over Wendy and Lisa's Fruit Up Your Bottom, as we renamed it. We loved him. I can still feel that I'm sat on my top bunk in my bedroom, with the Around the World in a Day on cassette, marvellling at the simple tune of Pop Life. Feeling slightly risque years later hearing him talk about "trying horse" (I was 16...). During the 1990s, I bought Come and liked a few things he'd released. I loved some stuff recently about the same time as he worked with 3rdeyegirl and lazily thought I must get round to buying some of it.
Prince, you soundtracked my childhood and to bastardise my friend's quote, I feel like an old school friend has gone. Not someone I'd kept in close contact with of recent, but someone who I loved at the time and helped me grow into the person I am today, musically and personally (not that there's much difference in that in my mind).
So I will grieve. For a creativity that once produced so many fantastic songs and albums and will never do so again. But I often put on Controversy before a night out to get me in the mood. The only joy that can be taken from a musical death is to rediscover all that you once loved.
Prince is dead, long live Prince.