Black & White never seemed so colourful : Parade by Prince & The Revolution

(This article first appeared at www.twistedear.com in 2007)

Ok, cards on the table – we are in ‘this album changed my life’ territory, but stay with me. When it was released, I was still (ahem) something of a young buck, slight of frame and light on bodily hair, and did have a propensity towards taping the top 40 to provide the staple of my musical diet. Within weeks of hearing Parade however, musical puberty descended, to the extent of my older sister returning home from nursing college to pop her head round my bedroom door to check out the unfamiliar noise and exclaim, “Oh my God he’s gone weird!”.

At the time of release, Prince was still considered in the mainstream a ‘pop-star’. Yet this is the point from where my damascene conversion began. I knew what pop stars were, and what they did. They made, especially in the mid-80’s, big, shiny, highly polished, bouncy tunes you could grab on to without thinking about it. So when Parade’s opener, Christopher Tracy’s Parade, careers into view with its insistent drums and piping horns, its funk guitar and cinematic strings, its very otherness grabbed me instantly. And yet, it still oozed a pop sensibility – pop music wasn’t supposed to sound like this, but from here on in, the world was a different place. Music had lost its labels – other than good or bad – because Parade sounded like nothing like I had ever heard before. And I loved it.

Taking cues from such disparate avenues as classic film soundtracks, jazz arrangements, and calypso beats, Parade takes pop to places not unlike where The Beatles took it, funk to places not unlike where Sly took it. The album is also covered in gorgeous string arrangements from Brazilian arranger and composer Clare Fischer, taking the melodies off into areas where the term widescreen would be totally inadequate. Mr Fischer’s arrangements (yes, he’s a bloke) so enamoured Prince that despite having used his talents on many records since, Prince insisted the two never meet, lest the magic created by their first collaboration be spoilt. And they say Prince is weird………

The opener segues into the filthy Caribbean swing of New Position, which in turn melds into the funk-noir of I Wonder U, with is dark intonations of desire (“I, how u say / I wonder u / I wonder u ... though u are far / I wonder u / u’re on my mind”).

The final part of the opening four song suite is probably the least satisfying, but Under The Cherry Moon still provides an evocative foray into 1940’s European balladry, melodramatic and deeply heartfelt at the same time.

The European, most notably French identity of the record comes from the setting of the truly shocking movie which this record soundtracked (really...it's bad in a special way), yet it is on the record where the film’s setting comes alive. Girls and Boys remains a modern funk classic with its deep, cavernous sax sparring with high-pitched synth effects, jerking groove and enormous pop melody, fleshed out with a saucy French monologue. The Gallic theme reaches its climax later in the record, as Do U Lie? could not be more French if it wore a Breton shirt and cycled up your driveway trying to sell you a 2CV.

There is such exuberance contained within this record. Life Can Be So Nice affirms its titular positivity with vibrant fluted synth lines, perky cow bells and flamboyant, propulsive drumming. Similarly, Mountains – a great second side opener in those days of cassettes and ‘elpees’ – careers along on a rhythmic guitar groove punctuated by stabbing horns. There are the first indications of the growing jazz influence Prince had been exploring in his listening habits, in the structural shifts and sense of the music being allowed to breathe and stretch, less constrained by the norms of the pop song, with much more live drumming than on previous albums.

Anotherloverholenyohead is a perfect example of this with its languid, slightly lop-sided piano chords offsetting the bluesy groove, and complemented wonderfully by the overlapping vocal lines, Prince’s lead vocal being repeated back to him by Wendy and Susannah Melvoin, and then swapping places so he follows them on the next line. It’s still a great pop song, with a strident chorus and swelling verses, but it’s also so much more. And then there’s Kiss…..a groove so tight, so dry, so simple it beggars belief. I’m not one to gush, but he’s in funk heaven right there.

However, the crowning glories of this record do not lie in its funk, no matter how funky, nor in its wallowing in, and melding of, European and Afro-American / Caribbean influences. Venus De Milo is beyond perfection, 115 seconds of unbridled beauty, sonorous piano lines backed with aching strings, horns and woodwinds, a wondrous calm right at the centre of the melee. The only other track remotely near its magnificence is the closer, Sometimes It Snows In April, a soft, keening elegy which despite being rooted, as far as subject matter is concerned, in the narrative of the movie ends up as a treatise on life, love and loss:

“Sometimes it snows in April / Sometimes I feel so bad

Sometimes I wish that life was never ending / But all good things they say never last

All good things they say never last

And love it isn’t love until its past.”

Vocally there are flashes of emotion, but the overall performance is controlled, full of pathos, with the final lines above delivered with devastating matter of factness. This is all backed with plucked acoustic guitar and piano, creating a sense of space for the vocal to weave its melancholy whilst also complimenting it. Prince is usually lauded for the minimalist funk stylings of his ‘classic’ 80’s period, yet rarely again would he sound as emotionally bare as this.

Parade… is a timeless classic. It inhabits its own world, its own space – but for this writer, it marks a definitive moment on a personal level. Things would never, thankfully, be the same again.