Forever In My Life - Sign O' The Times by Prince

For many years now I have been loathe to pin myself down to a ‘best’ or ‘favourite’ album, given the inherent constraints of that kind of labelling, but I’m going to cut myself a significance/anniversary based exception. I can still remember it all – Dave Lee Travis said he was going to play the new Prince single one Saturday morning, so I scrabbled for a C90 (Wiki it kids), and managed to tape it. Said single was ‘Sign O’ The Times’, and even as a confirmed Prince addict, I could tell this was special. Calm, meditative, doleful, weighty, not about shagging…….this was different. Even DLT noted this. I even wrote an A level English criticism of the lyric - I say criticism, I basically wrote it down and pointed at it for a bit. But this was nothing to what getting the album was like.

I was always pretty much a good lad at school - arse-bendingly, irritatingly straight laced. But I did skive a tadge to go to Virgin/Our Price at the Milburngate Centre (Wiki it kids) and buy the album. On Cassette. £8.99 - in 1987 I was investing! Major spendage! My Walkman (Wiki it ki -- oh never mind.....) saw more action than my....anyway, I played it a lot. The previous 3-4 years of Princely devotion was coming together as I immersed myself in this record, and it's multifarious sounds, styles, guises. For a while I believed it to be a singular creation, only to find later it went through various versions before this one, but that doesn't really matter. Prince as a one man creation has never - and, clearly by now will never - be more accurately represented than he was on this record. Purple Rain had the hits - SOTT had the heart. Flawed, but with flaws lesser mortals based careers on ; indulgent, but indulged with greatness lesser mortals could only pretend they understood.

The title track opened, but then segued into an opening tryptich which floored me. Play In The Sunshine was a scattergun, sprawling, how-the-chuff-is-this-just-one-guy-and-not-a-band romp, followed then by Housequake, which partied like it was....well, 1987, but a 1987 without Yamaha DX-7's and Muff Winwood. The Ballad of Dorothy Parker then slowed things down, but again the dislocated drum pattern, the off set chords, and the retained sonic malfunction from the recording again gave it an identity and texture that set it apart. If anything differentiated mid-80's Prince from his later work, it was this experimental edge - mistakes were left in, whereas much afterwards seemed over polished and less human as a result. Later track Forever In My Life was a similar beneficiary, with a misplaced tape timing producing a wonderful call/response - response/call vocal, which latter Prince would probably have binned off.

But the gamut was well and truly run throughout the rest of the record - Hot Thing was a mass of high end electronica, funk-overload horns, bendy-plastic bass ; Starfish And Coffee wouldn't have been out of place on either Sesame Street or Magical Mystery Tour; The Cross, whilst doused in religion, drew a line between indie and acid rock.

Many of the highlights were found on the second side of the album - U Got The Look was a straight forward rock riff taken through the looking glass; Strange Relationship was a blues melded to Prince's particular vision of funk stylings; I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man is the best Springsteen track Springsteen never wrote.......there's a case for almost every track. I'm going to focus on two however.

If I Was Your Girlfriend is usually - rightly - lauded for it's sonic trickery, backwards masking, slowed and speeded up vocals, but for me the emotional intricacy of the lyric is the killer. An examination of the line between friendship - whatever the gender - and relationship, it pulls at the heartstrings of a complex desire that would seem like a foreign language to most pop songs. And the there's the closing track, Adore. What a now defunct 80's magazine called "ostensibly a ballad in the Stax/Volt tradition", it is both blokeishly self-aggrandising and vulnerable in its lyric, but the combination of Eric Leeds saxophone and Prince's mellifluous Hammond Organ creates a sumptuous aural landscape for the massive multi-tracked vocal to embed itself into. At times ridiculous, but also passionate and earthy, it could be the last great soul ballad. Or at least the last one until 'Love Is A Losing Game'.

My totally subjective adoration of Prince was already in place when this album was released; I didn't need any help. However, even though that perspective has been tempered over time due to my ageing and his output, I'm not at home to any revisionists. This album has never left my sights as a pantheon in my own experience, but also as one that I will put out there as up to scrutiny against anything. I abhor the idea of 'the canon', but if our culture insists we have one, I insist that this album be included. One of those records you can use to place 'popular music' in the same vein as classical music, jazz, cinema, art, literature, drama etc. Whilst I'll always try and resist naming my 'Best' album ever, if you held a gun to my head.........