London 7 September 1993

 

The final concert of the Act II tour is significant, it is the last time that Prince performed his Prince material in a large concert before he retired his Prince persona and music. By November of 1993, the songs played on this night were banished, and he was presenting after shows of entirely new material. Unfortunately, the video bootleg of this concert doesn’t stand up next to the historical moment it is recording, it is filmed well enough, but the camera is positioned such that we often cannot see Prince’s head. When he takes the side stage or piano the camera work is excellent and we have a great view of Prince, regrettably more of the concert isn’t like that.
Last week I took a look at another Act II video, from Madrid just a month previous. This concert is similar to the setlist, only the piano set is longer, which plays well to our camera’s vantage point. So like most bootlegs, it has both good and bad points. It’s a concert of historical significance, and parts of the video are great to watch, especially Prince at the piano. However, it is far from perfect, and there are large portions of the show where Prince isn’t quite as prominent as we would like.

7th September 1993, Wembley Arena

The start of the concert doesn’t initially excite, as the camera struggles to catch up with the action, before returning to complete darkness for a minute. From here though things improve rapidly as Mayte, dressed as Prince, takes to standing on the piano right in front of the camera. One feeling I can’t shake watching these ACT II concerts is the DIY aesthetic of the concert presentation. The balloons inside the piano seem almost quaint by modern concert standards, and even in the 1990s coming off the back of the 1980s, and that era's obsession with pyrotechnics, it seems homely. The music through remains forward-looking as Prince immerses himself in rap for “My Name Is Prince,” and with the music daringly bold and right out front, it is easy enough to see Prince’s dabbling with rap as merely a secondary indulgence behind the forceful music he is creating at the time.

 

Prince and his funk are revealed for “Sexy M.F.” As always, it is Levi who shares the spotlight with Prince, the two of them steering the funk from the front of the stage. Again, they are well-positioned for the camera, and this is a fine record of the style of funk that the NPG was building at the time.

The viewing experience of “The Beautiful Ones” can’t come close as Prince is obscured for most of the song. With Mayte onstage as a foil, all is not lost, and the camera does spend some time on her as she slides and sways to the music. There is no denying that the song sounds great, and on an audio bootleg I would perhaps appreciate it much more, but sadly in this case I can’t get past the fact that I can’t see Prince.

The cloud guitar makes an appearance for a strangely empty-sounding “Let’s Go Crazy.” The visuals of the song suggest that is a fire and brimstone performance, but the audio sounds murky and at times hollow. Wembley Arena can be a sonic black hole with its boxy sound, so I am not too surprised to hear at least a couple of songs suffer from poor sound.

 

“Kiss” sounds better, although the sound isn’t completely clean. The horns bolster the song and propel it with an inner power of sinewy muscle. It does leave Prince’s vocals secondary, but it matters little as he dances and struts for most of the song, to the obvious delight of the crowd.

The horns and funk of “Irresistible Bitch” are a lot closer to the hard funk sound of James Brown that Prince will continue to draw from in the next twelve months. With the horns pulling each lineup with a curl, the song is pockmarked with holes for the funk to seep through.  The most surprising aspect of this song and style is that Prince doesn’t pull it out for longer, in retrospect this is the path he will be pursuing in the next year, yet here it is a truncated version that leaves no hint to the crowd that in the next year Prince is going to be a whole lot funkier and darker.

 

There is actual pyrotechnics at the opening of “She’s Always In My Hair,” but they are small and I stand by my earlier comments. The real fireworks are on stage, as Prince has his guitar ablaze with a scolding solo that obliterates the song beneath a raw nerved guitar sound that rips to the soul.

It is hard to believe that “Raspberry Beret” could come from the same performer, and after the dark swirling guitar shriek, Prince lets the light into the room with a brief, sprightly version of one of the poppiest songs. It is well placed, and the following “Sometimes It Snows In April” draws the crowd back into the concert after being mere spectators for the opening twenty minutes. Prince has the guitar lightly dancing in his hands for the final moments of “Sometimes It Snows In April,” lifting the song into the light for one final reprise of the chorus.

 

Feeding off this moment comes a powerful version of “The Cross.” It’s not without its faults, again the room steals some of the darker undercurrents that give the song its earthy drive, but Prince’s vocals are ample compensation as he delivers the song with a throaty rasp that scratches beneath the surface of the song to reveal the soul that lies beneath its rock n roll skin.

“Sign O The Times” comes from the same territory, and although sonically different, is the perfect bookend to the previous “The Cross.” With his guitar set to moanful howl, Prince lifts the song far beyond its skeletal funk and headline-inspired lyrics, to a song that revolves around the drive and energy that burst forth from Prince's guitar. It never becomes a rock song, the guitar adding anger and fear without taking to the song into cliche-driven padding.

 

The Prince playing at this concert is very much the Prince of the moment, his look and sound rapidly evolving, yet as the first strains of “Purple Rain” are heard  all that drops away as a veil of nostalgia descends on the concert while Prince plays his signature song, none of us knowing at this moment that this would be the last time we would hear it live until 18 February 1996, and even then it was performed with the “Purple Medley.” This doesn’t make the song any better or worse in this concert, but it does put in context the changes that Prince was about to go through in the coming years.

The instrumental interlude has some sound problems, on the bootleg at least, and as this band blows easily through “Thunder,” “When Doves Cry,” “Nothing Compares 2 U,” “And God Created Woman,” and “Diamonds And Pearls” there is very little to hold your attention, asides from Mayte pirouetting and swaying across the stage.

The bootleg is at its very best as Prince settles in at the piano for his set, right in front of the camera clear and unobstructed. Only a small tape glitch at the beginning of “I Love U In Me” can be faulted, and it is so minor that it’s barely worth mentioning. “I Love U In Me” marinates easily in the atmosphere of the darkened arena, the song thicker, and more steamer than heard on record.

 

Prince teases with a similar opening of “Condition Of The Heart,” but it is a swinging and rambunctious “Delirious” that steals my heart before Prince breaks it with a melancholy  “Little Red Corvette” It could have been a moment seared into the memory, but Prince keeps it all too short, leaving no time for the pain and burn to settle.

The swing and pure feel of the band sweep us all up again for “Strollin,” Levi taking his moment in the spotlight on top of Prince’s piano. It is another song that has some inconsistencies in the sound quality, but Levis’s guitar rings clear, and the horns behind the first half of the song have their own busy and thick sound.

 

Prince is back at the front of the stage, playing the crowd, for a sultry rendition of “Scandalous.” The first half is every bit as sexy as you could want, but it is over the top, and the second part of the song wanes beneath the added weight of Prince’s over-the-top showmanship. The saxophone rises out to add its own brand of sex to the song, it is a great solo, but too much for the weak bones of the song, and there is a point where the senses are overwhelmed and it just becomes overload.

The smooth and classy sound of “Girls And Boys,” is torn away by this horn-infused riot of a performance. It is overloaded with sounds and ideas, but unlike the previous “Scandalous,” there is much more meat on the bones of “Girls And Boys” for Prince to hang it all off, the song turning into a party rather than a muddled mess. The horn section is particularly impressive, and on this song more than any other they shine and sparkle more than the players around them.

 

“7” rises slowly out of the Arabic intro and Mayte's sword dance, gradually revealing itself in the hands of Levi and the band.  It is the spoken intro that ushers the song in proper, the darkness turning to light with the opening lines. No favors are afforded by the bootleg, Prince at the front of the stage with Hohner in hand appears with no head, in this case, it is unfortunate that the camera is obscured by part of the rig above the stage. The performance sounds good though, and one senses that the concert is building to some sort of conclusion.

Prince’s solo drum performance at this show is shorter than the one I previously watched from Madrid, but also a lot faster, he seems to cram just as much in here in a minute than he did over several minutes in Madrid. One wonders what the point is, it doesn’t contribute to any song and seems merely a reminder that Prince could play many instruments. “1999” that follows is far more rewarding, and paired with “Baby I’m A Star” makes for a frantic rush towards the end of the concert.

 

This is the point of the concert where all the boundaries dissolve, leaving us with a monster party jam. “Baby, I’m a Star” suddenly switches to “America” as Prince continues to accelerate the concert beyond comprehension towards its conclusion. “America” has the funk required for Prince’s purposes, and he uses the song to continue to hammer the audience with horn riffs, greasy guitar, and plenty of unrestrained dancing from himself and Mayte. “D.M.S.R’ is nothing more than oil to grease this funk jam, and it continues to power Prince’s funk machine deep into the arena. This is Prince at his loosest, he plays with easy freedom, throwing off the restraint of being tied to his hits and standard arrangements, instead indulging in a freewheeling jam that gives him plenty of time to dance and engage the audience on a more personal level.

The performance of “The Sacrifice Of Victor,” is all the more interesting for Prince’s opening speech as he reminds the audience that his name is not Prince, he doesn’t need a name.  Unfortunately, a lot of this speech is incomprehensible, sadly lost to distortion and crowd noise. But it is laying down where Prince thinks he is at that time regarding his name and the events that will continue to unfold throughout 1994. The sound improves for the song itself, although not enough to catch all the nuance and finesse of the songwriting. The performance can’t match the previous maelstrom of sound of the last encore, and the song itself falls slightly flat.

 

  

The show-closing rendition of “Peach” rights this wrong, and provides a furious exclamation mark on a show that has touched many genres, but none with the same dogged savagery as the guitar-driven rock of “Peach.” It rips at the previous smooth funk, shredding the previous hour and a half into a blistering four-minute package that shatters any impression that Prince has lost his inner fire. A few hours later he would end his aftershow party at Bagley’s Warehouse (a performance later released on VHS) with the same song, and although playing to a larger arena this rendition is every bit as good as the later well-known version. There is only one way for Prince to finish this performance, and the image of him throwing his guitar high at the end of the performance is an iconic ending to a fascinating tour.

And so ends the Act II tour, and the first half of Prince’s career before the slave era fully takes hold. The next two years would see an array of new music and looks, and this concert is very much a final goodbye to the Prince music that he had built his career on. This is not a perfect bootleg, the sound is never quite right, and Prince is obscured from the camera at times but it is good enough to record one of the most important stages of his career. On a musical level it’s good, but what makes this bootleg great is the historical value. It may have been previously overlooked, but all fans should see this at least once and acknowledge just how bold a visionary Prince was.