RIP Prince - remembering his best albums

The passing of Prince Nelson Rogers means we have lost another true icon. Like Bowie, his influence was incredible, crossing beyond the boundaries of music and into film and fashion, spanning numerous genres and multiple decades.

But in pure musical terms alone, Prince was a genius. He could write the hits, produce the hits, and play every single instrument on them. As a guitarist, he was one of the all-time greats. His live shows sprawled across three hours or more, mixing hits with deep cuts, and were unanimously raved about thanks in no small part to his stage presence, magnetism and theatrical predilections. Distilled into 10 minutes, he could produce utter magic – just check out his performance at the 2007 Superbowl, undoubtedly one of the best half-time shows the Superbowl has ever seen.

Prince released roughly 40 studio albums in a career that spanned 40 years, and is rumoured to have dozens of completed records stashed in the vaults of his Paisley Park mansion/recording studio. Between 1982 and 1987, he emerged as one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, releasing five massive albums during that time – it was a real purple patch, one might say. Here’s a look at those five records, which helped make Prince the much-loved and much-missed icon that he was.

NOTE: Prince was notoriously against web platforms such as YouTube, which makes embedding videos and songs difficult. In the wake of his death, a lot of songs are reappearing on those platforms, posted by fans paying their respects. It’s likely the clips we’ve embedded will get taken down at some point, so apologies for any dead links in this article. 

1999 (1982)

PRINCE already had four albums under his belt - including three top 50 records in the US - by the time he unleashed 1999. It was a step up in every aspect on its predecessor Controversy. The sexiness was sexier (and sillier), the non-sexual songs were smarter, the jams were longer, and the hooks were stronger. Like a lot of great albums, it's front loaded with gold. "If there is an opening salvo in rock 'n' soul stronger than 1999, Little Red Corvette and Delirious, it is locked in a leopard-guarded filing cabinet," the book 1001 Albums You Must Listen To Before You Die declared.

Rock 'n' soul is an interesting way to describe Prince's sound - it's certainly distinctive, with his influences having coalesced over the previous four albums to create an exciting synth-heavy mix that also combines elements of pop, funk, and disco. Songs such as Automatic sound like the place where Nile Rodgers and Gary Numan meet, the basslines, sonic trickery and spoken word of All The Critics Love U In New York would have impressed Bootsy Collins, Something In The Water (Does Not Compute) is Kraftwerk gone sexy, while Delirious is a bunch of classic blues riffs filtered through his futuristic synths.

While D.M.S.R. sets out his agenda - dance, music, sex, romance - the best song is the title track, one of the least sexified on the record. Having feared the end of the world in Controversy's silly little ditty Ronnie, Talk To Russia, Prince gives up on doing anything about the end of the world in 1999, when everybody has a bomb and we could all die any day, and instead decides to just kick up his heels and party. It's a great sentiment, even if it's one that is now sadly out of date and indirectly responsible for 1999 being the most over-hyped and disappointing New Year's Eve of all time.

The flipside to 1999's fun-in-the-face-of-armageddon attitude and Free's "be glad for what you've got" sincerity are the unsubtle sex-soaked lyrics of the rest of the album, including when he gets it on with a female taxi driver (Lady Cab Driver), his airline passengers (International Lover) and as for Let's Pretend We're Married... well, some things can't be repeated in a family newspaper. It all helped make Prince a global star - 1999 was his first top 10 album in the US and his first to make a dent in Europe, reaching #30 in the UK. It was also his first top 40 album in Australia (it got to #6 in New Zealand), while the singles 1999, Little Red Corvette and Delirious were all hits around the world.

Purple Rain (1984)

IF 1999 was a step forward after Controversy, then Purple Rain was a giant leap for Prince-kind. Relying less on himself to play nearly every instrument (as he'd done on 1999), Prince let his band The Revolution contribute more, with live instruments intermingling more with the drum machines and synths. Parts of the album were recorded live at a benefit gig in Prince's hometown of Minneapolis (you can hear the crowd at the end of Baby I'm A Star and Purple Rain) and there is a greater emphasis on his incredible guitar skills than ever before, particularly in the stunning title track.

Purple Rain serves as the soundtrack to the movie of the same name, in which Prince played The Kid - a musician loosely based on himself. While the film now has cult status, it's soundtrack has achieved classic status. Almost every time a publication unveils a list of the greatest albums of all time list or best albums of the 80s, Purple Rain features prominently, thanks in part to its aforementioned daring mix of digital and organic instruments and its collection of great songs. Not only does the musicianship go up a notch, but so do the arrangements - the lengthy synth-driven jams of 1999 have been replaced with more compact tunes that have more going on, such as on the intriguing drum-fill breakdowns of Take Me With You, or the mad guitar breaks of Computer Blue.

Purple Rain is home to one of Prince's biggest hits, When Doves Cry, which is intriguing for its lack of a bassline. "Nobody would have the balls to do this," Prince allegedly told his engineer as he removed the bass from the final mix. "They'll be freaking." And freak they did - When Doves Cry was his first #1 single in the US, Canada and Australia. Opener and follow-up single, the pseudo gospel of Let's Go Crazy, would repeat the feat in America, while the stunningly epic title track (an attempt by Prince to write Bob Seger-style anthem) reached #2.

Lyrically the album stepped away from his super-sexy posturing... all except for one song - Darling Nikki, possibly the dirtiest, raunchiest funk ever committed to vinyl. It's also the song that inadvertantly kicked off the parental advisory system, with Tipper Gore leading the censorship charge after catching her daughter listening to Prince's tale of "a sex fiend... masturbating with a magazine". In spite of the controversy (or maybe because of it) Purple Rain went #1 in four countries including Australia and spent an astonishing five and a half months on top of the US Billboard album charts.

Around The World In A Day (1985)

HIS star status cemented by Purple Rain's massive success, it was no surprise the follow-up Around The World In A Day, released just three months after the previous album's final single, went straight to #1 in the US. While not as successful long-term as its predecessor, the record is seen as something of a signpost towards the greater experimentation that would come later, particularly in his '90-'00s albums. The opening title track sees him add non-Western melodies and instrumentation (including oud and darbuka) to his trademark synth sounds, while the lengthy piano ballad Condition Of The Heart incorporates jazzy and classical elements (Prince would later record whole jazz-influenced albums).

Hints of psychedelia and art-rock also creep in on the album, which was released with little fanfare by Prince's label Warner Bros, as per Prince's request.  Despite the general perception that Around The World In A Day was less-radio friendly, it still yielded hits, the biggest being US #2 single Raspberry Beret. More successful across the pond was the UK-only single Paisley Park, which sounds suitably British and would later give its name to his studio complex in Minnesota.

The synth-funk of Pop Life was also a hit in the US, although the single America stalled at number 46. Another highlight was the rocky slow-jam Temptation, which close the album and featured same blazing guitar work from himself and Wendy Melvoin, some saucy sax, and the closest thing to his previous sexually charged lyrics and raunchy delivery. It's also the record's longest track, continuing his tradition of ending album's with an epic. The album featured his live backing band The Revolution (plus a number of guest musicians), but Prince announced he would stop live performing in the wake of the record... only to start up again a year later. Such announcements didn't sit well with Warner Bros - and it sparked just one of many clashes label and artist would have over the years, eventually leading to Prince performing with the word 'slave' written on his face and rush-releasing albums to get out of his record deal.

Parade (1986)

HAVING experienced some success with the film Purple Rain, Prince tried to replicate that with his second cinematic effort Under The Cherry Moon. Unfortunately the film bombed, both at the box office and with the critics, further straining Prince's relationship with Warner Bros, who had agreed to distribute the film. Prince won the Razzie award for worst director and worst actor, with the film also tying for worst film with the much-maligned Howard The Duck - a long way from the Oscar that Purple Rain won.

The soundtrack, titled Parade was more successful than the film, although Warners were also displeased to find that unlike the in-film performances of songs in Purple Rain, Parade served as a more traditional "score" for Under The Cherry Moon. The album's success probably comes down to lead single, the minimalist pop-funk of Kiss, a top 10 single in 10 countries that was also a hit for Art Of Noise (featuring Tom Jones on vocals) just two years later. The song almost didn't make it onto the album or even into the Prince catalogue - he wrote it with the intention of giving it to his side project Mazarati but when he heard the job they'd done with it, Prince reclaimed the song, re-recorded the vocals and added an extra guitar break.

Warners may not have been totally happy with Parade, but the critics were impressed, with Allmusic.com calling it "an astonishingly rewarding near-miss" that should have been "extended to a double album", noting that "the amount of ground that (Prince & The Revolution) cover in 12 songs is truly remarkable". Indeed, as with Around The World In A Day, there is an impressive amount of diversity. There are more traditional movie score-like pieces (Venus De Milo), the Broadway-esque Do U Lie? and highlight Under The Cherry Moon, the stark ballad Sometimes It Snows In April, and the woozy pop of I Wonder U. Even the more traditionally Prince-like tracks such as Girls & Boys, Life Can Be So Nice and Mountains are decorated with distinctive flourishes.

Sign O' The Times (1987)

IT appeared on the surface that Prince's ego was running rampant - in the wake of the failed Under The Cherry Moon project and the perceived under-performing (by Prince's standards) of its accompanying soundtrack Parade, Prince fired his band The Revolution and announced he was working on a triple album. The increasingly frustrated Warner Bros said 'no', forcing Prince to prune it down to a double album. The planned triple-disc effort, dubbed Crystal Ball, was in fact made up of tracks from two in-progress projects - a Revolution album named Dream Factory that featured more band input than usual, and a strange record dubbed Camille, which was to feature Prince signing in a sped-up female-sounding voice.

With such a scattershot approach, Sign O' The Times ends up like many great double albums - driven by almost over-reaching ambition and containing a sprawling collection of ideas and styles that only come together because of Prince's broad-ranging abilities. There's no hit of the magnitude of When Doves Cry, Kiss or 1999, but instead we get all the dabbling of Parade and Around The World In A Day honed into better songs. As Stereogum put it in their 25-year retrospective of the album: "Prince tries out a ton of different musical ideas on the album, and he nails almost all of them - it's a thing to behold."

The electro-funk of Hot Thing is a world away from the gorgeous coffee-shop gospel and psychedelic lyrics of Starfish & Coffee, the bizarre hip-hop-influenced Housequake is well removed from his Let's Get It On-style Slow Love, while the social commentary of the title track couldn't be more removed from the androgyny of If I Was Your Girlfriend. Many of these are the most un-Prince things he'd recorded and they're among his best - another example of this is the stadium rocker The Cross, a raucous two-chord power ballad that packs a late-album punch you want to go on for much longer than its four minutes and 49 seconds. Sign O' The Times is one of two Prince albums Rolling Stone ranked in the top 100 of its greatest 500 albums of all time list (the other is Purple Rain). Allmusic.com fittingly declared that "in it's own roundabout way, Sign O' The Times is the sound of the late '80s - it's the sound of the good times collapsing and how all that doubt and fear can be ignored if you just dance those problems away." Which brings us back nicely to where we started - with 1999 and its title track.