(Credits: Far Out / Allen Beaulieu)
Nobody in the 1980s was pumping out such a steady stream of successful yet confounding pop records as the decade’s musical whirlwind, Prince. Dropping nine mammoth LPs across ten years around various side-projects and numbers for other artists, the Minneapolis maestro set a dizzying creative course from his disco and funk background to multi-genre icon in a few short years.
Prince’s DIY operations were unrivalled in mainstream music at the time. Fuelled by a ceaseless work ethic from 1978’s For You debut while still a teen, Prince handled everything. Studio production, all instruments, virtually all songs, and was keenly involved in the conceptual direction of his iconic videos.
Such a multitudinous dexterity yielded an authoritative commentary on music’s history and contemporary stars, known for withering take-downs but also never above dishing out glowing praise should an artist meet his high standards.
It’s quite the epithet for any artist to be awarded as “exemplifying the spirit of rock and roll, but when such a question was put to Prince, he didn’t miss a beat in firing off a sincere answer. “Patti LaBelle,” he revealed to Entertainment Weekly in, funnily enough, 1999. “I played a show with her, and her keyboard player had just died of cancer. She was wrecked, but she came out and gave her all. A lot of people around her have died of cancer in the past few years, but she keeps on keepin’ on. That’s rock & roll”.
It’s an interesting choice. Many would have immediately pivoted to mainstays Chuck Berry or Jimi Hendrix, or Prince could have gunned for his beloved Carlos Santana but instead jumped to one of the pioneering forces of Philadelphia soul. Having cut pop R&B numbers across the 1960s, Patti entered the following decade operating under the quasi-band/mononymous moniker LaBelle and creatively pulled toward the grittier swirls of soul and funk that emanated from Parliament’s heady brew.
The new direction proved a winner, entering the disco era with a run of acclaimed albums behind them and dropping the immortal ‘Lady Marmalade’ from 1974’s Nightbirds—providing future hits for All Saints and covered again for 2001’s Moulin Rouge!
Adding the ‘Patti’ back to her performing name and embarking on a solo career by the decade’s end, LaBelle would fly through the 1980s, softening her sound for a more universal, adult-contemporary reach and enjoying renewed pop-cultural cache by contributing two songs to 1984’s Beverly Hill Cop soundtrack, ‘New Attitude’ becoming a live standard and shooting to number one on the US Dance Club Songs Billboard chart.
Ever the longtime fan, Prince penned and produced one of LaBelle’s biggest hits. ‘Yo Mister’, the second single from 1989’s Be Yourself, boasted the musical enigma on all instrumentation and backing vocals as well as the album’s ‘Love 89’. The collaboration would endure for the rest of Prince’s life til his death in 2016, routinely appearing on stage together at mutual concerts, recording further songs he wrote and produced, and harbouring such personal affection for her that he allegedly called LaBelle “mother” throughout their close friendship.
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