In 1986, Prince’s career was stratospheric. So what was Prince trying to achieve with Camille? Why did he pull the plug? And what, despite its intriguing back story, will the album add to an already bulging body of work that comprises almost 40 studio albums released over Prince’s lifetime (along with almost a dozen posthumous albums)?įirst, some context. “Prince’s people agreed – almost too easy.” “We’re finally going to put it out,” Ben Blackwell of Third Man told MOJO. Having secured permission from Prince’s estate ( the singer died in 2016), Third Man will release Camille at an unspecified date in the future. Musician Jack White’s label Third Man Records recently bought a rare pressing of Camille at auction for $49,375 (£37,000). Thirty-six years after Prince killed off Camille, the album is – at long last – to be released. What was seen as a far-out side project in one decade is seen as a “lost classic” in another. Camille was scrapped just weeks before its planned release when just 25 early pressings had been made. But the project (along with the other two albums) never saw the light of day. In a move that would have sent Mutterings into meltdown, Prince planned to release Camille anonymously with no mention whatsoever of his involvement. The most intriguing of these albums was Camille, a set of songs recorded by a hermaphrodite alter-ego of Prince’s. Specifically, he was working on three potential albums that could easily have sustained the single-album-tour cycle of an artist of his standing for a decade. In the autumn of 1986, Prince was indeed in the middle of a wildly prolific writing spree. Before a nugget about how Prince wore women’s perfume because “the smell lasts longer”, it breathlessly ran the following sentence: “Prince claims to have written all his music for the next 10 years and to have successfully predicted all the musical trends that will occur!”īut for all the eye-rolling implied in its copy, Smash Hits was merely stating fact. The Mutterings page in the Smash Hits edition of 21 October 1986 was typical of the time. He may have been one of the world’s biggest pop stars, but the musician was also seen as a madman whose life invited bemused opprobrium. Stories ran about how “His Royal Purpleness” would demand eggs boiled for precisely three and three-quarter minutes from kitchenhands at 4am, or how he turned up at a New York nightclub with 12 bodyguards whose walkie talkies were inadvertently tuned to the same frequency as fellow visitor Eddie Murphy’s bodyguards’ walkie talkies (cue chaos), or how Prince was a secret Bananarama fan. The Purple Rain singer was gleefully painted by the publication as an egotistical eccentric. Barely a fortnight went by in the mid-1980s when the Mutterings gossip column at the back of Smash Hits magazine didn’t contain a jibe about Prince’s latest wacky activities.
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