Garbage Days Revisited #96: Prince & The Revolution - "Around The World In A Day" (1985)

 

"The smile on their faces, it speaks of profound inner peace/Ask where they'll going, they'll tell you nowhere/They've taken a lifetime lease" - Prince & The Revolution - Paisley Park

It's weird to think that it's now over six years since we lost Prince. I'll be honest, it was only really in my twenties when I first discovered Purple Rain that I really started to get into the guy - when I first started getting into music coincided with him starting to go off the boil a bit in the early '90s. Although he was still capable of the odd killer at this point (Money Don't Matter 2Nite is still a classic, Arms of Orion is an understated and underrated gentle ballad with Sheena Easton and Gett Off still makes me chuckle all these years later through how OTT it is), we also had to put up with the overblown likes of The Most Beautiful Girl In The World and Diamonds And Pearls and Prince-by-numbers stuff like Partyman and My Name Is Prince. And, yeah, then came the symbol and the Sony row and the guy pretty much became a standing joke, a watchword for over-indulgent pampered pop stars throwing their toys out of the pram.

It's a shame because in his pomp, the guy produced an absolutely killer run of five albums running from 1982's 1999 to 1987's Sign O'The Times which, I'd argue, almost rivals the Stones' legendary run from Beggars Banquet to Goat's Head Soup. Taking in everything from disco to hard rock to funk, not only was Prince putting out the sort of varied but consistently great albums that most other artists of the time could only dream of, he was also running his very own hit factory, overseeing the likes of Morris Day & The Time, Sheila E, The Family and Vanity/Apollonia 6 and taking them into the charts (in the US at least). Oh and writing tracks for everybody from the Bangles (Manic Monday) to psychedelic garage rock revivalists the Three O'Clock. I mean, there's people on creative runs and then there's mid-'80s Prince.

I don't think it's any coincidence though that the vast majority of this (literal) purple patch of his was when he had the Revolution as his backing band though. Sure, Prince was quite clearly the mastermind behind it but every single one of the other members - Wendy, Lisa, Mark, Bobby and Matt - all brought something to the table as well. The purple one might well have had the image and the tunes in his head to take him to the top of the mountain with the Purple Rain album and film and, make no mistake, he very much did it in style, but without his band to breathe life into those songs I can't help but think he wouldn't have found it quite so easy.

It's not Purple Rain that we're here to discuss today though - enough's been written about that album already, you know it's a classic etc etc. Rather, it's the follow-up album, the much less warmly remembered Around The World In A Day, which we're talking about, surely the prime Prince candidate for a Garbage Days Revisited. Released less than a year after its blockbuster predecessor, it pretty much split his fanbase in two and was the sound of him realising that he'd rather be a cult hero than a proper jetsetting megastar and quietly vacating the top of the mountain. It maybe says everything that its release coincided with him cutting the Purple Rain arena world tour short after just six months to concentrate on his new record.

Supposedly the roots of the album took shape after Prince heard a demo by a psychedelic band featuring both Wendy and Lisa's brothers and liked the main song so much that he asked if he could use it himself. They agreed and he would slowly spend time in the studio building it up until it became Around The World In A Day's title track and opener with the rest of the tunes on the album kind of spawning from the same mindset. It's safe to say that Purple Rain Part 2 (which would have been the easy option), this very much was not - it's a much less immediate affair and you can kind of see why it threw his newly acquired worldwide fanbase for such a loop when it surfaced.

Yet I'd argue that the gap between Purple Rain and Around The World In A Day isn't actually quite as big as people think - certainly there's a few times there when you can definitely hear the old Prince sound breaking through the barrier. Raspberry Beret and Paisley Park were arguably two of Prince's best pop songs with killer choruses which stubbornly refuse to leave your head and at the other end of the scale, the steamy Temptation is every bit as down and dirty as the sleazier moments on Purple Rain like Darling Nikki or Computer Love.

The difference is that this is the sound of Prince pushing his boundaries out in the best Bowie style and adding new elements to his stuff. The epic piano ballad Condition of the Heart almost sounds like something Suede might have done on Dog Man Star (think Black Or Blue or Still Life - again, there's a definite link to be made between the two albums in terms of a band taking their sound well and truly widescreen as well) while the jerky funk of America and Pop Life almost harked back to the 1999 album although supposedly a lot of the lyrics on the latter are barbs at Morris Day and Vanity, both of whom had left Prince's stable by this point after clashes over creative control which makes some of them seem a bit unnecessarily mean. I mean, okay, it's not perfect - Tambourine and The Ladder both feel like they're drifting around in search of a point most of the time, but I'd argue that Around The World In A Day certainly wasn't the grand folly that some dismissed it as at the time and I'd actually put it up there among Prince's best work.

Prince and the Revolution would manage one further album together, 1986's Parade, the soundtrack to his second film Under The Cherry Moon (am I the only person who actually quite likes said film by the way?) which was arguably the sound of them reining things back in a bit. Although it's best known for its lead-off single Kiss, there's plenty else to recommend it - Mountains is the great hit that should have been and the heartbreaking Sometimes It Snows In April runs Purple Rain close as the best Prince ballad. Afterwards though, the group would party ways with creative control again being the issue, the story goes that the other band members were starting to demand fair share for their contributions and Prince's response was simply to get shot of them - given the guy's undeniable talent, it seems a bit of a shame that his Achilles heel was a bit of an inability to share the spotlight with people once they started to show signs of approaching his levels of creativity. The fact that he went from working with the Revolution to writing and producing for Carmen Electra in a few short years probably says everything...

Ironically given everything I've just said above, Prince's first post-Revolution album, the epic 17 track Sign o'The Times would arguably be his other masterpiece along with Purple Rain even though it'd be the final part of his creative hot run with him covering everything from skeletal funk (the timeless title track) to straight up rock (I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man, later covered by Flesh For Lulu). Thereafter though, it was a slow drift down to mediocrity. I've heard a couple of Prince's post-symbol albums (2014's Art Official Age and 20Ten which you can probably guess the release year of) and they were...well, okay I guess. Certainly the sheer productivity of the guy (his final album would be no less than his 37th) clearly never waned even if his consistency arguably did a bit.

Nevertheless, it was still a huge shock when I found out Prince had passed on - I think just because it was so unexpected. He never seemed like a guy given over to major excess (well, except the carnal kind obviously) and at just 58, it really felt like he was gone way too soon. I was lucky enough to see the Revolution reunion tour the next year at Shepherd's Bush Empire (my wife who, unlike me, was old enough to appreciate the purple one's imperial phase first time around, pretty much insisted we went) with Wendy and Mark sharing lead vocals on the songs and it was a fine tribute to the man. Certainly the finale of Sometimes It Snows In April and Purple Rain was something you'd have had to have had a heart of stone not to feel a lump in your throat to.

As I say, my knowledge of Prince's output after about 1993 or so is decidedly patchy so I can't really comment on any potential hidden gems in his later catalogue (although music writer legend and all round good guy Simon Price did an excellent albums guide on him for the Guardian - link here) but for me, Around The World In A Day is definitely an album that deserves a lot better than to just sit in its predecessor's shadow. Arguably the sound of the Revolution at their most inventive, it's definitely something well worth revisiting if you wrote it off as a mis-step at the time. Even all this time later, Paisley Park remains in our hearts.