Inside Prince’s wild youth of ‘animal lust’, racist kids and mum stealing his pocket money
MORE than three years after his untimely death, rock star Prince is once again making his thoughts on music known.
And Ed Sheeran and Katy Perry may be dismayed to hear he was not a fan.
In a long-awaited autobiography that Prince started writing shortly before his death in April 2016, he blasts the stars in an outspoken rant.
He claims radio stations are force-feeding the duo’s music to listeners in a crude bid to sell the most records — then compares it to 1973 horror film Soylent Green, where people were conned into eating human remains.
Prince writes: “It’s all about competition, how we outsell. Monkeys and primates could sell music.
“It becomes like Soylent Green — people feeding people to people.
“We need to tell them that they keep trying to ram Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran down our throats and we won’t like it no matter how many times they play it.”
His memoir, The Beautiful Ones, includes never-before-seen photos and handwritten notes.
He prided himself on never selling out despite sales of more than 100million records worldwide.
When Prince died aged 57, he had racked up seven Grammys, seven Brits and an Oscar for 1984 film Purple Rain — and a personal fortune.
The book charts his rise from humble origins in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the state he lived in all his life. The future megastar recalls his earliest memory, staring into the eyes of his mum, Mattie, a singer, and the sound of the piano played by his dad, John, a jazz musician who was also known by his stage name Prince.
The Raspberry Beret rocker was just ten years old when his parents separated, though his mother continued to carry a torch for her husband.
The young Prince and his sister Tyka — who was born two years after him — were woken regularly in the night by their desperate mum.
In the autobiography, Prince writes: “My mother used to call my father. There were late-night calls and pleas.
“She wanted him to come back. She’d wake my sister and me up and have us ask him to come back.”
But Prince Snr didn’t return to the family home and eventually his young son went to live with him after his mother married her second husband, Hayward Baker, in 1968.
Prince had always been closer to his dad, despite being his second son — his father had two daughters and a son from his first marriage.
In the book he writes: “My father had two families. I was his second, and he wanted to do better with me than with his first son. So he was very orderly, but my mother didn’t like that. She liked spontaneity and excitement.”
When Prince lived with his mother, he regularly found his money being taken. So when he left, he never returned.
In the book, which is largely written in Prince’s direct slang, he recalls: “She was 2 strong & not always in a good way. She would spend what $ the family had 4 survival on partying with her friends, then trespass in2 my bedroom, ‘borrow’ my personal $ that I’d gotten from babysitting local kids, & then chastise me 4 even questioning her regarding the broken promises she made 2 pay me back.”
Despite having a difficult relationship with his mum, Prince loved women from an early age. He started by playing husband and wife with Laura, the girl next door.
He wrote: “We weren’t the first inter-racial couple in Minneapolis, but we were the youngest. All lives mattered back then, because race didn’t. At least not in our fantasy world.
'ANIMAL LUST'
“Laura kissed me three times that day. The obligatory husband on the way to work kiss, then one when U returned, & one b4 U went 2 sleep that night.”
The childhood innocence quickly faded and Prince moved on to Debbie with her “perfect round” afro.
Next came his first real girlfriend Cari, who was “the first to expose a brother to animal lust”.
In his memories he was always the one being pursued by women, rather than the other way around.
Prince recalls three girls using mistletoe at Christmas in the corridor to get chosen boys to kiss them.
He wrote: “Petey & I were kissing as tho we knew just what the other wanted. Petey kissed me as if she had been planning this all year.
“It was so good, Joanne started moaning & Denise had 2 stop her: ‘Shut up, girl.’ Petey wouldn’t stop. She grabbed my neck and started kissing me harder.
“Denise said, ‘Dang, U guys’ and then Petey stopped. looked at me and said, ‘Did U like that?’ ”
Despite these romantic liaisons at school, Prince’s time there was not always positive.
He had grown up in a black neighbourhood and did not experience racist abuse until he went to primary school with rich white kids who “didn’t like having me there”.
When one of them called him the N-word, Prince threw a punch.
He wrote: “I felt I had to. Luckily the guy ran away crying.”
RACIAL HATRED
The racial hatred of America also fed into how his early school tap-dance performances were viewed.
One bully followed him and his sister home to taunt them. He wrote: “Dwight & his brother would mimic my routine between uproarious laughter. Dwight kept saying to me, ‘What’s wrong with U? N***** ain’t supposed 2 tap no more’.”
Prince said the encounter almost ended his hopes of “neighbourhood stardom altogether”. But he was destined for bigger things anyway.
After shooting to fame in the early Eighties with hits including Controversy, Kiss and 1999, he dated a string of beautiful women.
He married dancer Mayte Garcia in 1996, but divorced four years on, then wed charity worker Manuela Testolini in 2001, splitting in 2006. But the only woman Prince talks about in his autobiography is girlfriend Vanity, a Canadian singer who died due to kidney disease caused by crack cocaine addiction.
Her role in his life is described in a strange alternate universe where, at the end, it is Prince that dies — “He raises it [a gun] to his head. There is [a] shot.”
In reality the star died at his home, Paisley Park in Minnesota, from an overdose of a painkiller it is believed he was taking to alleviate hip pain caused by years of wearing high-heeled boots.
Just four days before his death he phoned the book’s co-author, journalist Dan Piepenbring, to reassure him he was fine after being hospitalised after a previous overdose of the medication.
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Dan, who Prince affectionately called his “brother”, wrote: “I knew at once it was him. ‘I wanted to say I’m alright,’ he said, ‘despite what the Press would have you believe. They have to exaggerate everything, you know.’”
The overdose had forced Prince’s plane to make an emergency landing shortly after he left Atlanta following what would be his final gig.
He was hospitalised in Maine and the world was told he had a bad case of flu. His death left Dan to pull together the notes the star left scattered across his house into the memoir.
He told Dan he wanted it to be about “the freedom to create autonomously, without anyone telling you what to do or how or why.”
- The Beautiful Ones, by Prince and Dan Piepenbring, is out now (Century).
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