And I think it’s more apparent in something like these early versions, than on other unreleased tracks like ‘Vagina’ or ‘Turn It Up’. MH: Coming out of Controversy, Prince was particularly interested in being as self-sufficient as possible and is starting to play with the drum machine and doing a tremendous amount of experimentation in the studio, so I think the influence of something like what Gary Numan was doing, and maybe some of the early British New Wave kind of stuff seeped into his creative energies. The drums sound like a drum machine whereas they sound real on the normal version. I mean with ‘Irresistible Bitch’, I actually prefer this version, I think, to the released version, but there’s some obvious differences.

SDE: This medley is a good example of Prince reworking something which sounded great in the first place. I am virtually certain it was initially intended for The Time and obviously never ended up getting released as it currently exists, and turned into the song ‘New Power Generation’, which is something that ended up on Graffiti Bridge I guess, but this is a much more organic sort of approach I would say.

Michael Howe: I don’t believe this ever trickled out into the fan community, and really is the only example of something on the entire set of expanded body of work that we had to source from a cassette rough mix, because there was literally no other existing version.Įven a two-inch was recorded over, so we didn’t even have a trace of what the original track was, but we did find a cassette rough mix of it and made it as sonically appealing as we possibly could, given the limitations, but that’s the kind of forensic approach that we tried to take. SDE spoke to Prince ‘vault’ archivist Michael Howe, who helped to put this set together in conjunction with the Prince Estate and the record label, and asked him about some of this unheard material…

Warner Music’s recently announced reissue of Prince‘s album 1999 has sparked massive interest in the 35 previously unreleased bonus tracks.

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