Is this the most awkward Prince interview of all time?
I’d like to think I know a little bit about interviews with musicians. I’ve watched a lot of them. Not only that… I’ve made a lot of them too. Working with companies like the BBC, XFM, and these days on YouTube. It’s both an art and a science, and it involves careful preparation, detailed research, confidence, and the ability to command and control the atmosphere and situation.
This interview is spectacular because it has precisely none of those things. Now, I’ll be the first to state that Prince probably wasn’t always the easiest interviewee, and it probably depended on what mood you caught him in. See Morris Hayes’ description of multiple Prince personalities here.
Former Warner Bros Records Head of Publicity Bob Merlis recounted a very early story that may go some way to wards explaining why Prince rarely granted interviews during his initial rise to fame — “Prince did an interview with a woman at Record World [in 1978]. They talked about whatever, then he asked her, ‘Does your pubic hair go up to your navel?’ At that moment, we thought maybe we shouldn’t encourage him to do interviews.”
So, I’m fully willing to give hosts the benefit of the doubt when it comes to Prince, as long as they’ve done their job well, and are skilled at it. And I’d like to think that this interview isn’t fully representative of Charlotte Roche’s ability. But this interview can only be described as an absolute trainwreck.
The clearly nervous Charlotte Roche gets off to a fine start by getting a song name wrong. And what she thought the song was called is literally the exact opposite of what it is called. Her off-kilter pauses, and constant references to the “sexy audience” despite there being no live audience don’t help (If this was a pre-record, why on earth didn’t they edit it?). Her odd tangent into veganism, questioning Prince on the very self-explanatory message inside the Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic album (Hey Prince, you’ve written about how we shouldn’t harm animals…. what’s that about?!??), her literally dropping his brand new album on the floor…….You probably couldn’t script a worse interview with someone of his fame if you actually tried.
Still, there’s something comforting about things like this, and that’s that, even with the inevitable emptying of the vault, and all the clips and footage that will see wider audiences over time, there will still be forgotten gems like this, hiding away, waiting for new hardcore fans to discover them and laugh at the absurdity of it all. With both a comprehensive Prince documentary on Netflix, and a re-release of Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic on the way in 2019, it’s still a fairly safe bet that this clip will never see an “official” light of day or get included on any official project. And it’s not the only one — there’s tons of appearances and interviews that Prince did over the years that will remain solely in the collections of only the most hardcore fan, it’s always a pleasure to hear Prince talk, and they are all enjoyable in one way or another — even the most awkward ones like this.
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