Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

PRINCE — The Earth Tour — Fri­day 21^st Septem­ber 2007, The O2 Arena, London.

This post has taken me a few days to write as I’ve barely been able to move.

Why? Because on Fri­day I partied like it was 1999 at the final night of Prince’s 21 nights in Lon­don. I think it was the most I’ve moved in about 10 years. No wait, that’s a dirty rot­ten lie — it was the most I have moved ever.

The lay­out of the O2 and the fact the Prince played “in the round” meant that every­one got a good view and we were lucky in that every time our view had been fant­astic. On the first 2 occa­sions that we vis­ited the O2, I’d been sat to the right of the Sym­bol Stage, at the front of the Lower Tier in Block 101 (see pink star on seat­ing plan), on a wheel­chair ramp dir­ectly at stage level. (Pro: Close enough to see facial expres­sions etc of people on stage/more intim­ate atmo­sphere. Con: Didn’t get a sense of the shape and size of stage/only a seg­men­ted view of the show.)

How­ever this time, we were seated dir­ectly facing the “point” of the Sym­bol Stage, at the back of the Lower Tier in Block 105 (see green star on seat­ing plan), on a ramp above stage level. (Pro: Far enough away to get a sense of the shape/size of the stage and an over­all view of the show and crowd. Con: Lacked intimacy.)

There had been talk online of people tak­ing purple glow sticks as a visual show of appre­ci­ation to Prince for the moment­ous 21 Nights, so I made sure to order mine from so that they would arrive in good time. Dur­ing the order­ing pro­cess, the form asks the reason for the order and my response pro­voked this friendly mes­sage on my pack­ing slip — how sweet!

Word must have got­ten out to O2 staff/Prince man­age­ment as they decided to give out com­pli­ment­ary purple sticks to every­one as they went in along with instruc­tion to “Snap ‘N Shake” at the start of the show as the first 2 songs were to be tele­vised live on Sky News. You see that foot­age? One of those glow sticks is me! I was on telly!

Look­ing out into a black sea awash with dan­cing elec­tric purple energy, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. We def­in­itely made the right choice seating-wise as I’ve never felt any­thing like it, it was so mov­ing to be cocooned in some­thing so beau­ti­ful and on such a huge scale, the sense of anti­cip­a­tion pro­duced by the stun­ning visual effect was immense.

And, as of what was to come… It was out. of. this. world. The atmo­sphere was truly awe-inspiring.

Set­l­ist

{Full Band}

I Feel For U
Con­tro­versy inc. House­quake chant
Some­where Here On Earth
Cream
U Got The Look
Musi­co­logy inc. Funky Lon­don Chants
Chelsea Rogers
Sexy Dan­cer w/ Le Freak lyr­ics
A Love Bizarre
Pass The Peas

{Solo Piano Set}

Dia­monds and Pearls (1 verse)
The Beau­ti­ful Ones
Little Red Cor­vette
I Would Die 4 U
Under The Cherry Moon (instru­mental)
Some­times It Snows In April

{Full Band}

Purple Rain
Take Me With You
Gui­tar
Kiss
Let’s Go Crazy

Encore

1999
Noth­ing Com­pares 2 U

{Synth Set}
Sign O The Times
When Doves Cry (1 verse)
Darling Nikki (intro)
I Wanna Be Your Lover
Erotic City (sample)
Alpha­bet St.
DMSR (1 verse)
Deli­ri­ous (1 verse)
Gett Off Houstyle (sample)
The Bal­lad Of Dorothy Parker (sample)
Irres­ist­ible Bitch (1 verse sung)
The Most Beau­ti­ful Girl In The World (1 chorus)
Rasp­berry Beret

Sur­prise Encore

When U Were Mine
Girls and Boys

The night began with Prince arriv­ing as we’d become accus­tomed through the middle of the stage amid dry ice, but this time the sus­pense was heightened with “thun­der”. From then on, the crowd were on a sing-along high and taken on a roller-coaster ride through one Hit after another.

Prince seemed to be soak­ing up the atmo­sphere, speak­ing warmly about his time in Lon­don and of the his­toric 21 Nights as though they were like “ima­ging per­fec­tion or para­dise”. Com­ing up for breath before Kiss, he spoke out again to the crowd: “This is con­fus­ing. The quicker I go through these hits, the sooner I’ll be gone… I ain’t tryin’ to go nowhere. I love it in London.”

Early on in the set, some friendly, drunken old man with stale beer-and-fag breath took to try­ing to chat me up by giv­ing me his glow stick as a token of his undy­ing affec­tion and ges­tur­ing towards me, ded­ic­at­ing shouted lyr­ics in my gen­eral dir­ec­tion through the dur­a­tion I Feel For U and U Got The Look. I smiled sweetly and gra­ciously accep­ted his glow stick (it seemed rude not to) and then hav­ing given him a few more seconds grace, turned my atten­tion back in to the dap­per, doe-eyed, funky, fuzzy little man that I’d come to see in the hopes that even­tu­ally the weird man would get bored and go away. It sounds harsh I know, but come on — Prince was stand­ing in front of me and this guy was behind me, which way did you think I was going to face? I think in the end Secur­ity ushered him away as he was ille­git­im­ately clog­ging the wheel­chair area. Oh, well.

The night was filled with crowd par­ti­cip­a­tion and Prince and the band seemed to be giv­ing it their all with Prince throw­ing some of the slick­est dance moves I’ve seen this tour and The Twinz actu­ally man­aging to syn­chron­ise their cho­reo­graphy (Hell, it only took 21 shows to get it right…). One of the biggest and most wel­come sur­prises of the night was the return of the legendary Maceo Parker! It was great to see Maceo given the spot­light on Con­tro­versy, Musi­co­logy and Pass The Peas, in par­tic­u­lar. (If my memory serves me right)

I won’t run through the show track by track as the set list over­laps in many places with the other 2 shows I saw on the 7^th August and 16^th Septem­ber, but some of my own per­sonal high­lights and mem­or­able moments included: hear­ing Chelsea Rodgers (a Planet Earth track that I’d been dying to hear live) with Prince on vocals and the NPG rock­ing the horns, the clas­sic Prince/Sheila E track (though sadly no Sheila that night) A Love Bizarre, The Beau­ti­ful Ones (with screams), a mem­or­able Purple Rain that began ini­tially on piano before swell­ing to include the whole band and a stonk­ing When U Were Mine dur­ing the sur­prise encore.

I did my best to absorb of much of that purple energy as I could, singing every syl­lable to every single song until I was hoarse and wav­ing my glow sticks like a maniac (almost smack­ing K in the face at one point in a series of moves that shall be bet­ter known as “crazy white girl com­bat dan­cing”) until I was con­vinced my arms were actu­ally going to fall off and that I’d have to carry them back to the car in my lap.

We met a really lovely couple whilst were were there, too (S and his wife, D — both dressed “to the 9’s” in purple). D and I traded “Prince Notes and Anec­dotes” on col­lect­ibles, favour­ite songs/albums/tours and how gor­geous we thought Prince’s arse was etc before the show began, whilst K and D’s hus­band exchanged world-weary and know­ing looks at our Fan Girl cluck­ing, squee-ing and high-fives. It turns out that D’s all-time favour­ite Prince track was Darling Nikki. Cue us turn­ing to one another, regress­ing to that of a pair of 12 year olds and scream­ing at one another when Prince threw us a sample of it on synth. (No lyr­ics again obvi­ously, for reli­gious reasons.)

For one of the first encores, the Twinz were car­ried back on stage atop the black box that had pre­vi­ously been used to trans­port Prince on and off stage. (It’s used to secretly and safely move Prince through the crowd so that he doesn’t get mobbed and is dis­guised to look like equip­ment) and they then sprayed the num­ber “21” on the back of Prince’s jacket with red paint (!) “I got mo’ hits than this num­ber on my back!”

And, des­pite a bit of a hoo-hah with some inebri­ated knobs lob­bing glow sticks from up in the Gods, we were for­tu­nate enough to even be treated to a rather impromptu sur­prise third and final encore long after the lights went up and the band had left the stage! “If y’all ain’t going home, I ain’t going home”… If only he wasn’t going home…

I can’t believe it’s over, I could cry — I did cry. I bawled all the way through Purple Rain and sobbed when Prince uttered the line dur­ing Some­times it Snows in April: “as much as I wanna stay, all good things, they say, never last.”

You can stay, mate. We don’t mind, hon­est — we’re not exactly kick­ing you out, are we? You could’ve done 31 nights and we’d have still come to party with you, that much I prom­ise. Stay! I’ll take the couch, I don’t mind — you can be my house guest. K’s a good cook, she’ll feed you up — you always look like you could do with a few good din­ners down you — you’ve damn near danced your­self away. Stay. We’ll look after you… Please?

Con­cert foot­age © Sky News.
Photo © The Org’s magictree. Used with kind per­mis­sion.
Set­l­ist cour­tesy of HQ.
Mod­i­fied seat­ing plan ori­gin­ally from Viag­ogo.