Columnist: Still mourning loss of a legend

Yes it’s been a couple of weeks now but it’s still a hard one to take in, especially given that despite being 57 he barely looked any older than he did when he was 19.

Although the full facts of his death have yet to emerge, it was a less than a dignified way to go. Dying alone in a lift in his sprawling Paisley Park complex and in all probability he had been there for hours before finally being discovered.

Little by little, snippets of information are slowly dripping out, some perhaps true, some perhaps nonsense; he was addicted to painkillers, a slew of emergency calls had been received by the police from his mansion over the last couple of years and that he was due to meet with an “addiction specialist” on the day he died.

I spent the night of his death feeling genuinely sad. Like most people in the UK I wasn’t aware of him until ‘Purple Rain’ - already his sixth album - but after that I would rush out and buy every new release and was never less than amazed at how staggeringly talented he was - all his albums would carry the credit ‘Produced, Arranged, Composed and Performed by Prince’.

His run of albums from his debut release in 1978 right up to 1987’s ‘Sign Of the Times’ is perhaps unparalleled in pop - nine albums (two of which are doubles) and each one deserving of five stars. A quite incredible achievement.

And for those of us that were lucky enough to see him live, his energy and musicianship was quite something to behold (he was also an underrated lyricist IMO).

So forget his horrible death -remember him as the hugely talented genius he undoubtedly was.