Prince – Parade
Me and my brother were known for being really big Prince nuts at school. It’s hard to pin down one record that means the most but for me this one is the most joyful, experimental and bonkers. It feels exciting every time I play it. It’s still very interesting that you can have an artist like that – Madonna had this as well – who was as obsessed with the mythology of cinema as they were music. How it could add to your iconography if you got it right. With Purple Rain, he hit it on the nose. With Under The Cherry Moon, not so much, but I still really love that film. As a Black creative man, he was so insistent on following the beat of his own drum and wasn’t going to be pigeon-holed into making the kind of records or films audiences expected a Black man to make. He wanted to make a black and white film in the South of France that owed as much to the Marx Brothers as anything else. It was a brave, egotistical thing to do. And what stands up from it is that the record is still absolutely amazing.