Chris Stanley's Bazaar

When Prince passed away in 2016 it was a sad end to what had been an interesting life. The details of what killed him aren’t clear , but for the man who created the purring come-on of ‘ Gett Off ’ to be discovered collapsed in a lift is ignominious to say the least. It took me a long time to get around to Prince. I’m not particularly enthusiastic about funk, and his cavortings always seemed faintly ridiculous for a man of his physical stature. But even though his imperial period had long since passed by the time I recognised he was a genius, it was still a huge ambition of mine to see him live. There was opportunity, should I have been arsed enough, to see him during his O2 residency in 2007, but I guess I thought he’d go on forever, like an icon does. But then David Bowie died , England lost to Iceland and Brexit happened. 2016 was a shitshow , and it took Prince Rogers Nelson away on a purple ebb tide. For the last year I’ve overdosed on music. I’ve been doing a lot of ed...

Where were you when history was made? Memory being what it is, it’s likely that in years to come the bare details of who you are and what you were doing when the defining moments of social history happened will be shaped and coloured into the image you would most like to claim was your own. However, I have what I suspect is a near-eidetic memory for my own life, and therefore I won’t have any choice but to admit that when England finally won a penalty shoot-out, I acted like a complete tit. I seem to have a knack for missing the moment by a hair’s breadth, but in some ways that makes my memories even more vivid, as if the mundanity of everyday life highlights the kaboom of history like the Trinity test in the Alamogordo morning. For example, when the Berlin Wall fell (or rather the Saturday evening, since it opened late on a Thursday night), we were having a family party. When the USSR collapsed in August ‘91, my elder sister and I were arguing over a game of Ludo. I thought Prince...