I am currently on the stage of the latter, along with four other representatives of the European press. Photograph: Michael Ochs ArchivesĪnd there are two full-sized live-music venues: a vast, hangar-like space that also features a food concession – form an orderly queue for Funky House Party In Your Mouth Cheesecake ($4) – and a smaller room decked out to look like a nightclub. Prince, performing in 1985, in his superstardom heyday. There are murals depicting the studio’s owner, never a man exactly crippled by modesty. There is something called the Galaxy Room, apparently intended for meditation: it is illuminated entirely by ultraviolet lights and has paintings of planets on the walls. The symbol that represented Prince’s name for most of the 90s is everywhere: hanging from the ceiling, painted on speakers and the studio’s mixing desks, illuminating one room in the form of a neon sign.
Inside, however, it looks almost exactly like you’d imagine a huge recording complex owned by Prince would look. It sits behind a chainlink fence in the nondescript Minnesota suburb of Chanhassen, and there’s no getting around the fact that, from the outside at least, it looks less like a mystical utopia, more like a branch of Ikea. It’s all a bit difficult to square with Paisley Park, the vast studio complex Prince built a couple of years later. “There aren’t any rules in Paisley Park.” “Love is the colour this place imparts,” it continues. Paisley Park, the lyrics aver, is filled with laughing children on see-saws and “colourful people” with expressions that “speak of profound inner peace”, whatever they look like.
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