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April 21, 2026 — 5:00am
I’m standing outside a deserted Yokohama Stadium, an hour’s train journey south of Tokyo, listening to Prince and the Revolution’s gorgeous, elegiac Sometimes it Snows in April.
It is not snowing but it is, at least, a cool April morning, and I’m thinking of something that happened here 40 years ago this September: Prince’s final show fronting the band he had performed with in the first half of the 1980s, a period that culminated in his rise to phenomenon status with the Purple Rain film and album.
He would soon come back, of course, with the creative-peak Sign ‘O’ the Times album, and with different brilliant collaborators, but the end of the Revolution was a seismic event for a then-14-year-old Prince obsessive. (I later read somewhere of Revolution guitarist Wendy Melvoin merely looking at keyboardist Lisa Coleman during a performance of Sometimes it Snows on that 1986 tour of Japan and both of them bursting into tears, knowing that an extraordinary era was coming to an end.)
A more significant anniversary takes place today, April 21, as it marks the day the entire Prince era ended 10 years ago when he was found dead, from what was deemed an accidental overdose of the painkiller fentanyl, in a lift in his Paisley Park studio complex just outside his home town of Minneapolis. He was 57.
The impact Prince had on several generations of musicians and music fans is virtually unparalleled. Many of the former have undoubtedly sold more records and tickets but few, if any, could claim to sing, dance, write and produce hits for both themselves and others to the level he could, excel at pretty much any instrument they pick up (wind and brass aside, for Prince) and be one of the most dazzling live performers of all time.
Prince also starred in, and sometimes directed, a handful of feature films. These were rarely acclaimed, though many fans, including me, rate 1986 flop Under the Cherry Moon as a camp comic masterpiece (with the bonus of the killer tunes of the Parade album).
My journey with Prince began at age 12 in Hull, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, in 1984. Every day, just before the 8am news on UK breakfast show TV-am and just before I had to leave for school, they would screen two minutes of a music video. One day, the video showed what you might describe as a naked sex imp beckoning viewers from his bathtub, followed by, um, flashes from his new movie, to the sound of an incredible song unlike any I had yet heard. The video was for When Doves Cry, the film was Purple Rain, and my first proper musical obsession was born.
It turns out that was likely also the day the seed of my becoming a music journalist was planted. Thanks to Prince, suddenly I was paying close attention to entire albums, not just the hit singles that came from them. When I bought singles, now I was as keen to hear if the B-sides were as good as the A-side. (Though they were usually only up to that level when Prince did them – look up, for example, She’s Always in My Hair or Erotic City – but kudos to any other artist who succeeded.)
The next step for me was to see him perform live.
Having had a ticket (featuring the unforgettable instruction to “wear something peach or black”) to the cancelled Sign “O” the Times show at Wembley Stadium in 1987, I finally had my first live Prince experience in Wembley Arena on the Lovesexy tour the following year.
Space and (further) self-indulgence prevent me from waxing lyrical about that show, and the 10 others I saw across seven of his tours in total, but allow me a few choice memories.
That Lovesexy tour had Prince arrive onstage in a muscle car (his “daddy’s Thunderbird” of Alphabet St fame), strut around in thrilling precision choreography with drummer Sheila E and dancer Cat, do that classic Prince move where he does the splits then slides back up into standing position, and drive an entire arena bananas, all within the first five minutes.
When we saw him at Sheffield Arena in 1993 “he” made his way to the stage from high above the middle of the audience, masked and on a trapeze, singing My Name Is Prince – only for the masked singer to reveal herself as his dancer (and later wife) Mayte.
Over in Sydney, the first arena show of the 2012 Welcome 2 tour was slightly underwhelming in comparison with my previous experiences and, unfortunately, the first Prince gig I got to review. At least the following night I had the bucket-list experience of making it to the Ivy for one of his legendary aftershows, and witnessed the most extraordinary version of a Prince song I’d ever heard live to that point: a bluesy, harrowing I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man.
And then, of course, there was his last Australian tour – the Piano & a Microphone shows of February 2016 – at which arthritis in his fingers meant he could no longer play guitar, so he instead casually, spectacularly retooled, where necessary, various hits for piano. In now 25 years of reviewing for The Sydney Morning Herald, that first show at the Opera House remains one of only a handful I’ve given the full, perfect five stars.
Prince played Sometimes it Snows in April at the Opera House that night, a song whose heart-crushing lyric “all good things, they say, never last” would resonate profoundly a couple of months later when the shocking news of his death cast a cloud over the music-loving world.
Still, while some of us have spent the past 10 years bemoaning the fact we’ll never get to see him play live again, we have at least been able to console ourselves with his unique, breathtaking body of work.
Some good things, mercifully, do last.
George Palathingal is a senior music writer at The Sydney Morning Herald. He travelled to Japan at his own expense.
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