Purple rain will soak Nelson’s DeVille Café dance floor later this month when DJ-supreme Grant Smithies will bust out his 40-record Prince collection to pay his respects to the music legend.
Grant was in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco when news of Prince’s death was announced last month. He says he was in a record store in the epicentre of the hippy movement when he received a text message from home about the death.
“I had no idea. I texted back saying ‘dude, what are you talking about’. It wasn’t until a guy came in and picked up this whole bunch of Prince records. I went up to the guy behind the counter and said ‘what’s the story’, and he said Prince had just died and that the same thing happened when Michael Jackson died. People just bought them en masse as a kind of memento, I suppose.”
Grant’s Prince collection goes back decades and includes many single EP’s as well as his most famous records. In his job as a music reviewer for the Sunday Star Times, Grant went to see Prince’s first – and as it turns out, only – New Zealand show in Auckland a month before he died.
He says he was blown away.
“I heard some people say they weren’t going to go because he didn’t have a band, it was just him and a piano. But he had 3000 people up screaming and stomping along. It was a s..t-hot show.”
Upon Grant’s return to Nelson he says he kept running into people suggesting a gig based on Prince’s music. “So it seemed like a good idea to do, like, a wake. To actually go along and play some great Prince records, but not just Prince, but other funk and soul charters around the same time.”
He says he’s already had plenty of interest.
“It will be a good opportunity for people who were big fans to come along and do some marginal dance moves to these various tunes. For me, Prince was the guy who owned the 80s and you can often forget how great loads of those tunes are, so it will be great to hear them in succession.”
The party will be called Purple Rain and held on May 28 at DeVille Café. Tickets are $20 and can be bought from DeVille.
