'The Second Coming'

Huge congratulations to my friend Tony Best, who has unearthed a piece of music history.

In an article for black music journal Wax Poetics, Tony - a writer based in Los Angeles - has managed to secure the inside track on one of the most mythologised unreleased projects in Prince's famous and extensive vault. The vault is rumoured to contain thousands of unreleased songs, dozens of unreleased music videos and several unreleased movies.

Among those movies is an abandoned 1982 project titled 'The Second Coming', which began life as a concert film. Music video director Chuck Statler captured a live concert from the latter portion of Prince's 1982 Controversy Tour. The gig, at the Met Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, was shot on 16mm film and has long been on the 'most wanted' list for Prince's army of dedicated fans.

Prince and his management were equally excited by the concert footage. There was a feeling that it could generate real commercial success. A view was taken that if the live material was intertwined with narrative segments, it might be easier to secure a wide theatrical release. Work commenced on these autobiographical interludes but was later abandoned. The footage has sat unreleased ever since.

For, I think, the first time ever, Tony has convinced Chuck Statler to discuss the project in-depth for publication. But it gets better. He has also persuaded Chuck - who technically owns the footage - to release a number of screengrabs from the film for the first time ever in the 30 years since it was shot. You can read Tony's in-depth interview with Chuck and look at the exclusive movie stills by clicking here and visiting the Wax Poetics website.

The footage is significant for several reasons, the most important being that it is thought to be the only high quality filmed concert from Prince's early career. A number of bootlegs from the era have circulated for many years but are shot by static, rear-of-venue cameras. Chuck Statler spent some time following Prince around on tour before filming, so he could decide on which would be the best angles to shoot from. The footage is an absolutely integral building block of Prince's live videography - the foundation upon which all else was built - but, scandalously, still has yet to receive any sort of public airing.

The earliest Prince performance footage currently on the market is the musical segments in Prince's Oscar-winning movie 'Purple Rain', for which 'The Second Coming' ultimately wound up being a prototype. But while the performances in 'Purple Rain' were staged and lip-synched so they could be shot multiple times from different angles, Chuck Statler managed to capture an entire live gig from Prince's Controversy Tour, raw and untouched. The prospect of such footage one day coming to light has tantalised fans for three decades now.

Prince's next attempt at a concert movie, 'Sign O The Times', was marred by the fact that much of the video and audio - shot across several gigs in the Netherlands in 1987 - turned out to be unusable. As such, a wealth of the footage wound up having to be re-shot or re-dubbed. While 'Sign O The Times' received rave reviews, the need to tamper with the footage to such a degree is a huge regret for many of Prince's fans, who feel the gig lost its energy.

The likelihood of 'The Second Coming' seeing the light of day any time soon is remote. The concert displays Prince's raunchy side, pushing the boundaries of sexuality in music. He performs much of the show in bikini bottoms and suspenders. Since he became a Jehovah's Witness he has distanced himself from this aspect of his earlier career, refusing to play his sexually explicit hits onstage.

However, Tony's piece sheds new light on the much-debated lost movie and the release of the never-before-seen screengrabs is a real scoop.

In a way, I owe my music-writing career to Tony. He spotted me writing online years ago and suggested I contribute some articles to Wax Poetics, which I wound up doing. In fact, when you click to visit Tony's 'Second Coming' exclusive, my first ever Wax Poetics article - an interview with Motown musician Jack Ashford - has somehow found its way onto the related articles menu. My work for Wax Poetics gave me something I could show to editors - a collection of published articles. My projects for WaxPo also gave me the confidence to seek other interviews for other publications, including my own JIVE magazine in 2009.

Tony and I have our own 'lost' project. In 2009 we began work on a collaborative piece about the Jacksons music video 'Can You Feel It'. While 'Thriller' is constantly cited as Michael Jackson's first hugely innovative music video, 'Can You Feel It' is often overlooked, despite bucking the music video trend several years prior to 'Thriller'.

The video featured groundbreaking special effects and even a spoken word intro by Orson Welles. When Dick Clark screened the film on American Bandstand, he told the audience that he had initially been reluctant to show a music video because he found them boring, but had then watched it and been blown away. Tony and I felt that the video's importance had been overshadowed by the phenomenon of 'Thriller' and set about placing it in its rightful historical context.

The story required us to track down people who had worked on the project - which we did with very limited success. The company which produced the video had since dissolved. Most of the principal players in its production had since died. Of those we did track down, some weren't especially keen to speak to reporters, others had very hazy memories. We did track down one gentleman who was highly involved in the video's mind-blowing special effects, but the project faltered because of a lack of other sources. The story had been intended as a WaxPo feature, but Tony instead wrote a one-page piece about the video for the mag's RE:Discovered section.

When I flew to Los Angeles in the Summer of 2010, I was recognised at my hotel on the morning that Tony was coming to meet me. When the fans I was getting pictures taken with found out that Tony was the author of the WaxPo article, they insisted he be in the pictures too.

Picture courtesy of Wanda Peoples (Click to enlarge)

Tony was a great tour guide, ferrying my friend Angela and I around the city using the underground network, telling us jaw-dropping stories about his years working in the gangster rap industry. I remember stopping at a Barnes & Noble on our travels so I could pick up the latest Jet magazine with Prince on the front cover. He also came with us to Forest Lawn, where Michael Jackson was laid to rest. As we parted ways, he sent us to an awesome record store called Amoeba, where I found a legit copy of Prince's 'Black Album' for a ludicrously low price of about $9.

I messaged Tony on Facebook earlier to tell him what a coup his Prince piece was, but I also felt compelled to post it here too. I really hope you all go and read it.

Until next time...

Tony and I at Forest Lawn, June 2010 (Click to enlarge)

Michael Barrymore's Easter Egg - Broadcast Details

Regular readers will remember that in my last entry I detailed my thwarted attempt to interview Michael Barrymore. The one-time king of Saturday night TV visited Basildon last month to record a guest radio show for local station Gateway 97.8. I was told he had agreed to interview, but when I arrived he denied agreeing to any such thing and instead pulled me on-air halfway through the recording, turning the tables and interviewing me. His refusal to give me an interview became a running joke throughout the second half of the recording.

When I last blogged, I was still waiting to hear when the show would air. I can now tell you that it will go out at 1pm (GMT) on Easter Monday. The show is scheduled to last an hour, which surprised me because the host, Ros, was concerned about having to cut out several of Michael Barrymore's potentially slanderous flights of fancy. It will be interesting to see what material has and hasn't made the show. From what I remember, I sounded quite bewildered.

To tune in online, simply click here and then click the 'Listen live' button in the upper right portion of the screen.

Meeting Michael Barrymore

On Monday I was dispatched to interview Michael Barrymore, who was in town to record a guest slot for the local radio station. The station owners had told me Barrymore had agreed to be interviewed, but on the condition that his past not be discussed.

For international readers: Michael Barrymore, throughout the 1990s, was probably the biggest television star in the UK. Dubbed 'Mr Saturday Night', he hosted everything from variety showcases to game shows to kids' TV. Then, in 2001, a man called Stuart Lubbock was found dead in Barrymore's swimming pool after a party. He had drugs in his system and the coroner later found extensive anal injuries, although there is some question as to how and when those were sustained.

DNA ruled Barrymore out of the assault but the scandal ruined his career. He has spent more than ten years now trying to put the incident behind him. In 2006 he almost mounted a successful comeback by appearing on Celebrity Big Brother. The public seemed to embrace him - he came second on public votes - but while many of the viewers at home were willing to let go of the past, the media wasn't. Everywhere Barrymore goes, he is followed by unpleasant tabloid innuendo - something most broadcasters are unwilling to associate themselves with.

What happened to Stuart Lubbock will probably never be known and opinion on Barrymore will forever be divided by the incident. Some people believe he is holding back information, protecting somebody - but I didn't walk into the interview hoping to interrogate him about it. Many have tried and they've all failed to produce the career-making smoking gun they're looking for. If anything, the more people probe the incident, the more questions seem to arise - so grilling him about his past would probably have been somewhat of a wild goose chase.

I was interested in Barrymore's life now. Is he following the Leveson inquiry? What does he make of it? Does he feel his treatment has been symptomatic of the widespread media misbehaviour which is now being uncovered on a weekly basis? How do people react to him now? How does he deal with people's hostility? These were just some of the questions I'd have liked to put to him.

Alas, when I arrived at the radio studio, Barrymore denied having ever agreed to give me an interview in the first place - something I never quite got to the bottom of - but he did agree to let me sit in on the radio recording.

Halfway through the show, during a music break, he invited me to sit next to him. Then, once recording resumed, he began grilling me about my job. He made a running joke about having turned the tables to interview me. Our interaction dominated the second half of the show.

My take on the encounter has been published in my regional newspaper (see below). I will post details on how to tune into the show as I find them out. It'll be interesting to see how much they have to cut out. I have an unedited copy and it's a great listen.

CLICK HERE to read about my thwarted attempt to interview Michael Barrymore

Michael Barrymore looks suspiciously at our photographer. Picture: Mark Cleveland, Yellow Advertiser

Jermaine Jackson Outtake

Since it was taken over by AOL, the Huffington Post has introduced a fairly restrictive word limit on blog entries, asking posters to cap them at an absolute maximum of 1,200 words. Under the current editorial policy, my piece on the Michael Jackson trial would never have been published by the website. It was also the reason I had to post an uncut version of my Troy Davis piece on my website.

With this word count in mind, I had to cut my interview with Jermaine Jackson into small chunks, which told an overall narrative but at the same time were self-contained and somewhat themed. The first, about the controversy surrounding his book and how it came to be published, was published in October. The second installment focused on he and his brothers' childhood experiences. That fairly uncontroversial segment is the one which was rejected without any explanation.

When I re-worked the piece for the Orchard Times, having those self-contained chunks was no longer a necessity and discussion of Jermaine's childhood would have been a diversion from the overall narrative. As such, the whole segment got dropped.

Rather than leaving it unpublished, I thought I'd stick up here on the blog for you all.



Through A Brother's Eyes: Jermaine Jackson Speaks - Part Two

Michael Jackson's solo career was so eclipsing that it's easy to forget the enormity of the Jackson 5's success. The first group ever to have their first four records go to number one, they sparked hysteria almost everywhere they went. Almost everywhere.

Concerts in Southern states were picketed by the KKK. Jermaine tells me about the trauma of, "checking into a hotel and they're telling you 'you don't have reservations here' and we know we have them. Then when they give us our rooms, they [are] way in the back facing the alley where all the trash was." Stories like this serve as a reminder that the Jackson 5 started out, as Jermaine puts it, as "five black guys from Gary, Indiana" - a fact overlooked by some generations who have simply never known a world in which the Jacksons weren't famous.

In fact, the Jacksons' story is one of the greatest rags-to-riches tales ever told. The family rose from a borderline poverty-stricken background - two parents and nine children living in a two-bedroom house on a crane operator's wage - to become the most famous family in America, challenging stereotypes and breaking barriers along the way.

In his book, Jermaine downplays their money woes. They weren't poor, he says, but they weren't privileged. He writes: "The best way of describing our situation was: not enough money to buy anything new, but somehow we scraped by and survived."

The group's rise to prominence is well-documented but Jermaine's descriptions of life at Motown have raised eyebrows among some fans, who believe he has sugar-coated the brothers' childhood, contradicting many of Michael's own recollections.

For example, Jermaine writes of their after-school work schedule at Motown: "[We went] to the studio for around 5.30pm, and sometimes stayed there till 10.30pm. Some people say this sounds exhausting but we were too excited to notice because we loved being at work."

This doesn't quite tally with Michael's own version of events. In 1993 he told Oprah Winfrey, "I remember going to the record studio and there was a park across the street and I'd see all the children playing and I would cry because it would make me sad that I would have to work instead."

When I put this to Jermaine he mentions a scene early in the book where he and Michael are stood at the window at Christmas, watching the local children play outside with their new toys, unable to share in their joy because of their Jehovah's Witness upbringing.

"I think that scene shows that same sadness," he says. "But I think the sadness was also balanced with our shared thrill of performing. I remember this time at the Apollo when we were in the dressing room looking down on the basketball courts, desperate to play. But we were born to entertain. Michael lost four more years of his childhood than I did, so I understand why he felt more strongly about this... Michael was probably the most sensitive out of all of us, so I think he was maybe more vulnerable to the impact of fame."

Fans have also questioned Jermaine's depiction of his father Joe's allegedly heavy-handed discipline, which Michael claimed left him so traumatised that he would vomit at his father's mere presence. Claiming that Joe's behaviour was both normal and necessary at the time, particularly because he was desperate not to see his children swept up in Gary's gang culture, Jermaine suggests that Michael's recollections may have been 'exaggerated' because he witnessed his siblings' punishments at a young age, hearing their 'screams' and seeing 'belt buckle imprints on bare skin at bed time'.

"This made him fear something long before he felt it," he writes. "In his mind the mere thought of Joseph's discipline was traumatic. That is what exaggerated fear does: it builds something in the mind to a scale that, perhaps, it is not."

But Michael often recalled being personally beaten and whipped by his father. In one 2001 interview with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, broadcast on NBC after his death, he recalled his father using extreme violence towards him and his siblings. "He would make you strip nude first," he told Boteach. "He would oil you down. It would be a whole ritual. He would oil you down so when the flip of the ironing cord hit you, you know... You had whips all over your face, your back, everywhere."

Jermaine tells me he does not share this particular recollection. He's quick to point out, though, that this doesn't mean it wasn't true. It was 'clearly Michael's emotional truth and recollection' - but just not one shared by Jermaine.

"Whatever people want to label it - beatings, whippings, spankings - it was not abuse," Jermaine tells me. "I was there. I shared the same discipline at the hands of Joseph and I have never considered myself 'abused'... In the book, I try to place Joseph's discipline and Michael's forgiveness of Joseph into a context no-one has written about before."

Still, Joe Jackson does not emerge from this book bathed in holy light. While he's portrayed more sympathetically than is common in Jackson biographies, Jermaine's recollections still detail what many would consider inappropriate discipline. Despite earlier attributing his father's brutal discipline to a fear that his children would be tempted to join local gangs, Jermaine reveals that even after the group had achieved global success and moved to California, rehearsals were still "administered under the threat of a beating."

One of Jermaine's more shocking claims is that Joe Jackson tricked a teenaged Michael into leaving Motown and signing a contract with CBS Records by pretending he'd get to have dinner with Fred Astaire as a reward. Then, he writes, Joe used that signature to try to convince Jermaine - at that time married to Motown boss Berry Gordy's daughter - to jump ship as well.

I ask Jermaine how his father has reacted to such revelations but, as far as he is aware, Joe has not yet read the book.

In 1975 Michael, Marlon, Jackie and Tito signed contracts with CBS and hopped labels with brother Randy filling Jermaine's spot. Jermaine remained loyal to his father-in-law and stayed at Motown. "There was a suggestion for years that I broke up the group by leaving," he writes, "but I've never viewed it that way. I did not leave them: they left me."

The split drove a wedge between Jermaine and the family. Joe wouldn't take his calls and the brothers were now often away on tour without him. Jermaine, used to his brothers' constant presence, found the separation almost impossible to bear. But, he says with hindsight, the distance between them would prove trivial compared to the chasm that later opened between Michael and his family. In a few years, he says, Michael would become surrounded by shady figures who assumed control of his affairs, screened his calls and locked his family out of his property. That was when everything started to go really wrong…

Final Jermaine Extract & Roundtable Discussion

Before posting the fifth and final audio extract from my Jermaine Jackson interview, just a quick note to let you know that I recently took part in a roundtable discussion about Michael Jackson as a songwriter.

I was invited to take part in the discussion by Joe Vogel, author of the magnificent book 'Man In The Music: The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson'. You can read the discussion here. I'm told there may be a second round of discussion in the coming weeks.

In this brief, final excerpt from my interview with Jermaine Jackson, he tells me about his hopes for a Jacksons reunion tour. Don't forget to read the full interview here.

As always, watch the blog, my twitter page and my facebook page for more updates.

Fourth Jermaine Jackson Audio Extract

In this clip, Jermaine tells me about chapter 22 of his book, in which he details the eyewitness accounts of five people he interviewed who were inside rehearsals for the 'This Is It' concerts.

Third Jermaine Jackson Audio Extract

In this extract, Jermaine speaks to me about racism in the music industry, and what role he believes music publishing played in his brother's demise: