Fact #140965

Ian Penman (reviewer, NME) : For a wolverine habituee of the sharper clubs and bars of our capital such as myself, this tawdry ‘gig’ was something like a step into the horrors of Hieronymous Bosch from the accustomed gilt-edged decadent sumptuousness of Klimt! The dry ice and fright lights – whose calculated effect is undermined and rendered pretty pathetic by way of the Lyceum’s half-emptiness – turn out to be a good index of the Prince live repertoire’s ancient grasp of sub-cultural subtlety: the plot doesn’t thicken, it keeps its consistency. Heavy, stodgy, overdone, tasteless, lacking in spice or space – you get the picture? ‘Outfront’, Prince prances in unison with his two guitar cohorts – they walk it like they talk it, as the saying goes, every song split down the middle or battered to bed with the tedious exaggeration of third-rate Heavy Metal. Someone remarked to me the next day that oh, you know what these young chaps are like with their Hendrix fixations. Hendrix? It never began to shimmer with a hint of the historical avant-shapelessness or spirited slipstreams or sexual harangues of a Hendrix! This was calculated – Madison Square Garden here we come! – coldly choreographed strut rut muzak, in which context Prince’s thigh flashes and camp come-hither persona is stretched pretty thin. My two fellow funkateers and I unanimously elected to wander away from the endlessly guitar wrenching spectacle after about half an hour – we didn’t really even ‘walk out’; it was more of an embarrassed shuffle.
(Source : review in NME, June 13, 1981)

Beverly Glick : I was there. The Lyceum was half empty. Easy to say in hindsight but there was no doubt we were in the presence of genius that night. I remember lingering by the stage after the gig, in a heightened state, with an equally dazed Bob Geldof and Paula Yates...
(Source : Facebook entry)

Mat Snow (journalist) : Barney Hoskyns had hipped me to his second and third albums, and then in NME Chris Salewicz wrote a great introductory piece. Had to be there, and yes, it was less than half full. But what a show!! Despite the tumbleweeds that night, you just knew that Prince was going to be something truly extraordinary, and lo it came to pass.
(Source : Facebook entry)