Prince didn’t save my life, but he helped me live it

By Joseph Earp

In late 2008, I was living in Coventry, England. Coventry’s not exactly the most scenic place in the world. In fact, more than anything it resembles a large car park – it’s all cold concrete and plain, pock marked buildings.

Though I technically had a room in a share house, I barely used it. I was a chain smoker at the time, and spent most of my waking hours in a freezing shed out the back with my laptop. Music, the one thing that had always given me pleasure, was now little more than an annoyance.

I stopped going to work. I stopped talking to my friends. I watched Youtube clips – garbage. Designed for distraction. Videos of reality TV shows from Croatia. Scenes from 70’s documentaries about marine life. But one day the Youtube algorithm went skewiff. I can’t remember which live Prince clip came up first. I just remember how clean he looked. How peaceful.

I had always liked him, but never enough to own one of his albums. So I ventured out to the shops – my first contact with the outside world in a long time. I bought Purple Rain. Took it home. Poured over it.

Prince didn’t seem kooky to me. He didn’t seem strange, or kitsch, or quirky. He seemed real. And though he looked like royalty while I looked like a leper – a diet of cigarettes and fast food will do that – he seemed of my life. He seemed like he understood. I felt there was a melancholy undercurrent to his songs – a pain that made it all work. But rather than wallow in tragedy, Prince made it fashionable. He turned hurt into heroism. He wore his trauma – tucked it under the ruffs that ran down his chest.

Like Bowie, another legend we lost far too soon, Prince was a significant figure in the LGBTQI community. He was a spokesperson for the disenfranchised – a figurehead for any of us who have felt outed, or unusual. He didn’t tone down his strangeness. It became his great strength, coupled with an excess that felt empowering rather than opulent. His fashion choices and his creative ones were united by a singular lack of shame or fear. Prince was about living your life as you wanted to live your life. Accept no substitutes.

It’s that refusal to compromise – that utter insistence on acting without half measure – that began to help me out in that shed in Coventry. I moved away from my self imposed exile and back into the share house. I lay in my previously unused bed and listened to 1999.

And things got better.

It’s not that you don’t see colour when you’re depressed. You just don’t notice it. It would be melodramatic to say Prince saved my life. But it wouldn’t to say he helped me live it. He made me realise there was creativity in the world. Integrity. But more than anything, he made me notice the colour.
I owe him that.