Читать книгу Prince - Brian Morton - Страница 6

Acknowledgements

In a story so much concerned with rumour, counter-rumour, carefuly confected legend, fallings-out, gagging clauses and plain nonsense, who to believe? Almost every detail of Prince’s childhood and early years is rebutted or contradicted somewhere in the record. Almost everything that happened later is the subject of endless speculation in an internet community whose size and passion is the best evidence of Prince’s artistic longevity. Special thanks to all those imaginatively handled visitors to chat-rooms and message boards, but also to those who’ve written about Prince before me, and particularly Barney Hoskyns and Dave Hill, whose books Imp of the Perverse and A Pop Life offered a useful confirmation at a later stage of writing that I wasn’t wildly off the mark. Thanks to Arthur Geffen, my virtual guide to Minneapolis, who could have been appalled to know what he was guiding me towards; to the late Colin Smith; to Robert Palmer, Mica Paris, Andrew Pothecary, Cindy Revell; to Jamie Byng, Andy Miller, Helen Bleck and Alison Rae of Canongate Books, who put up with long delays during the unhappy period after I left the BBC and changed my name to an unpronounceable squiggle and my writing style to an unreadable scrawl; to the members and ex-members of the Prince entourage who spoke (mostly) off the record but with more obvious affection and admiration than malice, and who are paraphrased rather than quoted anonymously in what follows. Thanks above all to Sarah – ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ – for putting up with endless plays of endless Prince albums, singles and bootlegs, and for being there during the SLAVE/squiggle days. And to Prince, who I met once semi-officially and from whom I got not one word of sense, except a shared admiration for Miles Davis.