SDE: This is a good example of something that’s like the opposite of ‘Irresistible Bitch’. In most cases, these rough mixes – because they’re so early – are on cassettes, which aren’t really suitable for commercial release, at least from a sonic standpoint, so when we get the mix from the two-inch we make it sound as if it’s the mix on a cassette, but with today’s technology, so you’re not hearing hiss and wow and flutter and dropouts and all kinds of other crap. MH: Yeah, there were cases where we had to mix from the multis, but we always used the rough mix, the existing mix, as the template so we would just basically mix match the two-inch to whatever the source of the rough mix was.
SDE: And were you actually mixing any of these unreleased songs? Were you having to go back to multi-tracks or were there stereo versions that you could just leave as is? We are trying to take as few creative liberties as possible, I mean zero creative liberties. So we believe that this is what the intention was, at least given the rough mix that was done by Prince on a cassette. I mean they are technically two individual tracks, but there is a cassette rough mix of what we would consider the complete version which then we replicated basically to present this tethered version of ‘Feel U Up’ and ‘Irresistible Bitch’.
SDE: And was this originally conceived as one big long track, or was it always two separate tracks that he happened to fuse together on this particular day? It’s pretty interesting, the sort of dichotomy of genres or styles that he was exploring. And I think it’s more apparent in something like these early versions, than on other unreleased tracks like ‘Vagina’ or ‘Turn It Up’. MH: Coming out of Controversy, Prince was particularly interested in being as self-sufficient as possible and is starting to play with the drum machine and doing a tremendous amount of experimentation in the studio, so I think the influence of something like what Gary Numan was doing, and maybe some of the early British New Wave kind of stuff seeped into his creative energies. The drums sound like a drum machine whereas they sound real on the normal version. I mean with ‘Irresistible Bitch’, I actually prefer this version, I think, to the released version, but there’s some obvious differences. SDE: This medley is a good example of Prince reworking something which sounded great in the first place. I am virtually certain it was initially intended for The Time and obviously never ended up getting released as it currently exists, and turned into the song ‘New Power Generation’, which is something that ended up on Graffiti Bridge I guess, but this is a much more organic sort of approach I would say. Michael Howe: I don’t believe this ever trickled out into the fan community, and really is the only example of something on the entire set of expanded body of work that we had to source from a cassette rough mix, because there was literally no other existing version.Įven a two-inch was recorded over, so we didn’t even have a trace of what the original track was, but we did find a cassette rough mix of it and made it as sonically appealing as we possibly could, given the limitations, but that’s the kind of forensic approach that we tried to take. SDE spoke to Prince ‘vault’ archivist Michael Howe, who helped to put this set together in conjunction with the Prince Estate and the record label, and asked him about some of this unheard material… Warner Music’s recently announced reissue of Prince‘s album 1999 has sparked massive interest in the 35 previously unreleased bonus tracks.