After the Revolution: "Prince: Sign "O" The Times"

There's no strict chronological rationale behind this weekend's reissue of Prince's Sign "O" the Times concert film: we are, after all, a full two years away from its fortieth anniversary. Maybe the good folks at Pathé (who now own the distribution rights) and IMAX Corp (on whose screens the film will take up residence) just wanted to round off what has on the whole been an intriguingly diverse summer season with the memory of a good show. (Consider it pop's Last Night of the Proms.) Either way, the film's reemergence allows us to reconnect with a performer in his Bowie-esque mid-1980s pomp, shedding a new skin year after year: the pop dreamer of 1985's Around the World in a Day had been replaced by the shirtless sex imp of the following year's Parade and "Kiss", and that persona had now been superceded by - as the title song announced - Prince the fully dressed pop reporter, first taking to the stage in specs and a long coat to pass anguished comment on America's social ills. (The glasses allowed him to see more, and see further into the future: the hurricanes, drug dependency and gun crime, the problems that wouldn't be fixed in his short lifetime.) That's the first five minutes of Sign "O" the Times, certainly, yet they prove broadly unrepresentative of what was to follow: this, it turned out, was a reporter who wanted and knew how to throw a party. (You notice how even that headline report was set to a skittish, tachycardic beat - the blip of a life support machine, mimicking the minimalism of house, which couldn't help but get the listener agitated in some way.) The old Prince, the young Prince, the other Princes kept coming out to play: the rock god, the snake-hipped seducer, the lizard king, the mystic, the rabble rouser, the incorrigible constructor of nine-minute jams, edging his Stratocaster towards another big "O".

You could be forgiven for feeling discombobulated: here is a concert film that offers no concrete sense of where we are. (The end credits let slip this footage was captured somewhere between Rotterdam and Paisley Park, though it could easily be anywhere, Liverpool or Rome.) Really, we're being invited into Prince's kingdom, maybe even inside his head: all flashing neon signs, dry ice, shadows and sex, it's part-42nd Street, part-The Naked City, a performer and his creative associates building a world into which the audience can escape. (That's why the title song comes first: I know where and what you're fleeing from, Prince states, but tonight we're all here for a good time.) Front and centre, the performer-director; back and sides, an expanded band, drilled by the human metronome Sheila E. (a whirl of hair and limbs on percussion, waggishly introduced by the singer as "not bad for a girl"), accessorised with backing performers with whom Prince falls into occasional, panty-snatching melodrama ("Cat, can I take you out tonight?" "Fuck off"). Sporadically, a telling visual quirk: cutaways to instruments and other detritus abandoned on the stage post-gig like the underwear on a bedroom floor. (Even before the crowbarred-in promo for the album's biggest hit "U Got the Look", it becomes apparent this was a tour on which there must have been some serious fucking, never mind the big disease with the little name.) Busting James Brown moves at the microphone and Hendrix riffs on the guitar, ripping off a toddler's orange romper suit to launch a costume change every ten minutes and going full-falsetto genderfluid on "If I Was Your Girlfriend", the shapeshifting Caligula at the film's centre has energy to burn and then some. Both chaotic evil and chaotic good, he appears barely a song away from donning Joker make-up or changing his name to a symbol; more skins to be shed. He was tearing through them at an exhilarating rate of knots, rapid enough to make one wonder whether "baby, you're much too fast" in "Little Red Corvette" (reprised here) wasn't just pure projection on Prince's part. You had to go twice as fast to keep up with him back in 1987; it's why, even with its preponderance of second-half wigouts, Sign "O" the Times persists as such a spectacle.

Sign "O" the Times opens in selected IMAX screens from Friday.