We’ve all had dodgy landlords at one point or another – petty little gits who ignore the fact that slugs crawl across the carpet every night but will keep your deposit for finding one atom of blu-tac on a wall.
Tiny, recently-resurrected, purple imp Prince is going through his own landlord worries at the moment. Why? Did Prince block up his kitchen sink with a mixture of congealing fat and body hair? Did Prince accidentally pull down a pair of curtains during a house party one evening? No. Prince painted his entire rented house purple, and daubed the title of his new album up and down the exterior. We’ve all done it, to be fair.
Prince (CDs) is a man hitting the comeback trail. He’s not writing Slave
all over his face or releasing interminable instrumental albums anymore
– Prince is writing proper songs and everyone loves him again. Kind of
like Morrissey, but with more attention to facial hair. Even the Prince Willy Wonka-style Purple Ticket ruse came off as more endearing than creepy, and that’s really surprising.
But, for long-term fans, there are still flashes of the mental old
batshit Prince here and there. The Prince with such an obsession with
the colour purple that he’s fully prepared to rent a house in Los
Angeles and pimp it out, purple-style, much to the chagrin of ‘probably
quite famous in America’ Utah Jazz forward Carlos Boozer.
Prince, you see, loves his houses purple. Nothing wrong in
particular with that, but with with Prince’s design flair – one that
makes Linda Barker look like Norman Foster – added into the mixture,
we’re on a one-way ticket to Lawsuitsville.
According to court papers gained by The Smoking Gun, Prince covered
Boozer’s house in purple stripes, covered the outside of the house in
purple versions of the famous Prince Squiggle and 3121 (the title of
the new Prince album), installed purple monogrammed carpets in the
master bedroom, black carpets in a guest room, cut a hole in a wall and
re-routed water into a bedroom so that Prince could have some salon
chairs installed.
The papers state that Prince’s eight-month contract and $70,000 a
month rent did not allow him to splash purple paint around like a
freakishly-talented toddler. However, Prince’s lawyers deny that Prince
damaged any of the decor, and stated that Boozer took the January and
February rent "without
objection."
Carlos
Boozer has dropped the lawsuit against Prince, but he did so "without
prejudice," meaning that if the house is not returned to him in an
acceptable state in May, the lawsuit can resume. Prince should be
careful with the tidying up – we’ve lost deposits for not cleaning
crumbs out of a toaster before. Granted, they were giant purple
monogrammed crumbs, but still…
Read more:
Extreme Makeover: Prince Edition – The Smoking Gun
[story by Stuart Heritage]
Patrick Snyder says
Thanks for making me laugh!
Horwich Boy says
Cracking stuff!!! Great to see someone shooting the little feller down! Oh, and also…
I’ve heard that Prince is made out of wax, lives in a sock and eats tinfoil all day? Can Hecklerspray please confirm this? Or perhaps one of your readers can help?