The madness of Prince Rogers Nelson
In June 1993, the Artist Who’d Just Decided He Didn’t Want to be Called Prince Any More handed his passport to his long-suffering tour manager Skip Johnson and told him to get the name on it changed to the squiggly symbol with which he’d decided to rebrand himself. It is ironic that he felt ‘oppressed’ by a name bestowed on him by others while insisting on renaming most of his colleagues and lovers. The passport incident is one of the more comical demands listed in the exhausting catalogue of employee grievances that make up John McKie’s sprawling biography of Minnesota’s own Prince Rogers Nelson, the virtuosic visionary who died, aged
