Also forgot to mention that Prince ... as expected ... was AMAZING! I was rung by Mills as we were waiting to go into the gig to say that their 2nd nipper had been born. BRILLIANT! I even managed to get rid of my spare ticket to gay man after hearing his gay friend in the lobby on the phone to him saying there was no way he could get him a ticket. Bish bash wallop, I produce my spare one. We of course later met the man because he was sat with us. He was chuffed. One downside to the evening however was Dave (aka Alan) attempting to add humour to the evening by clapping out of time to the majority of his hits (Prince's hits, not Dave's, who to my knowledge doesn't have any). The gay man sat/stood next to Dave (aka Alan) had disappeared before the end of the gig. Now, this could just be a coincidence ... then again?!?!?!

I don't really want to say too much regarding the after-show party. My expectations were low anyway. The thought of actually seeing Prince up close and personal in an intimate gig would have been a dream come true and even the chance of seeing him play the guitar for a couple of minutes would have been worth it. The problem came when I met the rest of the people there who clearly knew more about this type of thing than me. He'd done a 2 hour after-show set on the night before and even crowd surfed. There had only previously been one occasion when he'd not shown at all ... and even then his band came out for a bit and that was a midweeker anyway. So my expectations went through the roof. I nearly wet myself, only to be told whilst were in the queue by the arena staff that Prince had released a statement to say that he was categorically not turning up tonight (Saturday 11th Aug) and neither were his band. This had never happened before apparently, so much so that people were allowed to change their tickets to another night which was f**k all use to us of course because we were flying to India the following day, so we went in anyway ... secretly hoping it might have been a double/triple bluff. It wasn't, and seeing the intimacy of the venue made it all the more harder to swallow. So why Prince was in a strop I don't know, he even finished on a strange song ... Love Bizarre was from a Shiela E album of the mid 80's. Whilst Prince also sang on the record and I think he wrote it, it's certainly not what you would call one of his hits and not meaning to sound snobby, I doubt half the audience would ever have heard of. That said, other than Dave's absurd clapping, Prince's after-show strop and me nearly crying when he opened the show with Purple Rain ... it was a belter of an evening.