Thread by @joemuggs

Hello, and welcome to my #PrinceTwitterThread on #SOTTDELUXE, and specifically "Starfish and Coffee". I'm honoured and not a little overawed to be part of this project, because I'm a long way from being a full-on Princeologist like most of the contributors. BUT I love this song.

I love it with a passion, in fact: as a part of my life ever since 1987. And I think that its very atypicality and strangeness even by Prince standards really illuminates his wider creativity. So this thread will be quite personal, and just a little bit... mystical.

First the song. Here it is - you'll have to go to your favourite streaming service for the 2020 remaster, but this is fine. Its page on Genius calls it a "Beatleseque psychedelic pop song", but it's not very Beatles-y is it? It's gospel more than anything.

(And "psychedelic" was never the right word for Prince: he was never druggy in that way - but we'll come to the powerful weirdness of the song later...)

Probably the most important thing to note about the song's creation is that it is co-written with Susannah Melvoin @susannahtwin: singer for The Family, sister of Wendy of Wendy & Lisa, and Prince's fiancé and inspiration in the lead-up to SOTT.

(There are many songs on SOTT ABOUT Susannah, but this is the only one BY her)

Susannah has described the song's inspiration beautifully herself, with her own pictures, here. In short, the Cynthia Rose of the song was real: a probably autistic girl in Susannah and Wendy's class at school for several years. starfishcoffeeofficial.bandzoogle.com/the-story--2

(There's an alternate universe in which Prince was one step closer to his p-funk inspiration than he was in this reality, and didn't sanitise "Starfish And Peepee"... but that would be a different Prince, a different song and a different thread...)

Now the personal stuff. I got SOTT on cassette some time around my 13th birthday in June 87. I was an awkward and quite isolated kid who'd come quite late to pop music, but by this time was voracious. I loved soft rock, Billy Idol, Iron Maiden, Eurythmics, old Motown, all sorts.

I think by then I identified as a metaller - stonewashed denim with all the band patches - and over the next couple of years I barrelled through goth (spraypainting the jacket black!), stoner, raver... But SOTT was one of the few perennials that stuck with me all the way.

As a metaller, the virtuosity and glam-ness of it grabbed me, as a goth it was the religiosity and apocalyptic stuff, as I discovered drugs I found more and more weirdness, and getting into dance music - well, need I say more?

As time went on, SOTT often provided a gateway into genres I didn't know, or a bridge between ones I did. And each time it did, I understood it a bit more, and it grew. But it wasn't until the early 00s, and a Saturday night DJ pub residency that I really "got" Starfish & Coffee.

It was an unassuming pub in Nunhead, Southeast London, before gentrification had kicked in: neither rough nor fancy, the clientele a real across-the-board social mix. I would play a complete mix of "cool" and ultra populist stuff, and very often it would turn into a party.

In fact there would often be after hours lock-ins to 3am or later so I'd sometimes be DJing for eight or more hours. If the drunk Irish landlord started to seem like he was flagging, I knew his favourite tunes to play to get him to say "ah everyone have one more then!"

It was here that I learned the magic of playing well known but just slightly forgotten songs - the ones you recognise, maybe loved years ago, but are never played on the radio - and Starfish And Coffee became the epitome of this, and an anthem for these sessions.

I remember exactly the moment I first played it - I'd burned it to a CD in a flash of inspiration the week before, then c.1am I was feeling a bit lost as to where to go next, suddenly remembered I had it, let a house track play to the end, short pause, then hit "play". RINNNNNNG!

Of course people startled at the alarm bell, then looked around with that "oh hm, I know this" expression as the chords played, then one by one worked it out, started singing along, smiling, swaying. I didn't use the word "magic" lightly before: this was transformative. Alchemy.

The room came to life, it changed from strangers just drinking to a party. The song became a failsafe for me thereafter, and I got a little obsessed with what made it so great - with the magic that Prince put into it - yet why it's comparatively underappreciated.

(I wrote more about that particular pub session, and the intimacy of friendly listening here - - and it's a subject I return to quite often... watch this space)joemuggs.tumblr.com/post/134854832…

Musically and lyrically S&C is often thought of as lightweight. George Chesterton in GQ affectionately called it "a slice of McCartney-esque levity, a nursery rhyme". Again, that Beatles comparison which I don't get; in fact it's both modernist and rooted in black music.

Its endless repetition of a four chord cycle and those strange edgeless snares are a vehicle for amazing subliminal sounds to circle around one another, all supporting this gospel song about finding the numinous within the everyday.

Lyrically, it functions on two main levels. First there's the portrait of a childhood moment, and of Cynthia Rose herself - and it's notable here that neither Prince nor Susannah seem to be fetishising her way of being, but rather delighting, with love, in uniqueness. It's SWEET.

Does Prince, the eternal outsider, identify with the autistic kid who can't help marching to her own beat, having her own language, and ignoring social norms? Or yearn to be as unselfconscious as her? It doesn't seem like a huge stretch.

And here we should talk about Prince's eternal childishness, and the importance of innocence in his work. More specifically, the interface of innocence and experience - because like William Blake, Prince understood that the two were not opposites but complementary "contraries".

Prince's playful humour always had a bit of the naughty kid. His appearance on The Muppets – and of COURSE it was singing S&C – is one of the best ever. He is NATURAL in that setting (and be sure to watch to the end for a cheesy joke perfectly delivered)

(You might even suggest that Prince's understanding of childlike innocence as part and parcel of life and experience is a big part of what sets him apart from Michael Jackson, whose desperation to preserve innocence as pure and separate turned so sour)

The second lyrical function is nonsense. And yes, it IS nursery rhyme-ish, whimsical, but that doesn't mean lightweight. Just as childish innocence interfaces with adult experience, so silliness and gibberish does, in a profound way. And this is where it gets extra mystical.

This is something I’ve written about a fair bit. When words become nonsensical, they tap into something very primal, the beginnings of language – in terms both of our childhood experience, and of something shamanic, prehistoric. dropbox.com/s/i4h5jffwt5i3…

There are various mystical traditions that use mischief and nonsense as a trigger to take the mind beyond the rational, Zen Buddhism and its Koans most notably. "If you set your mind free baby, maybe you'll understand".

This song is almost an explicit lesson about how words become strange. The "ordinary", archaic Anglo/Celtic names - Kevin, Lucy, Miss Kathleen - anchor you in familiar reality, before Cynthia Rose's juxtapositions flick a switch in your brain: baffle you into the magical world.

There's another kind of nonsense tradition here too - as ever, Prince is rooted in black music, and not only in the gospel of the piano chords. The use of food words has real power: think of all the songs featuring gumbo, jambalaya, t-bone, jelly roll...

...fried pie blues, milk cow blues, cornbread blues, pigmeat and whisky blues, rump steak serenade, red beans and rice, bake my biscuits, gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer, saturday night fish fry...

...all the way through to Theo Parrish's "Hambone Cappuccino". In this lineage, the sensualism of words is an end in itself: again, it takes you beyond the rational, but this time by triggering the senses. "Maple syrup and jam" hits a base spot in the brain.

(In most writing about jazz, blues and rock'n'roll, this is all seen as euphemism and innuendo - and of course, very often it is, but it's much more than that... food words evoke and provoke all the senses, not just the loins - this kind of lyricism awakens the whole body)

So "Starfish And Coffee" is old magic, primal magic, deep magic, but because it's Prince, it's also refined. He crafts deep childhood recollection, earthy sensualism, sweetness, sympathy and straight up weirdness into a beautiful device for the transformation of mood and thought.

And that’s why it still has such power to bring warmth to a room, to a gathering. From the moment the alarm clock brings everyone to attention like the “reminder birds” in Aldous Huxley’s Island, it’s a profoundly transformational, mystically brilliant song.

Many focus on the sexuality, overt religiosity, attempts at grappling with politics in SOTT. And sure, the intellect and libido of the album lie elsewhere - but for me the care, childish delight, strangeness and old magic of Starfish And Coffee make it the album's warm heart.

As a bonus, here’s the full version of the Muppets appearance, well worth watching all the way to appreciate Prince’s genuine high camp comedy chops, and hear him playing bluegrass!

Thanks so much for your attention, thanks for having me @deejayumb & @EdgarKruize and please go and follow Matt Thorne – @8minutesidle – who’ll be delivering tomorrow’s #SOTTDELUXE #PrinceTwitterThread... and get ready to turn the lights down low, because he’s doing “Slow Love”.

PS my ten year old son spotted this beautiful purple mushroom today, I think it was a portent 💜

YES! He always subverted tired categories, especially those around black masculinity, not with clever artifice but just by BEING MORE.

https://twitter.com/anildash/status/1317872304580427778?s=20

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