"So, Prince tells me that he and Kate are going to work on a tune together. He also told me that while they were talking he told her that his engineer would rather work with her than him. (I thought, wow, Prince and Kate Bush talking about me!).
ANYWAY, Eventually the phone call above occurred and the tapes arrived and I put them up and got a rough mix up. I still have a cassette of it. It fucking rules. It is 1 million times better than the lame disco Prince put on it. There was, of course, no disco on it before Prince got his hands on it. So Prince comes in and listens to it. And the brutality began. First we sampled the drum thing and synced it up to my Powerbook so we could do MIDI. At that point, we essentially created a new song on a new piece of tape and then flew all of Kate's tracks back on top of it. So now we could run the sequencer and add all the keyboards that Prince put on. So Prince stacked a bunch of keys, guitars, basses, etc, on it and then went to sing background vocals.
When Prince does vocals, he sits right at the recording console with a microphone hanging over it and does his own punching in and out. So he kicks everyone out of the room when he sings. It took him a few hours and then he called me back in and played me the thick, multi-tracked background vocals he had put on. Now, as we all know, the song in question goes "Of all the people in the world why should i love you". When Prince called me back in and played me what he had done, he had sung "All of the people in the world", instead of Of All. I said, isn't it OF all the people in the world? Not ALL of? He said, no, we had a little talk about that, in his cocky way, as if to say he had talked with Kate about changing the words to "all of" instead of "of all".
The next day, I was waiting at my hotel room for the call to go to the studio when the assistant engineer, Sylvia Massy, called and said Prince was in the studio doing vocals. I was surprised; i was always called well in advance of Prince going into the studio. When I got there he was changing all the vocals to "Of All", and was sampling them in himself, which is something he would normally never do himself. My interpretation? He made a mistake, as humans do, and didn't have the guts to admit it. That's weird. So I sorta poked my head in at one point and asked him if he needed any help, and we went on with the day. Eventually he had me do a rough mix, and when he had approved it, we sent it to Kate.
I got a call from Therese a few days (or weeks, I forget) later. She said, Kate Bush said to destroy all copies of that mix. I said, huh? Did she not like it or something? (my heart rejoiced, because I hated what Prince did to it) She said, I don't know, she just said to destroy them. Later on Prince told me, Kate Bush liked what we did. She said it sounded very American. So at that point I wasn't sure if she was even going to use it. We sent the tapes back and she sort of split the difference with what he sent and what's on the record.
