{"id":29127,"date":"2025-08-28T17:33:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T17:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/29127\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T17:33:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T17:33:07","slug":"why-princes-sign-o-the-times-concert-film-in-imax-is-essential","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/29127\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Prince’s ‘Sign O’ the Times’ Concert Film in IMAX Is Essential"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tPrince<\/a> was arguably the most gifted musician of the second half of the last century, but he didn\u2019t make it easy to be a fan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe\u2019d charged headlong to the top of the charts and pop culture with a hurricane-force level of talent, savvy and ambition, but once \u201cPurple Rain\u201d made him the global superstar <\/a>he always knew he would be, he started messing with people \u2014 especially his newer fans. Sure, he still had massive hit singles \u2014\u00a0at least for the next few years \u2014 but his music and public profile became progressively stranger and harder to connect with until, by the mid-1990s, all but the most devoted fans had given up.<\/p>\n

\n\tOf course, he changed that narrative later in life, but although many of his ideas were years or even decades ahead of his time \u2014 selling music online, digital subscription plans, bundling albums and merchandise with tickets, and most of all, the importance of creators owning the rights to their work \u2014\u00a0his execution of those ideas was often controversial, confrontational, confused or confusing (or all four). Writing \u201cSlave\u201d on his face and changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol during the 1990s might have been a profound statement on artists\u2019 rights in his mind, but it was nowhere near as understandable to the average human as Taylor Swift\u2019s methodical explanation of the same issue as she fought for ownership of her music 30-odd years later. Prince\u2019s music during those years wasn\u2019t much easier to understand.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut for a few glorious years in the mid-\u201880s, his pop instincts and musical innovation were in glorious synch, and that\u2019s the exact period captured in the 1987 \u201cSign O\u2019 the Times\u201d album<\/a> and tour, and the concert film of the same name, which is being shown in IMAX theaters for the first time for one week only, starting Friday (August 29).<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPurple Rain\u201d might have been the blockbuster, but this era was the sound and vision of a genius exploring just how far his creativity could go \u2014\u00a0and you can see him reveling in that creativity in this electrifying document from that 1987 tour, which is almost universally considered one of the greatest concert films ever made. In fact, at the time of its release in 1988, it spawned such overheated press quotes as \u201cThis is without a shadow of a doubt the greatest concert movie ever made\u201d and \u201cMakes Michael Jackson look nailed to the floor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhy is that, and why is the IMAX version of \u201cSign O\u2019 the Times\u201d so essential for even casual fans? After all, the film is almost entirely focused on that album \u2014\u00a0even though he played such classics as \u201c1999,\u201d \u201cLet\u2019s Go Crazy\u201d and \u201cPurple Rain\u201d on this tour, they\u2019re not included in the movie (probably because he\u2019d released a full-length concert video <\/a>including them just a couple of years earlier). Based on an advance screening in New York last week, there are several reasons: Let us count the ways\u2026<\/p>\n

\n\ta) First and most importantly: It captures Prince at the absolute peak of his powers as a performer, singer, songwriter and innovator<\/strong>, with one of the greatest bands of his career \u2014 notably Sheila E.<\/a> on drums and vocals, singer\/keyboardist Boni Boyer, a horn section and dancer\/singer Cat Glover. As always, he reveled in making very difficult things look effortless, peeling off virtuoso guitar or keyboard solos while singing, dancing and conducting the band at the same time. At one point he does a kind of crabwalk on his back across the stage, goes into a full split, then slides back up into a spin; at another, he slides across the floor between the legs of the limber-limbed Glover and pulls off her skirt with his teeth.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

\n\tLike all Prince concerts, it was an elaborate production, with multiple costume changes \u2014 this visual era\u2019s themes included the colors peach and black, peace signs, arrows, hearts and fringe \u2014 a multi-level stage and lots of neon lighting.<\/p>\n

\n\tb) The \u201cSign O\u2019 the Times\u201d album, more than half of which is performed here, is not only Prince\u2019s creative masterpiece<\/strong>, it has plenty of hits \u2014 \u201cU Got the Look\u201d was a No. 1 single, after all \u2014\u00a0and is a dazzling grand-slam of his talents and versatility. There\u2019s sunny pop in \u201cPlay in the Sunshine\u201d and \u201cI Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,\u201d funk grind in \u201c\u201dU Got the Look\u201d and \u201cHot Thing,\u201d current events (and blazing guitar work) in the title track, boisterous R&B in \u201cIt\u2019s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night,\u201d and a sort of rock-gospel ballad in \u201cThe Cross.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd even though the album had been out for just a couple of weeks when the shows were filmed, its songs (many of which would not be performed again for years, if at all) take on a new dimension in the live setting. The show starts off with just Prince and Glover performing the title track, but during the martial-drum segment at the end, the vividly costumed bandmembers strut onstage like a marching band, and from there the show\u2019s energy is explosive. The joyous keyboard hook of \u201cI Could Never Take the Place of Your Man\u201d sounds even more exuberant when played by his horn section, and \u201cForever in My Life,\u201d which is just a spare, soulful groove on the album, gets overhauled into an almost gospel raveup in a live setting, complete with churchified testifying from Boyer.<\/p>\n

\n\tc) The film was out of circulation for decades and hasn\u2019t been widely screened in theaters for almost 40 years.<\/strong> Starting in the 1990s, Prince became so committed to owning and receiving fair compensation for his creative work that he simply took some of it off the market \u2014\u00a0including this film. After its initial run it was available on VHS and briefly on DVD, but when Prince decided the financial model wasn\u2019t working for him, he simply made it unavailable, along with most of his music videos. In fact, for the first dozen years of YouTube and similar platforms, he employed a legal team to issue takedown notices every time a fan would upload his videos, which meant that those videos and this fantastic film could only be found on old DVDs or virus-laden overseas video platforms. That may have protected his work in some ways, but it also meant that at least two generations of music fans couldn\u2019t see this remarkable film (or countless hours of videos and concert footage) without laborious research.<\/p>\n

\n\td) It sounds and looks so much better.<\/strong> The restored sound is glorious, popping out of the speakers with a clarity and punch that previous versions \u2014 i.e. VHS and DVD copies and shaky bootleg online footage \u2014 can\u2019t touch. And although the film quality of the IMAX version is grainy \u2014 it was made in 1987, after all \u2014\u00a0and toward the very end of the film it seems that some of the source video may have been slightly damaged (you see some speckles, like on old newsreels), that\u2019s a minor quibble \u2014 just don\u2019t expect a Peter Jackson level of restoration.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s also not 100% a concert film \u2014 while the tour\u2019s four final dates were filmed and recorded in June 1987, Prince was apparently unhappy with the much of footage and reshot the entire show at his Paisley Park soundstage with a few hundred extras serving as the audience, so a large percentage of the film is culled from that reshoot. Likewise, there are brief dramatic interludes between some of the songs related to a paper-thin plot about Cat fighting with her boyfriend and pursuing a dalliance with Prince, and the performance of \u201cU Got the Look,\u201d featuring Sheena Easton, is actually a separate music video filmed on the set and inserted into the middle of the concert as a sort of dream sequence.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut will you care much about that while watching the film? Probably not, because\u2026<\/p>\n

\n\te) It\u2019s the closest you\u2019ll get to seeing a Prince concert today.<\/strong> There may have been better singers, dancers, instrumentalists, performers and visual artists \u2014 but absolutely no one combined those talents as vividly as Prince did. Those of us lucky enough to have seen him at his peak remember how exhilarating \u2014 and what a monumental sensory overload \u2014 those shows were. Three of these musicians \u2014 Glover<\/a>, Boyer, and of course the man himself <\/a>\u2014\u00a0are no longer with us, so it won\u2019t be happening again.<\/p>\n

\n\tTechnology has a long way to go before it can fully recapture the feeling of a Prince concert \u2014 but \u201cSign O\u2019 the Times\u201d comes close \u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prince was arguably the most gifted musician of the second half of the last century, but he didn\u2019t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[264],"tags":[18,117,19,17,337,16682,23264,23265],"class_list":{"0":"post-29127","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-prince","14":"tag-sheila-e","15":"tag-sign-o-the-times"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}