Whenever someone mentions Prince, the following story comes to mind. And yesterday, when news of his death at 57 started burning up social media, it came back in vivid purple colour. It was the time Prince came to London, Ontario. In 1984, I was working at CKSL and so was Derek when his purpleness was spotted in the Forest City. As my friend Dan Brown writes, this was long before he lived in Toronto or had any ties to Canada.
It was also before cell phones and GPS and email and the Internet, Prince was tracked by good old-fashioned word of mouth and driving around. Looking back, we probably ruined his night. It appears his tour bus pulled into London where he assumed he could have a nice dinner and catch a movie, like a regular person. But those days were over. I’ll leave the rest of the story to Dan’s 2001 Free Press article HERE. Rest in peace, genius, purple music man.