The Hits / The B-Sides

Here was the situation. The most expensive and successful artist ever and signed less than a year ago to your label decides to ‘kill’ his name and change it to an unpronounceable symbol – Prince love symbol, coupled with the fact you feel their music is growing less commercial, what does your label do? Smash the emergency glass and unlock that star’s vault to re-package a greatest hits collection. This is the release where the relationship between Prince and Warner Brothers soured. Prince was doggedly opposed to greatest hits packages and saw this one as his tombstone when Warner asked him to pick a cover for it. But there is plenty of redeeming aspects about this release because in typical Prince fashion there was a ton of material to choose from. Watered down from five disks to three, thrown into this compilation are a couple of unreleased tracks, Pope and Peach and a long-awaited Prince version of Nothing Compares 2 U. The real reason for seeking out the triple-disk set and falling prey to Warner’s master plan to make every fan own this collection, is that it resurfaces many much cherished and long lost B-sides for the first time on CD, notably 4 The Tears In Your Eyes and Power Fantastic – dedicating the B-sides to an entire disk. Prince had Warner worked out: “everybody wants to sell what’s already been sold …” but Warner Brothers too realised Prince had reached his commercial peak … “all that glitters ain’t gold”. As one highly respected DJ at the time put it plainly: “The Hits / The B-Sides is essential to anyone’s music collection”. Good music aplenty here and as a set it alleviates the need to change CDs to fit all the compass points to Prince’s Warner Brothers career in to one sensational listening session.