Lovesexy Live Prince video

Granada International

video

What music should actually look like.

Lovesexy Live comprises live footage during Lovesexy Tour captured from the concert performed at the Westfalenhallen in Dortmund, West Germany on 9 September 1988 – the final date Prince staged for the European leg of the tour.

The show’s recording came about by two coincidences: Prince was taken aback by the fan reaction during the tour, in how audible they were in his shows, particularly the Dutch. Having also been impressed with Egbert van Hees’ recent filming of Prince’s aftershow performance at the Grosse Freiheit club when the tour visited Hamburg on 30 August, he duly invited van Hees to film the Dortmund concert, the final date of Lovesexy Tour. The tour was Prince’s most extravagant series of concerts and as the run approached its closing show, Prince came to the decision to have it preserved for posterity and arrangements were hastily put in place with a Dutch production company named ID-TV.

On 25 July 1988, the Netherlands national football team beat USSR in the Euros Championship final and a euphoria had swept the country. Dutch audiences attending Prince’s concerts chanted frequently throughout in support of the national team. The show chosen to be filmed was the second of two performances staged in Dortmund. Although the city was across the border in what was then West Germany, Prince requested that tickets for the final show be sold at Dutch outlets to ensure their fans were captured in the recording. The show was filmed by seventeen cameras, deployed under van Hees’ direction. Capturing this in-the-round event, which also required an additional 100 microphones, was an impressive feat of production for its day.

Following his success with the release of Sign O’ The Times movie, Prince sold the broadcast and distribution rights for the show, titled Lovesexy Live, and was bought by Granada International in the UK and RAI Sacis Network in Europe for $2 million, and syndicated to their various networks: ORF (Austria), DK-TV (Denmark), Antenne 2 (France), TV3 (Finland), KRO (Netherlands), RTVE (Spain), SVT (Sweden), SFA (Switzerland), Channel 4 (UK), and SAT Eins (West Germany). The TV broadcast aired after the completion of the tour’s US leg that November.

The recording was commercially available on 19 April 1989 packaged as a home video set issued as two separately available VHS cassettes. Lovesexy Live 1 consists of the second half of the concert, while Lovesexy Live 2 features the show’s opening half. Its back-to-front presentation in the home video volumes is due to the end portion of the concert featuring the bulk of Prince’s hits was deemed preferable to issued as Lovesexy Live 1.

The division of Lovesexy Live into two releases preserve the format of the actual tour which was likewise split into two Acts by an intermission, the sequence of the songs highlighting the contrast between the shade to light theme of the live show. Featuring the raunchier tracks, Lovesexy Live 2 carries the age certification 15, whereas volume one is rated PG. A laserdisc version was available in Japan.