THE BATTLE FOR PRINCE’S MILLIONS
WHENEVER a musical icon dies, the understandable convention is to look squarely backwards. Grief is formalised in obituaries. Back catalogues are hastily appraised, then reappraised. Above all, there’s a sense of reluctant finality: show’s over, folks, nothing more to see here.
Prince Rogers Nelson – the man known best as Prince but also, variously, as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, and simply an unpronounceable glyph – never was much for convention.
When he died in April 2016, aged 57, of an accidental overdose at Paisley Park, his Minnesota home, together with a sense of loss fans experienced a peculiar feeling of anticipation. As music legend had it, Prince kept a vault deep in the bowels of Paisley Park containing hundreds of hours of unreleased recordings and other material. The hope was that it might now be opened.
“I’ve never said this before, but I didn’t always give the record companies the best song,” he teased in 2014. “There are songs in the vault that no one’s ever heard.”
The story went that if Prince were to die tomorrow, there was enough in the locker to release an album a year until sometime in the 22nd century. For his final trick, had Prince ensured that he might just live for ever?
The answer turned out to be far more complicated. Prince left no will when he died. Divorced since the mid-2000s,
