Video of the week: Prince - Controversy

Back in 1981, Prince's career was just beginning to take off. He'd released three albums, each of which outperformed the last, and had built up a small, but respectable, fan base in the US.

Controversy, however, marked the moment when he really found his feet. Musically, Prince had abandoned the funkified disco of early singles like I Wanna Be Your Lover and I Feel For You (later covered by Chaka Khan).

Emboldened by the favourable reaction to the stripped-down home-made sound of third album Dirty Mind, he embraced a more edgy, new-wave sound. Concert promoters called it punk-funk, a description Prince wasn't enamoured with, but which pretty much fits the bill.

His lyrics, too, became more personal. Controversy (the album) dealt with nuclear war, gun control and the recent murder of John Lennon. The title track addresses misconceptions people had about the miniature Minneapolis singer - "Do I believe in God?" he asks, following that up with the query "Am I straight or gay?"

But, rather than answer those questions, Prince lets them hang in the air. In the video for the single, he blurs the issue even further by singing in a trenchcoat and stockings in front of a church window. It is the first time the purple perv's visuals and music combined so spectacularly.

As you can imagine the video was a little too, erm, controversial for the time. It was another two years before MTV started showing music by black artists and Prince's sexually ambiguous get-up wouldn't have made it on air even then. As a result, the single stalled at number 70 in the US charts.

Nontheless, the video stands up now as one of the greatest Prince performances on film. Just make sure to keep your eye on him, as the rest of the band seem oddly detached and the direction is distinctly shoddy (see if you can count the number of times a cameraman makes it into shot).

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