Prince leaves a secret stash of songs for future fans

There is said to be enough recorded material for a new Prince album every year for the next 100 years after star’s death.

Fans began to gather in the rain outside Paisley Park, where Prince’s gold records line the walls and a vast quantity of unreleased music is thought to lurk in the vaults.

Within 45 minutes of his death at the age of 57 being confirmed, his greatest hits was already the best selling album on iTunes and other records were rapidly climbing the charts. There is more to come - there is said to be enough recorded material at Paisley Park for a new Prince album every year for the next 100 years.

Across social media, fans comforted themselves with the opening line of the singer’s hit Let’s Go Crazy: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.”

Celebrities reacted with horror to his death. Tony Parsons, the author and former music critic, wrote: “Prince danced like Fred Astaire, he played guitar like Hendrix, he wrote songs as good as Dylan, he smashed as many barriers as Bowie.”

Spike Lee paid tribute on Twitter. “I Miss My Brother. Prince Was A Funny Cat. Great Sense of Humuor.”

Samuel L Jackson wrote: “I’m crushed . . . Massive loss for us all! What a Genius! Speechless.”

On Instagram Justin Timberlake wrote: “They say don’t meet your idols . . . That they let you down. But, some of my greatest, funniest (yes, he was hilarious), and most prolific encounters and conversations about music came from the moments that I spent with him. It would be silly to say that he has inspired our music . . . It’s beyond that. He’s somewhere within every song I’ve ever written.”

People walk past a "Rest In Peace" message for singer Prince, on an electronic board at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York. Picture: AFP

Larry King, who interviewed Prince, told CNN: “This is a very sad day in the music world. They say some people are irreplaceable. There will never be another Prince.”

He was born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis on June 7, 1958, and was said to have written his first song at the age of 7. He found early fame as a multi-instrumentalist teenager writing late 70s funk-pop but hit a higher gear altogether with his first release of the new decade, the sex-drenched Dirty Mind in 1980.

It began one of the greatest runs of albums by any artist, with Controversy, 1999, Purple Rain, Parade and Sign ‘O’ The Times all following in the next seven years.

After the flop of Lovesexy he returned to the top of the charts at the end of the decade with the soundtrack to Tim Burton’s film Batman and then in 1991 he scored his biggest album success since 1985 with Diamonds and Pearls, which contained the classic single Gett Off.

However, Prince’s career in the 1990s was overshadowed by his long-running dispute with his record label Warner Bros. He appeared with the word “slave” painted on his face, changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and, for a period in his career, became “the Artist Formerly Known as Prince”.

Prince performs during the halftime show at the Super Bowl XLI. Picture: AP

It was the consequence of an independent streak that remained rock solid to the end. Fans reaching for Prince’s music could not find it on Spotify or other legal free download sites because he insisted that they still bought the albums.

When he announced that he was working on an autobiography in a Manhattan nightclub last month, he told the invitation-only crowd: “You all still read books, right?”

Although known for the provocative sexuality of his output earlier in his career, Prince became a Jehovah’s Witness about 15 years ago. He was also a strict vegan who had been born an epileptic and suffered seizures as a child.

He was teased in school and once explained how “early in my career I tried to compensate by being as flashy as I could and as noisy as I could”.

He managed to do rather more than that.

Prince remained a prolific recording artist but despite the inevitable popular revival of 1999 at the end of the millennium it was not until the following decade that he fully regained his grip on the public imagination.

His spectacular Super Bowl performance in 2007 reminded casual fans of his charisma and dazzling musicianship and is often cited as the best concert ever given in that prestige slot.

The string of 21 shows at the O2 in London that followed raised the bar even higher and became the inspiration for a similar sequence at the same venue that Michael Jackson was rehearsing for at the time of his death in 2009.

Times