THE REAL PRAIRIE PREMONITIONS:
Towards the end of our time at Paisley Park I was missing home,
wondering what was going to happen next, looking forward to being
back in the UK, but still unsure about putting Rrrrrock down &
committing to Dance. Rick had asked around & found a young DJ to
work with back in Essex, a seventeen year old with ‘up-&-coming’
written all over him, complete with a teenagers’s attitude that
was both threatening & refreshing. I’d been carrying a cassette
with some new tunes we’d recorded back in Romford before I left
for Minnesota, the knock-backs & sneers I’d received on the rare
occasion I’d played them to anyone further underlined that my roots
were in Europe. It’s not wholly true to infer everyone in America
didn’t get the music I played them, all the young studio engineers
at Paisley Park got it & loved it. In time, they would be the new
generation of American Dance audiences who would lay the groundwork
for something massive, but that would be a long way into the future.
One of Prince’s engineers even flew over to Romford rode around the
UK on his mountain bike & slept on the floor of my flat with his
congas & recorded grooves for Underworld in the tiny bedroom studio
Rick had assembled form the ashes of the old band. I can’t remember
the name of the track he played on but that guy was the first
international session musician to record at Lemon World.
Prior to all this, towards the end of the Terri Nunn sessions, I’d
returned to Chanhassen from another bender & to sit alone in my hotel
room & ponder my future. It might’ve been the ferocious storm raging
outside or the quantity of alcohol in my veins that induced one of
those rare premonitions that always come true, but I had a dream in
which I was playing guitar to a packed stadium behind a famous blonde
female singer whose face I couldn’t quite see. In the morning, going
back over what I new, from experience, was most definitely going to
happen I concluded that the most famous blond female singer of the day
was Madonna & that I would soon be summoned to New York to meet my new
employer. The phone rang as I lay in bed considering the strange journey
I was on. An ex-submarine captain’s voice on the other end said,
“Hey Karl, there’s a guy on the phone from London England, says he
knows you. Do you want me to put him through or tell him I couldn’t
find you?”
As this was the call my dream had prophesied I took it.
“Hey Karl, Geoff Dougmore, how you doing? How long you going to be
out there?”
“Hey Geoff, it’s strange you ask, ’cause the session is nearly done.
I’m heading home in a couple of days.”
“Great! Any chance you can stop off in New York on the way? I’m putting
a band together for a tour & there’s some people I want you to meet.”
Bingo!
“Yeah! Sounds great Geoff. What’s the gig?”
“Debbie Harry”
(K)
Karl Hyde 
Ha..ha… An ex-submarine captain? I would very much like to hear more about that.
Pleeease… 🙂