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even thought of I knew his first wife, as much as I could being a kid. Soon, there were further connections with the Nelsons, one of them nurtured by the church; the Nelsons, like many black families, were practising Seventh Day Adventists, and so was Mrs Andersons husband, Fred. But also, there was music. My husband had always been a musician, and he played the upright bass. He and Princes dad played together a lot of times. He was in Mr Nelsons band, the Prince Rogers Trio.

It was on 7 June 1958 that the first child of John Nelsons second marriage was born, and christened after the band. After all, it was because of the Prince Rogers Trio that Mr Nelson had met Princes mother, Mattie Shaw, whom he had recruited to sing with the group. On his birth certificate (as reproduced in Jon Breams Prince: Inside The Purple Reign) his middle name is listed as just plain Roger, without the s, but most people have assumed it was meant to have been there, Bernadette Anderson included. Mattie Shaw and her sister Edna Mae had come up to Minneapolis from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the fifties. Both migrants would have been of fairly tender years. Mrs Shaw was still only twenty-four when she gave birth to Prince, while her husband was past forty. Mr Nelson had a steady job at the Honeywell Computers complex, one of the bigger local employers. His music, though it was his abiding passion, did not pay the bills.

Together, Shaw and Nelson had one other child, a daughter called Tyka, who in 1988 released her own album through Chrysalis, with production by David Z, but no input from her brother. For his first ten years, Prince grew up in the family home on 5th Avenue South, among the mixture of blacks and Scandinavians that predominates there. It was when his father left and a stepfather, Hayward Baker, arrived that things began to go seriously wrong. Prince eventually moved out, and after short, troubled stays with his Aunt Olivia and his estranged father, finally showed up at the home of his best friend, Andr Anderson, asking if he could stay. By then he would still have only been around thirteen years old.

It was after the [Grand Central] band had played somewhere the night before, says Mrs Anderson; and his dad had got mad at him and put him out. Some girl had followed him home, and shed stayed there. He [Prince] said, I didnt do anything wrong, but I cant explain that to dad. His dad was very strict. So I said, Well, you can stay here, but I got to check with him first. John Nelson approved the deal. So Bernadette Anderson, by then a divorcee, suddenly had another youngster to add on to an already considerable brood: Fred Jnr, Sylvia, Eddie, Patricia, Linda, Andr . . . and now Prince.

For an itinerant adolescent to just step into a hard-pressed single-parent family might seem a bizarre, if not plain improper way for people