‘Partyman’: How did Jack Nicholson inspire a classic song by Prince?
When Prince agreed to record the soundtrack for the 1989 film Batman, the production company couldn’t believe their luck. They already had stars Jack Nicholson and Micheal Keaton signed up for the project, and Prince added yet another extra layer of star power to proceedings.
On paper, Prince improves any budding project, and director Tim Burton was a fan of the musician’s work years before they joined forces. However, their two distinctly different visions were at odds with one another, and Burton felt their ideas didn’t fit together coherently. Ultimately, the decision wasn’t in his hands, but with Warner Bros, who knew that with Prince producing a soundtrack, they were sitting on an immense marketing tool.
While Prince’s soundtrack may have jarred with Burton’s creative vision for the film, the musician’s album holds up magnificently as a stand-alone piece. Despite that, it was a scarring experience for Burton, who told Rolling Stone in 2014: “This is what happened. You learn something new every day. Now, here is this guy, Prince, who was one of my favourites. I had just gone to see two of his concerts in London, and I felt they were like the best concerts I’d ever seen.”
“They’re saying to me, these record guys, ‘it needs this and that,’ and they give you this whole thing about it’s an expensive movie, so you need it,” Burton continued. “And what happens is, you get engaged in this world, and then there’s no way out. There’s too much money. There’s this guy you respect and is good and has got this thing going. It got to a point where there was no turning back. And I won’t want to get into that situation again.”
Burton regretfully added: “It tainted something that I don’t want to taint, which is how you feel about an artist. And actually, I liked his album. I wish I could listen to it without the feel of what had happened.”
One of the stand-out tracks from the release is ‘Partyman’, which Prince wrote following an interaction on-set with Nicholson. While the material is a delightfully funkalicious track, the fact the Purple One was inspired to write it by Nicholson rather than his character in the film only further illustrates Burton’s point.
“[Jack Nicholson] just walked over, sat down and put his foot up on a table, real cool,” Prince exclaimed in a 1990 interview with Rolling Stone (via SongFacts). “He had this attitude that reminded me of Morris [Day] — and there was that song.”
Even if ‘Partyman’ didn’t fit into Burton’s idea of what the soundtrack for Batman should be, on the one hand, it was fitting Prince was thrust into the mystical world of Gotham City. While Burton was reluctant for Prince’s work to feature in the movie, as music lovers, we should all be thankful to Warner Bros for helping the album become a reality.
