The title track and lead single from Prince’s last truly great album, Sign ‘o’ the Times, emerged from sessions for no fewer than three overlapping projects the Purple One somehow found time to fit in during 1986, when he was engaged in a world tour. When Warner Bros baulked at a three-CD release, the recordings were whittled down (back then, Prince still knew what an Edit button was) to a double album, Sign ‘o’ the Times.

Using the then modish Fairlight keyboard — the first polyphonic digital sampling synthesizer — Prince devised his most minimal song to date. If hits such as When Doves Cry and Kiss had been sparse, Sign ‘o’ the Times was positively skeletal. With a casualness to make his competitors weep, Prince didn’t even bother to programme new effects for the song, relying instead on the synthesizer’s in-built sounds and mining from them pure sonic gold.

The percussive motif that introduces the song is immediately disorientating, underpinned by a cold, digital bass drum and a whip-cracking snare. The laid-back nature of Prince’s vocals is at startling odds with his lyrics, their sense of disgust made more lethal by the resignation of his delivery. “In France,” he begins, “a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name.”

He moves on from Aids to the recent Challenger space-shuttle explosion, environmental disasters, Reagan’s Star Wars initiative, gang wars and drug addiction. His pause before the end of the second verse — “September, my cousin tried reefer for the very first time / Now he’s doing horse — it’s June” — is split-second and deadly. The freeze thaws only on a repeated middle eight, where he asks “It’s silly, no? When a rocket ship explodes / And everybody still wants to fly” before concluding that “a man ain’t happy / Unless a man truly dies”.

The single reached No 10 here and No 3 in America — no surprise, in a sense, given how big a superstar he was, but extraordinary considering the song’s bleakness. A product of Prince’s increasing mono- and megalomania, Sign ‘o’ the Times undoubtedly benefited from both, yet in the subsoil of that introspection lay the seeds of his artistic decline.

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