In the Sixties, when record companies thought nothing of squeezing two albums a year from their artists, the music industry benefited rampantly productive artists. As such, it didn’t seem incredible to anyone that, during a six-month period in 1967, the Beatles released the Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane double A-side, Sgt Pepper and All You Need is Love.

Back in those days, no one dreamed of likening major record labels to slave-drivers.

When Prince made the analogy, writing “slave” on his face at the 1995 Brits, it was hard not to smile at the irony. Interviewed at the time, the singer criticised a record company that refused to put out his records when he wanted them released, citing “market saturation” in their defence. They wanted him to slow down, but Prince’s work-rate defied the notion. By the end of the decade he was hawking CDs over the web to a dwindling fan base.

With hindsight, it’s easier to see both sides. When supply outstrips demand — whether it be Crazy Frog merchandise, solo projects by ex-members of Blue or noodly treatises on cosmic sexuality by once-great Minneapolis monoliths — people’s interest inevitably wanes. Perhaps it’s something that he has belatedly come around to realising. Two years after the patchy Escapology he sounds like a man set on arresting his commercial decline.

At last month’s Brits performance he adhered to the first rule of commercial rehabilitation: the best way to get people interested in your new stuff is to mix it with the old. So along with a honey-dripping Purple Rain and a rousing Let’s Go Crazy, we got a balmy, Santana-esque newie, Te Amo Corazón, and Fury. If the latter sounded familiar, that’s because its synth riff first appeared as the chorus of Boys and Girls in 1986.

It’s not the only time you suspect that Prince has been perusing his back pages for inspiration. Black Sweat, more of an erotic mood piece than a song, sees its creator deploy a trick its creator first used to thrilling effect on When Doves Cry: forgoing bass for space, in which his priapic falsetto gets busy over a primitive robot groove.

The levity that seems to permeate almost every track here is unmistakable. On the title track he’s cast as a pygmy pied piper of funk, supplying helium harmonies over a moreishly sluggish rhythm: “You can come if you want/But you can never leave.”

He also wants us to know that he may be dirty but he still has standards. In Lolita he ventures into the same treacherous terrain as Björn from Abba when he wrote the belief-beggaringly bad Does Your Mother Know. The 48-year-old singer rebuffs the advances of his teenage muse, but where the Swede came a cropper Prince prevails with prizewinning couplets such as: “You’re much too young to peep my stash/ You’re trying to write cheques your body can’t cash.”

Better still is The Word, a lithe, locomotive call to arms against unspecific satanic forces, in which Prince intones: “Get up, come on, Let’s do something” over a sinuous acoustic loop.

He’s still practically peerless when he’s funky; less so when he’s soppy. As such, it’s no coincidence that the two skippable songs on 3121 merge to form one sloppy suite. Beautiful Loved and Blessed — a ploddingly generic duet with his current purple protégé Tamar — is just the kind of joyless soul ballad that made Prince such hard work through most of the Nineties.

And while you have to admire his insistence on playing everything himself, Prince’s Claydermanesque plinking on The Dance does little to stop the song resembling the incidental music you might hear when a postcoital James Bond pours himself a cognac.

But, of course, there’s no telling a control freak. He has to learn his own lessons. And Prince’s 25th album portrays an artist learning to make peace with his past without turning into his own tribute act. If the generous proliferation of tunes on here is anything to go by, Prince has freed himself from a more pernicious form of self-inflicted slavery. Which can only be good news for all of us.

PETE PAPHIDES

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