Like many children of his generation, Prince was enamoured of Batman. A fan of the 60s TV show, he taught himself how to play its theme tune while learning to pick out melodies on his father’s piano at home. So when, years later, he was invited to provide songs for Tim Burton’s blockbuster 1989 movie adaptation, he accepted before anyone could say “Holy smokes!” Framing his Batman album as a nine-track collection inspired by the film, Prince helped invent the blockbuster movie soundtrack. And in its second single, Partyman, he gave the villainous Joker the perfect theme song while also effectively writing an homage to himself.
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The recording: “He sat down and put his foot up on a table, real cool”
A prolific artist turning out an album a year – and stowing many more recordings in his vault – Prince quickly amassed more songs than Burton could use in his movie. Imagining that he would need only one or two submissions from Prince (an early idea would have limited the Purple Rain icon to the “dark” songs required for the film, while his 80s rival Michael Jackson would record the “light” songs), the director placed a pair of earlier Prince tracks, 1999 and Baby I’m A Star, in key Batman scenes as a try-out. But with more than an album’s worth of material tumbling out of Prince’s Paisley Park Studios in the early part of 1989, it was soon apparent that a standalone record would be required in order to do justice to Prince’s vision.
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Of the songs Prince delivered for consideration, one proved so irresistible that its use was all but mandatory. Built on a James Brown-inspired bassline played by Prince on his custom black Auserwald Cleo, with samples of film dialogue and spoken-word interjections from studio engineer Femi Jiya and girlfriend Anna Fantastic, Partyman was a classic funk groove, replete with crip drums and rousing synth horns, that effectively wrote itself after Prince met Jack Nicholson, who was playing the role of The Joker, on the Batman film set.
In a coincidental connection with an earlier Prince hit, Nicholson owned a Corvette which, it was said, he’d drive to London’s Pinewood Studios each morning, blasting Prince’s music along the way. Arriving one day for a meeting with the musician himself, Nicholson “just walked over, sat down and put his foot up on a table, real cool”, Prince told Rolling Stone magazine, speaking shortly after the film’s release. Oozing an attitude reminiscent of Morris Day, the frontman of Prince’s former protégé act The Time, Nicholson all but handed Prince The Joker’s musical calling card: “And there was that song,” he said.
