Prince; Taylor Swift – review

It is near the end of the second gig of the night. The singer has just introduced his latest band, 3rdeyegirl, seemingly made up of post-apocalyptic female vagabonds dragged in off the streets of Camden, but actually composed of three fierce blues-rockers and a bald bloke on cowbell.

The introduction, when it comes, is pretty superfluous. "My name is Prince," says the man with the afro in the black leathery tunic, from behind his signature glyph mic stand. This just broadens the grins on the faces of fans who have braved uncertain Twitter rumours and tube strikes, rain-soaked queues and bottleneck crushes to see the Minneapolis guitarist up close. Inwardly, 1,000-odd people reply: "And he is funky", still.

Prince wants us to tell people about 3rdeyegirl. "We're a new band," he smiles. The implication is that this fledgling, unknown outfit need all the support they can get. But there is a run of good new songs to suggest otherwise. Live, the finger-wagging Fixurlifeup is very little like the pop song first unveiled last year, but heavier, faster and louder. Funk'n'roll is the sort of timeless genre exercise that Prince could write blindfolded, with one hand tied behind his back and a rose in his teeth, but there is a very contemporary twist in the line: "Put your phone down and get your party on."

"Participate!" urges Prince. And, largely, people comply. It's not difficult to get drawn into the seductive roll of things, the unknowable 80s megastar posing as a personable late-night club musician. The 3rdeyegirls come on a few minutes before the night's second gig at 11pm set to explicitly, but groovily, discourage camera phones.

The forthcoming 3rdyegirl album's title track is Plectrum Electrum, and it underscores how Prince has fallen in love with six-string histrionics once again. Anyone in a guitar shop can get a strangled cat impression out of an instrument, but Prince gets his guitar to sound like water dripping, or three different guitars; he pulls the bass off Ida Nielsen and solos on that for a while too.

There is something lazy about invoking Jimi Hendrix every time a man of African American descent plugs in, but Prince's display genuinely has that level of casual, loving virtuosity tonight. And he's generous with it, squaring up, plectrum to plectrum, against guitarist Donna Grantis, ceding multiple solos to his foil. Half her hair is missing, probably from all the incendiary guitar being played.

A new band they may be, but 3rdeyegirl still play songs from 1984's Purple Rain. The night's final encore kicks off with a passage from the title track of Prince's best-known album. Both of tonight's two distinct sets – one at 8pm and another at 11pm, in front of two mostly different audiences – begin with a heavy, reworked version of Purple Rain's Let's Go Crazy. Both set lists feature I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man, from 1987's Sign o' the Times, again reworked, but this time into an unfolding, fluent slower jam. It's the best of both worlds: 3rdeyegirl are a new, viable, blues-rock outfit and they can play the best of purpledom past.

There is a theory that Prince moves in 10-year cycles: Purple Rain in 1984, then, 10 years later, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World reversed a decade of stasis with a No 1 UK single. In 2004 it all happened again with the Musicology album. It's not quite a perfect arc. In 1994, for example, Prince opened what would now be called a pop-up shop just down the road from the Electric Ballroom, selling New Power Generation memorabilia. More tourist stop than retail outlet, it shut quietly a couple of years later. Thirty years on from Purple Rain, though, Prince is genuinely in rocking form, a puckish rake totally at odds with the old image we have of him, the reclusive Jehovah's Witness who sues people for downloading bootlegs of his gigs.

The last time Prince played London, in 2007, there was a string of sold-out shows at the O2 Arena. That's precisely what Taylor Swift is doing now, making herself at home in what was the Dome for five nights, with lots of hydraulics, minor falls and major lifts. The 24-year-old Pennsylvanian has sold more than 26m albums in a rapidly contracting market; in the flesh, she is revealed as a sort of lovechild of Kylie Minogue (straight teeth, predilection for shorts) and Dolly Parton (copper-bottomed songwriting chops, banjo).

It's easy to sneer at Swift, so often held up as the prudish yin to Miley Cyrus's vice-ridden yang. But even bereft of all funk, she is nothing short of impressive tonight. You have to excuse all the trappings that come with an arena show, such as the red flag-flying desperado dancers who illustrate the title track to her Red album, which has shifted nearly 4m copies in the US to date.

In between songs, Swift is candid about writing about her exes and quips: "Duly noted" when people scream at her. The night's surprise is not Danny O'Donogue of the Script, who turns up for a dire sing-song, but the power of Swift's writing. The Lucky One is a meditation on fame that addresses the lucky star who gave it up, choosing a "rose garden over Madison Square" (it's rumoured to be about Joni Mitchell). An even bigger shock is the sudden bass drop in her excellent hit single, Trouble (said to be about Harry Styles). The bass actually reaches dubstep frequencies, making itself at home in south London.

Star ratings (out of 5)
3rdeyegirl ****
Taylor Swift ***