Nicolas Cage has opened up about his now-iconic attempt at covering a Prince song during a karaoke session earlier this year, describing the incident as “primal-scream therapy”.
No matter how you slice it, Nicolas Cage is something of an interesting fellow. Whether it’s his affinity for superheroes or his enigmatic acting style, there’s no denying that he’s managed to make quite a name for himself over the years.
Earlier this year though, Cage found himself making headlines around the world after footage of him angrily belting out Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ at a karaoke bar surfaced online.
Coming directly after the annulment of his four-day marriage to Erika Koike, many thought that this footage was proof that Cage had finally gone off the rails, while others assumed this was his way of dealing with the stress of recent events.
Now, in a new interview with The New York Times, Nicolas Cage took the opportunity to discuss numerous topics, including searching for the Holy Grail at Glastonbury, the iconic “not the bees!” scene in The Wicker Man, and – of course – his famous karaoke session.
“I once had brunch with Warren Beatty, and I said, ‘Do you have any idea how lucky you are that you were Warren Beatty in the ’70s, before everyone had a cellphone with a video camera?'” Cage began.
“You go to a karaoke bar with a male friend in the neighborhood, the bar says ‘no videotaping’ and suddenly, there’s two different videos of you doing karaoke. Who did that? Who exposed the videotape? Who sold it?”
Check out Nicolas Cage performing ‘Purple Rain’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDSDkdG3OdY
When asked about the circumstances of the performance, Cage noted that he was indeed reacting to his recent breakup, and “trying to invent his own mythology” in the process.
“It was around the anniversary of Prince’s passing,” Cage explained. “Everyone knows how much I admire him as an artist. But honestly, I wasn’t even doing that to sing. It was more like primal-scream therapy.
“It was a holiday weekend, and I didn’t want to go anywhere, but my friend who was with me said: ‘You can’t sit here in your apartment. You’ve got to go out.’
“So I went to the one place in my neighborhood that I knew had no video recording, just to have some fun, and that became everybody’s business.”
While Nicolas Cage is definitely correct in noting how the footage soon “became everybody’s business”, there’s no denying that his karaoke antics are set to go down in history as one of the strangest musical events of 2019.
Check out Prince performing ‘Purple Rain’:
