Christened Prince Rogers Nelson, Prince, or his many pseudonyms including symbol, The Artist Formerly known as Prince, and The Artist is one of the biggest stars to have ever graced popular music culture.

The 80's saw Prince become one of the true megastars, comparable to Madonna, Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston in terms of power, sales and influence. He wrote the biggest hit of 1984 'When Doves Cry', and is perhaps best known for his seminal album Purple Rain and starred in the hit movie of the same name.

A truly talented artist, Prince is not only an accomplished vocalist but insanely gifted dancer, composer, producer, and instrumentalist, not to mention film and movie director. For his first five albums, Prince played nearly all the instruments, his talents it seems know no limits.

With his musical style containing elements of funk, soul, new wave, pop, rock, blues, jazz and hip hop, Prince has carved an ever changing sound tath somehow retains a sound that is uniquely his own.

His early to mid 1980s work, responsible for raising him into super star status, features industrial sounding drum machine arrangements, the use of synthesizer riffs in place of horn riffs, and was coined 'the Minneapolis sound'. Renowned as a tireless workaholic, Prince has in his career recorded in excess of a thousand songs under his own name and through other artists, as well as having an unnumbered amount written but as yet unreleased.

Few artists have created a body of work as rich and varied as Prince. His genius is critically agreed.

More recently, in 2004 after several years of relative obscurity, Prince returned to the limelight to perform at the Grammy Awards with Beyonce Knowles. That spring, he released Musicology with a tour that became the top concert draw in the United States. The album won two Grammys. His next album, 3121, was released in 2006. That year, he wrote and performed "Song of the Heart" for the animated film Happy Feet, and won a Golden Globe (best original song) for the composition.

He has since released albums Planet Earth, Indigo Nights, and 20ten, all to critical acclaim. His live performances, although sparse, remain legendary, as despite his long career, Prince is still widely regarded as one of the finest performers of our generation.