More than 30 years on from the recording of a demo version, Baby Doll - a song that was intended to be a collaboration between Prince and Kylie Minogue - has leaked online.
Minogue has spoken about the song several times in the past, suggesting that she penned some lyrics that Prince then wrote the music for. The leaked version features only Prince’s vocals as Minogue never got around to recording it.
Discussing Baby Doll’s origins with Scott Mills in 2023, Minogue explained: “I went to see his show, Diamonds and Pearls, at Earls Court. And when I say I’m a Prince fan… you don’t understand. Prince, I mean, I love him, and I got to meet him after the show.
“I don’t know where I plucked up the courage from but somewhere, at some point I said ‘What are you doing? What are you working on?’”
Cue an invitation from Prince to visit him in Minneapolis, after which Minogue got to work.
“It’s a blur,” she told Mills. “I don’t know how it happened. It was all landline calls to him or this person, I can’t remember, but I got some lyrics to him and then I had delivered to me, by his driver, a cassette of Prince. He was just such a workaholic and he knocked up this song called Baby Doll. It’s me, on my own, in my apartment in London, receiving this cassette. I mean, it was a moment, and it’s typical - there’s no one there to share it with.”
It’s not clear whether Prince hoped that he might record Baby Doll as a duet with Minogue or if he was simply giving her the song, but for whatever reason (Minogue has suggested in the past that her label at the time wasn’t keen on the idea of Prince recording all the instrumental parts himself), it fell by the wayside.
That said, Minogue has indicated that she’d be open to the idea of revisiting it. In that 2023 interview, she said: “Nothing ever happened to [Baby Doll] but I would love it one day if [Prince’s] estate would grant me permission to do something with it. I don’t know where my cassette is, which is a travesty really. It’ll appear somewhere.”
That somewhere, it turns out, is on YouTube. Believed to have been recorded with the New Power Generation in early 1992, it’s a classic Prince blend of pure pop and taut funk, with a drum groove reminiscent of Cream, a featherlight melody and choppy guitar. There’s a big gap in the vocal in the first verse, indicating that Prince may have been intending that Minogue fill it.
It’s rumoured that this version of Baby Doll may appear on the deluxe reissue of Prince’s ‘Love Symbol’ album from1992. Whether we’ll finally hear Kylie’s vocals on it at some point remains to be seen…
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