#PrinceOnThisDay On Sunday 11 October 2009, Prince played two one-off concerts under the glass-and-iron nave of the Grand Palais, billed together as All Day, All Night. The shows were arranged in a few days after he attended the Chanel show during Paris Fashion Week and decided the hall itself was the stage. Tickets at €99 standing and €149 seated—about 11,000 across both performances—sold out in 77 minutes. It was his first Paris date since the Zénith in 2002. Cameras and phones were banned. The band was lean: Cora Coleman-Dunham on drums, Josh Dunham on bass, Morris Hayes and Cassandra O’Neal on keyboards, and the trio of Shelby J., Liv Warfield and Elisa Dease on vocals and percussion, with French harmonica player Frédéric Yonnet as guest. The 45-metre dome fought the sound all day; clusters of cabinets were hung to fight the reverb, and still did not fully win. The afternoon show began with theatre. Around 16:50 a black Mercedes drove straight into the nave. Prince lowered a window, photographed the crowd pressing the car, then walked the aisle with security and was onstage at 17:00 sharp, black-and-white jacket over leather trousers, Hohner Telecaster already in hand. Daylight still poured through the vault. Thunder effects and the chant “All Day, All Night”—the 1984 line later recorded by Jill Jones—rolled into “1999.” The room answered as if the seven-year absence had been a single held breath. What followed was less a setlist than a continuous argument about the Minneapolis catalogue. “I Feel for You,” written for Chaka Khan, was returned to its writer and stretched. “Controversy” opened into chants of “All Day, All Night” and “(Like) Funky Music,” Yonnet’s harmonica cutting across the two keyboards. “Sexy Dancer” stayed mostly instrumental until the singers took “Le Freak,” Chic’s disco hit treated as a Minneapolis groove rather than a nostalgia cue. “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?” and “Take Me With U” kept the early-’80s pulse, then “Anotherloverholenyohead” broke into an uptempo rock coda, Prince switching to the purple Stratocaster for the jam and holding it through “Guitar” and “Raspberry Beret.” The middle of the show dropped the volume. An acoustic pocket—Girl, with the house chant folded back in, “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man,” the then-unreleased “The One U Wanna C,” and “Sometimes It Snows in April”—was the only real stillness under the glass. “April” in particular exposed how thin the hall’s natural acoustic was for a ballad: the voice carried, the guitar less so, and the intimacy felt borrowed rather than built. He recovered by handing the singers the floor. “Mountains” slid into the Jacksons’ “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” with Elisa Dease leading; Sly Stone’s “Everyday People” and “I Want to Take You Higher” followed; Shelby J. took the Doobie Brothers’ “Long Train Runnin’”; “Play That Funky Music” closed the homage block. Bootleg tracklists also place Janet Jackson’s “What Have You Done for Me Lately” and “Partyman” in this stretch—short, sharp, and clearly meant as Minneapolis cross-references rather than full arrangements. The last third was pure dance-floor Prince: “Uptown,” “Let’s Work,” The Time’s “Cool,” then “Kiss” again braided with the “All Day, All Night” chant. “All the Critics Love U in Paris”—the old “New York” lyric rewritten for the room, Yonnet back in, thunder and “Housequake” tags in the coda—was the local joke and the local peak. He left and returned for “Cream” and “U Got the Look.” No “Purple Rain.” The show ran roughly from 17:00 to 18:45. Fans who had paid premium prices for ninety minutes of daylight felt the length; those who heard the guitar—funk one minute, jazz the next, Hendrix the minute after—did not. He joked about the building (“How do you like my house?”) and treated the nave as a private room that happened to hold thousands. The sound remained the unresolved argument: metallic, washy, occasionally harsh, never quite equal to the playing.