OH come off it – not Prince too. This is ridiculous. If we are actually living in The Matrix, the robots are just playing around with our programming now. Who falls next? Madonna crumpled at the bottom of her stage stairs? Jagger suddenly clutching his silk-shirted chest? Springsteen spontaneously combusting at the peak of Born In The USA?

Just daft. Whoever/whatever it is, stop it. It’s not funny anymore.

I’m blustering, of course. Because the news that Prince Rogers Nelson, 57, has been found dead at his beloved Paisley Park complex in Minneapolis, is – at the moment – too preposterous to register properly.

I remember that Q Magazine once did a fantasy feature in which various rock and pop icons hadn’t flamed out in their youth, and were now giving interviews.

Jimi Hendrix was the only decent realisation of the idea. He’d been recently playing with Miles Davis, was composing another one of his jazz-funk-rock fusions, and was calmly enjoying his global music-god status.

The last time I noticed – which I think was his attendance at the 2015 Grammies – Prince right now was basically the old Hendrix. But better. He looked like not one year had touched him in the last 30, lithe in an orange top and perfect afro. And coolly quoting that “both albums – and black lives – matter”.

He was presenting, not playing – at the Grammies – but he didn’t need to. Everyone knows you give Prince a guitar, a mike and an amp, and he tears down any place he’s standing in. But not anymore. As the man was wont to say on his funkiest records: dayum!

There is enough Prince, in his sheer creative excess, for anyone to compose their ideal version. I didn’t honestly check for his first major success – that stadium funk, solo-slathered period around Purple Rain or Controversy. But I don’t think I have loved any albums more than Parade or Sign o’ the Times.

From 1986, Parade is still the best single pop album I’ve ever heard. It’s made by a musical genius. Someone who can one minute pile on the orchestra and reverb like Pink Floyd, then reduce everything to a squealing streetfunk band playing on a Minneapolis corner, then write the most ridiculously perfect pop song (Kiss or Girls & Boys), concluding it all with a ballad Joni Mitchell would be proud of (Sometimes It Snows In April).

To follow that up with Sign o’ the Times only a year later… As a working commercial musician at the time, I remember listening to this with stunned (and crushed) wonder. How much range could one artist have? The stuttering title track was a What’s Goin’ On for our much grimmer, less hopeful times: “Hurricane Annie ripped the ceiling off a church and killed everyone inside/You turn on the telly and every other story is tellin’ you somebody died.”

But the same double album could contain lubricious daftness like U Got The Look and If I Was Your Girlfriend, futurist funk workouts and religious grunge epics. And above them all, the complex and beautiful The Ballad of Dorothy Parker – which sounded like soul from some parallel, purple-tinted universe.

At that point in the late 80s, Prince was a total god among the musicians I knew. We thought we would be tracking his every move from that moment onwards. But the problem gradually became that there were too many moves.

Prince released an album every year from 1988 to 1992, in what seemed at the time like a spray of endless creativity (we now know he was producing album after album to try and get out of his contract with Warner Brothers). This run ended up with Prince abandoning his own name, and replacing it with a symbol that fused male and female signs.

Did it still seem like genius? Or just gimmickry? I will admit that around about this point, I started to drift away from The Artist Formerly Known As Prince’s music. The albums kept coming, yearly, each with ever more lurid and gnomic covers – but with about one hit per record, not enough to pull you back into his singular, psychedelic-rock-funk brew.

TAFKAP (as punctilious rock journos would call him) did interviews with black veils draped over his face, or with “slave” scrawled across his cheek (still protesting against his old record label). From 2000, Prince tried to establish an online community called NPGMusicClub – selling exclusive music through it, organising fans to come and meet him at his gigs or studios.

Like Bowie, Prince was an enthusiastic early adopter of internet technology – trying to cut out the middle-man between him and his fans. But it’s obvious that he exhausted his fans with too much music, maddening record label after management team with an unstoppable tsunami from the Paisley Park complex.

I get the sense that we’ll be sifting through a vast archive of Prince’s music over the next decade or so. My youngest brother (and Proclaimers bassist) Garry John Kane, who’s played Minneapolis over many years, tells me: “Prince was a workaholic and studioholic. He never stopped… People in the music world there were available to him, 24/7. If he had an idea he would call them all to the studio at any moment. The town will miss Prince big time – they talked fondly of him, he paid top rate to all the engineers and musicians he used.”

Like many people, I reconnected with Prince when he played the half-time slot at the US Miami SuperBowl in 2006. As he whirled and skipped about the stage, firing off vocal and guitar licks everywhere, you were reminded of the sheer profligacy of his talent. In 2007, his 21 concerts at the O2 Arena in London are still talked about as the most extraordinary concert experience.

The music business in general is struggling to find a way to survive financially. In a world where our mindshare is split between a million other devices and channels, it doesn’t look like much revenue will come from recorded music any more. One of the last places you can secure a buck from a happy customer is the live concert – and in the whole business model, this shifts the power back to the musicians.

For a man who Miles Davis once described as “the next Duke Ellington”, this return of the pre-eminence of live music has given Prince a special platform, in what’s turned out to be his last few years.

It is entirely appropriate that Prince was giving a cheap $10 concert to local fans at his Paisley Park studios only hours before he was found “not breathing and motionless” by police. His current world tour was simply him and a piano in a big-city concert hall (a Glasgow Concert Hall performance on November 27 of this year had recently been postponed).

The Scottish jazz critic Brian Morton’s insightful book on Prince, Thief In The Temple, tells us that his jazz-composing father John Nelson was a huge but often absent influence on his son. I’d imagine that the exorbitantly talented, sexually exploratory, and wilfully mysterious son was something of a trial to the father too.

But as for so many great artists, let us give thanks for the pathologies and traumas that drive them to make a mark. You wanna be better than your missing-but-talented dad, Prince Rogers? Be our guest. “I can do what anyone does,” said the stellar one once, “but I got more music than they do.”

And now we’ll get no more. Stop with the hero-cull, please. It’s only April. When sometimes, it snows.

Pat Kane is a musician and writer (www.patkane.today).

Tears and vigils as music world mourns the end of purple reign