Prince wrote a song so sexy a committee was established to investigate

The masturbation-themed song offended a bunch of mums

(Getty)

Those ‘parental advisory’ stickers that have been ruining album artworks for decades can be traced back to Prince’s 1984 song, ‘Darling Nikki’.

Eroticism was a strong theme in so much of Prince’s work, but it was particularly overt in this track, which opens: ‘I knew a girl named nikki / I guess u could say she was a sex fiend / I met her in a hotel lobby / Masturbating with a magazine’.

Tipper Gore happened upon the song while listening to the Purple Rain soundtrack, and was so offended she got the idea to found the Parents Music Resource Center, a now fortunately defunct committee with the stated goal of increasing parental control over the access of children to music deemed to have violent, drug-related or sexual themes. It was the body that introduced those stickers.

Prince was a brilliantly disruptive force in the music industry. When he changed his name to an indecipherable glyph, Warner Bros had to mass mail floppy disks with a custom font.