Thanks to one of his followers, Justin Hawkins had a chance to watch Adam Levine perform Prince’s ‘Purple Rain.’ Unsurprisingly enough, Hawkins decided to reveal his opinions on the Maroon 5 singer’s performance in a recent episode of his Justin Hawkins Rides Again video series.
Adam Levine joined Howard Stern’s 2014 birthday bash and delivered an ear-pleasing cover of Prince’s all-time hit ‘Purple Rain.’ During his performance, Levine came up with an unexpected guitar-playing performance while Train was playing as his backing band. Recently, Justin Hawkins came across the musician’s cover of ‘Purple Rain’ and decided to say a word or two about it.
“You’ve got to say for ‘Purple Rain’ to be considered one of the greatest songs of all time,” said Justin Hawkins to highlight the importance of ‘Purple Rain’ in music history. “That’s f*cking fair enough. I mean, he’s doing the perfect performance of it. It’s really great. I think it has changed my opinion of him.”
“To be honest, I actually enjoyed a couple of the songs when that first record [‘Songs About Jane’] came out,” added Hawkins, revealing he liked Maroon 5’s debut album. “The singles you heard a lot on the radio, there’s nothing wrong with them. There’s some good stuff there; good singing, good writing, and everything. What it became is, of course, that I cannot abide, which is vacuous pop nonsense with phoned-in lyrics. But you give him something meaty like ‘Purple Rain,’ and he can do it.”
Apparently, Justin Hawkins was fond of Maroon 5’s early efforts and had some favorites from their ‘Songs About Jane’ album. However, the Darkness vocalist noticed the band’s shift toward pop music in their later work and changed his opinion. It turns out that Adam Levine’s ‘Purple Rain’ cover made him change his mind yet again.
