We just bought Princes superb looking memoir 'The Beautiful Ones', which I'm sure many of you know is unfinished but still a brilliant insight into one of the most genius musicians of all time. This isn't a review of the book (maybe we'll do one of those later) but when we were leafing through it we noted that Prince's 80s passport used a headshot from his 'Parade' album cover which is just amazing.

Anyway, the more you look at the passport the more you realise how personal this all is as he would have been moving in and out of countries (obviously) with this thing in his hand and he also (obviously) signed it. It's just not one of those things you normally see. A passport is one of those documents you take care when signing. Signing for a parcel it's an 'x' but with your passport care is taken. So, long story short, we thought it'd be the perfect sample of Prince's handwriting to use to get an insight into his true character so we got in touch with Adam Brand, a renowned and acclaimed expert on handwriting, or a graphologist as they are officially known, and asked him what Prince's signature told us about him. Here's what he said...

"The signature shows, not surprisingly, that he is extremely expressive. It is large (which shows a need for recognition), right slanted (emotionally expressive) and underlined (self reliant). He has a complex and florid ‘i’ dot (a need for individual recognition) along with large and connected loops at the start. These show considerable imagination and fluent thinking plus an ability to draw ideas together before acting."

Adam went above and beyond and tracked down a letter Prince had written to George Clinton of Funkadellic / Parliament to see what this told us...

"A signature is the public image a person wants to show the world. The cursive writing is more about the inner person. His cursive writing shows that in addition to producing masses of ideas, he is demanding in his requirements for new materials to work with; craves the unexpected and gets excitement from new experiences; will get frustrated when projects and relationships are unvaried and subjective in his evaluation of people and events. So misunderstandings may follow when his need for variety is interpreted as irresponsibility and a lack of concern for those people close to him.

Below are some other quick points which might be of interest."

This all feels about right to me and adds up to exactly the man I think he may have been. Bless.

Test Pressing would like to extend thanks to Adam Brand for his time and if you ever need a graphologist / handwriting expert here is his website. We highly recommend him.