EXCLUSIVE: Purple Pain — How Drug-Addled Prince Was Convinced Celibacy, Fasting, Zero Sleep And Veganism Would Make Him Immortal
Prince reckoned he had tapped into the secrets of immortality.
June 19 2025, Published 10:00 a.m. ET
Pill-popping Prince claimed he followed a punishing regime of celibacy, fasting, sleep deprivation and veganism before his death – in the belief it would grant him eternal life, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
After watching sci-fi flick The Matrix, the junkie virtuoso also became convinced his bizarre lifestyle would lead to him existing forever as simply a brain.
Oddball Beliefs
The singer had a very odd recipe for living forever.
He revealed his screwy theories in a chat featured in the book Prince: The Last Interviews And Other Conversations, which has re-emerged on fan forums.
Speaking at his Paisley Park home – less than two years before he was found slumped dead aged 57 in April 2016 in one of the complex’s elevators following an overdose of a drug 50 times more potent than heroin – a skeletal Prince babbled to a magazine writer: “I have gone long periods with no food, and also water – people have to remind me to drink water because I always forget to do that.
“The hunger turns into something else. I am music.
“After four days, you don’t want food anymore. It’s like this thing that says, ‘Feed me, feed me’. When it realizes it’s not going to get fed, it goes away.”
Talking about his belief he would never die and exist as an immortal brain, Prince added: “I don’t think about ‘gone’.
“Life spans are getting longer. One of the reasons is because people are learning more about everything, so then the brain makes more connections.
“Eventually, we’ll be in eternal brain mode because we’ll be able to hold eternity in our minds.
“A lot of people can’t do that. Everybody usually thinks about a beginning, a big bang. If you take that event out, then you can start to see what eternity is.
“Remember in The Matrix where they said the only thing that has an ending had a beginning, and vice versa?”
Movie Obsessed
Prince compared his ploy to 'The Matrix.'
Despite writing some of the lewdest lyrics in music history the diminutive diva insisted he was going without sex.
He said he instead channeled lust through his music – declaring: “I can hit this guitar for you and what you’ll hear is sex.”
In another interview included in the book Prince The Last Interviews, the singer confesses in a chat five months before his death he was yearning for “transcendence” as it was the ultimate high.
Yet Prince was lying about his monk-style existence.
Despite posing as a Bible-bashing born-again Jehovah’s Witness whose prudishness extended to a hatred of swearing, Prince was secretly addicted to painkillers.
Autopsy results showed he died from an accidental overdose of fentanyl – a synthetic drug 50 times more powerful than heroin usually prescribed to patients who have built up a resistance to other painkillers.
Prince was also thought to have been enjoying a romance with a former The Voice contestant before he died.
Secret Romance?
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He was thought to have been in a romance with a singer at the time of his death.
The 5ft 2 inch singer and Judith Hill were reportedly been dating since 2014, and communicated through an email account set up in Prince’s former managers, Julia Ramadan.
His filthy, dated Paisley Park home was littered with prescription and non-prescription drugs, many of them marked with labels bearing other people’s names.
Twice-married Prince was linked to a string of glamorous women in the 1980s and ’90s before he got hitched including actresses Kim Basinger and Sherilyn Fenn and Scottish singer Sheena Easton.
But on Valentine's Day 1996 he married Mayte Garcia, one of his backing group.
The marriage failed to withstand the trauma of their baby son Amiir’s death at six days old after he was born deformed and they split in 1999.
Prince’s next marriage in 2001 was to Mayte Garcia lookalike Manuela Testolini who worked for the singer’s charity Love4OneAnother – but it only lasted five years.
