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The Cocoa Boys (initially listed as The Coco Boys) is a track recorded by Prince alone on 14 September 1986 at his Galpin Blvd Home Studio in Chanhassen, Minnesota. Overdubs, including background vocals, horns and a bed of looped audiences, presumed to be from the 25 August 1986 show at Le Zénith, Paris, France, where It’s Gonna Be A Beautiful Night was recorded, were added at a later session.
Along with When The Dawn Of The Morning Comes and Crucial, the song was written specifically for the planned musical The Dawn. Other songs recorded earlier (Heaven, God Is Everywhere, Others Here With Us and All My Dreams) were also considered for the film, but the project was ultimately abandoned, and the song was never intended for any of Prince’s many late-1986 album projects.
The song also has the lines ‘All the boys and all the girls, you are the new kings of the world’, later reused in Positivity, as well as a chant of ‘We are beautiful, it’s gonna be beautiful night’ from It’s Gonna Be A Beautiful Night.
The Cocoa Boys was the name of a band of fictional brothers Joey and Frankie Coco, included as characters in the musical. The Cocoa in the band name is supposedly a play on words in the fictional story of the song. While the band names changed, the idea of rival bands was reused in the initial 1987 draft of the Graffiti Bridge movie.
In September 2020 the song was released as the eleventh track of Vault Tracks part 2, one of the discs with previously unreleased tracks included with the Sign O’ The Times Super Deluxe Edition.
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