“He was a distant figure,” Michael Quercio of the Three O’Clock told me of his single encounter with Prince, his label boss and a man he believes had been inspired by the music he and a handful of other bands had been making in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. “We met him once. He had opened up the Paisley Park complex of studios in Minneapolis at that same time and had people come out. He put us up in a hotel, and we all went to this party after his concert there in Minneapolis. I remember being on a shuttle bus from the hotel to the party. I get on the bus, and it’s me with George Clinton, Mavis Staples, Wendy and Lisa and Apollonia. Everybody’s very quiet, we’re just going to the complex, and everybody’s staring at me. Finally, Mavis Staples, who’s sitting next to me, puts her hand on my knee and very nicely says, ‘Who are you, honey?’”

What’s odd about this story isn’t that Quercio and his bandmates were invited to Minneapolis. Or that Mavis Staples had no idea who Quercio was. It’s that the Three O’Clock, a cult psychedelic garage band from Los Angeles, were signed to Prince’s Paisley Park imprint, and part of a movement of bands that briefly held him thrall, likely contributing to the naming of his studio and label, and to the sound of his 1985 album Around the World in a Day.

The Three O’Clock were one of the bands from Los Angeles who formed the scene known as the “Paisley Underground”, a term first used in late 1982, coined by Quercio himself to describe his own band, the Dream Syndicate, the Rain Parade and an all-woman quartet called the Bangs, later to change their name to the Bangles. It was that last group who really attracted Prince’s attention.

“He apparently saw the video for [the 1984 single] Hero Takes a Fall – one of our first professional videos,” Bangles guitarist Vicki Peterson told me – she and Quercio were both speaking to me when I was researching an oral history of the Paisley Underground in 2013. “He saw that and was just intrigued with the band. And he started showing up at shows. We’d find out after we’d left the stage and before we did the encore: ‘Prince is here and he’d like to play with you.’ OK. Here’s my guitar.”

It was always rumoured that Prince was romantically interested in the Bangles’s lead singer, Susanna Hoffs. But his interest was certainly professional, too. In 1984, he had written a song called Manic Monday and recorded it for the debut album by his protegees Apollonia 6. He pulled it and sat in it for two years. And then he decided to gift it to the Bangles.

“He presented us with a cassette tape of two songs – ‘Here, do you want to record these?’ And one of them was Manic Monday,” Peterson recalled. And so we picked that song – it felt pretty Bangle-ish, like something we could have written. He said if we wanted to use the tracks we could just re-sing it [over the top of his backing track]. Well, thank you so very, very much, but we’ll record it.”

For the Bangles, who – like all the Paisley Underground bands – had seen their record sales fail to match their reputation, Prince’s intervention was life-changing, not least because he had just become an international superstar himself off the back of albums 1999 (in 1982) and Purple Rain (in 1984). “They were trying to figure out how to get us to radio,” Peterson said. “We were getting a lot of good press and our shows were doing well, but really the idea of getting a single to radio was still a bit of a challenge, and once you have this great hook – Look! Prince wrote them a song! – it definitely helps.”

Manic Monday became a worldwide hit, peaking at No 2 in the US and the UK, and began a period in which everything the Bangles touched turned to gold. Sid Griffin of the Long Ryders, a group who joined the original four in the Paisley Underground, was living in a shared house with Bangles drummer Debbi Peterson when their success hit in 1985.

“Everyone’s equipment was in our house,” he told me, “because we had a house and most people had flats. There’d be an amp of of Steve Wynn’s [from the Dream Syndicate] or Green on Red’s, a bunch of Long Ryders’ gear, various other bands, the Celibate Rifles from Australia had some equipment there. There was a klieg light – it’s incredibly bright. So Debbi got a cheque from Bill Graham Associates, who were doing their merchandise, her piece of the pie. My friend said: ‘How much do you think it is? Do you think she got a million bucks?’ ‘No, she didn’t get a million bucks, but pick up the klieg light, and I’ll hold it up to the light. You turn it on, and I’ll be able to read the cheque.’ I’d seen it done in the movies – and it works! I held it up - and it was a sizeable cheque.”

From the Bangles, Prince’s interest moved to the Three O’Clock. “I’m told by one of the Bangles that he saw our video for Her Head’s Revolving, which was before Around the World in a Day,” Quercio said. “He started listening to these bands, and took a bit of it. I’m sure he was a huge fan of that music – I know he was a fan of Arthur Lee and Love and I think naming the record company Paisley Park right at the same time … I can put two and two together! I think it really influenced him.”

The Three O’Clock were signed to Prince’s Paisley Park imprint, although by the time he signed them, the Paisley Underground’s psychedelic swirl had rather lost its vivid colour. The one album the group recorded for Paisley Park – their final record, Vermillion, released in 1988 – was dissimilar to what had come before and is regarded as the worst of their four full-length releases, despite Prince giving them a song, Neon Telephone.

By that point, Prince’s psychedelic phase was passing. Around the World in a Day proved to be an outlier in his discography, followed by Parade, Sign o’ the Times and Lovesexy, each featuring a defining single – Kiss, Sign o’ the Times and Alphabet Street – in a way Around the World in a Day hadn’t, despite the DayGlo charm of Raspberry Beret. Peterson remembered Prince coming to see the Bangles play for a couple of years after Manic Monday, and then nothing. He had moved on.

For a moment, though, Prince was the patron of the LA psychedelic underground, a characteristically perverse and quixotic gesture from an artist who always wanted to surprise and be surprised.