Double Mint: The Secret Life of Prince’s Trini ‘Twinz’

Words by Jesse Serwer

If you’ve caught any of Prince’s recent shows at Madison Square Garden or elsewhere, chances are your eyes spent a great deal of time taking in the sight of his new dancers-slash-backup-singers, the “Twinz,” aka Maya and Nandy McClean. While doing the sort of requisite research a man does after witnessing two fine examples of femininity writhing onstage with Prince following last Tuesday’s MSG show, it quickly came to my attention that these beauties, while hailing from Australia, are of Trinidadian descent, the daughters of a “hard-drinking session musician from Trinidad named Bruce McClean,” according to England’s Daily Mail. That’s right: Trinis in the Outback. Who knew.

By now you’re surely aware of the Purple dude’s taste for exotic/racially ambiguous/mixed-race divas whose caramel skin-tone matches his own. Maya and Nandy, of course, fit this mold to the tee. So much so that one wonders if Prince didn’t find one of them, and clone her in Paisley Park’s secret underground laboratory. Or, as New York Magazine‘s Nitsuh Abebe wondered in his review of Tuesday night’s show, “If you are two actual twins who sing, dance, cartwheel, roller-boogie, bump, grind, have the kind of look people call ‘exotic,’ are small enough they don’t make Prince look too tiny, and just generally seem like something a person would make up for the purposes of performing with Prince — do you just write him a letter at some point, to let him know you exist?”.

Among other noteworthy details one turns up via a “Twinz” and “Prince” Google search:

—They caused an apparent media firestorm after one of them dropped out of Australian Idol in order to pursue their dream as a duo act.

—They’ve appeared in Moulin Rouge, Son of the Mask and the Matthew McConaughey vehicle Surfer, Dude.

—They make their own, Disney-soundtrack-friendly music.

—Although they’ve been with Prince since 2007, and were even rumored to be simultaneously dating him, Hugh Hefner-style, they auditioned for roles in his one-time rival Michael Jackson’s ill-fated “This is It” performances in 2009.

—They really, really want to perform for Tom Green.