57th & 9th: World Tour

No stakes, friendly - Sting in the Arena...

There was nothing special about him, but we got an enjoyable best-of program from the English guitarist-singer, who returned to Budapest after five years, on Friday the 13th at the Papp László Budapest Sport Arena. It should never get worse. Of course, it can get better at any time.

What's exciting in pop is when it's happening. The present. When something (a band, a style, or a concert) unfolds before our eyes, right in front of our noses. What could be, the future tense, has the potential or germ of excitement, but what was, the past, can only be reproduced. Of course, that can also be pleasant and experiential. The latter happened last night at Budapest's largest indoor concert venue.

If we wanted to summarize what important things happened to Gordon Matthew Sumner in the past, let's say, 20 years, who naturally deserves a chapter in rock history, it wouldn't be easy. If we wanted to take stock of important and significant events. 

The former Police leader, who had few more current items on the pop music market in the second half of the eighties, and even at the turn of the decade – as a solo artist – released a new album last year entitled 57th & 9th – with which he reopened Le Bataclan in Paris in November 2016 – but before that he was unable to record a single valid sound on record for a long time. After 1999's Brand New Day, he made a medieval song album, a lute album, a folk-musical Broadway piece that made a significant impact, a symphonic self-arrangement album, and a pop album that was hard to like.

In 2007, he reunited his former band and embarked on a long nostalgia tour, then performed with Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel, winning a Grammy Award, becoming a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and playing for Barack Obama and Uzbek President Karimov (the latter turned into a major scandal - Sting allegedly thought it was a UNICEF-supported performance, but it turned out it wasn't), but it was noticeable that the artist, who was once bursting with musical ideas, couldn't find his own creative vein.

In this overall picture, the aforementioned new album from 2016, in which Sting once again took on the role of guitarist and rock bandleader, did not improve much, at most it put something on the scale. While a retired Paul Simon, Robert Plant, and even Elton John are making new albums reminiscent of their best days, Sting's lack of inspiration is a sore spot.

However, this only has so much to do with last night that we cannot accuse the 66-year-old Newcastle-born pop veteran of a lack of self-reflection, as he put together a set list that - with the exception of three new songs, one of which he did not even perform in full - focused exclusively on the Police and the more successful part of his solo career (roughly the first eight years of his career). Thanks to him for that.

This evening we had a stripped-down concert in every respect, which was strangely opened by Sting's son, Joe Sumner, with a single guitar (his performance was a duet between his father and son, the song Heading South on the Great North Road from the latest Sting album). Then the 41-year-old child remained on stage, as a vocalist behind his father; he had previously performed in front of his father with his band Fiction Plane (he is not clumsy, but he is not particularly talented either, he obviously could not stand on these boards of the world if his last name were not Sumner).

So: minimal lights, no visual hocus-pocus behind the stage, just the two large projection screens, no long monologues, often overlapping songs that flowed from song to song, and the band's line-up itself was also sparse, in keeping with the rock inspiration of the latest album, with two guitars and no keyboard player. Only one vocalist (the other one besides Joe Sumner) occasionally played the tango harmonica, which again showed that, with a few justified exceptions - because he is terribly mannered - he has no business at a rock concert.

But nothing could stand in the way of the fans' happiness. When Sting brings the best of his oeuvre, which is the net past tense, to the stage, we don't feel any unpleasant aftertaste (as we felt, for example, at Robbie Williams' summer concert); both the subject of the performance and the performer are complete, compact and undamaged. There are none, because there is no need for witty quotation marks to reinterpret or quote the songs, and (with one or two exceptions) there are no mannered, important, wordy musical remarks.

However, we could scream at the top of our lungs to the chorus of Message In The Bottle that there will be a presso on Szentmihály, we could laugh to ourselves - while of course enjoying the song itself - wondering how many people might be thinking at this very moment about Every Breath You Take, about a man who is being dumped by his ex-girlfriend, that it will be the perfect song for the wedding, we could click again and again how there is not a single grain of dust on the three and a half decades of Police songs, we could state that the Englishman In New York works well when arranged for a rock band, and we could do a quick mental calculation that loyal guitarist Dominic Miller has been playing with Sting practically continuously for over 25 years now (bracket: Sting's other guitarist is also Miller, Rufus Miller). Finally: we can hear Sting and his band bowing their heads to the two pop stars who passed away in 2016 with the David Bowie song Ashes to Ashes (sung by Joe Sumner) and the accompanying Sting song 50,000, inspired by the deaths of Bowie and Prince.

(Plus: we also saw that Gergely Gulyás, who "wasn't seen wearing anything more casual than a jeans+tie combo even at the faction meetings held in wellness hotels", also honoured Sting with a suit and tie)

It was as if we had seen the hundredth performance of a long-running classic play in a well-known theatre - the play we had already seen once years before. We watched it, we loved it, we went home. It happens.

(c) hvg.hu