Blue Turtles: 1985/86

"Our album has been number two for five weeks and for one reason," said Sting, on the sixth and final night of a sold-out debut in New York City's Radio City Music Hall.

Before he could elaborate, out popped Mark Knopfler clad in a red headband an armed with a guitar. Knopfler's band,  Dire Straits, wouldn't play songs from their number one album, Brothers in Arms, until the next night. And if Sting had any complaints about chart positions, it was his own fault - his own voice helped make Money For Nothing number one.

Unlike last summer at Live Aid, a Sting-Knopfler duet didn't materialise - instead they jammed to an old blues song before Herbie Hancock came onstage and they knocked out a headbanging version of the Police's lethal Demolition Man, and encore to end all encores.

Getting past the screaming shrieks of crazed teenage girls who treated Sting's tour as the second coming of the Beatles, there was little to complain about his first shows since going on hiatus from the Police. If anything, listening to an older Police song like Driven to Tears seemed even more relevant three years later with the horror of Ethiopian famine stuck in our minds.

And in the Police song One World is Enough, Sting led his jazzy new back-up band through an ear-tingling assortment of Third World rhythms, a capella choruses and 1980's global village imagery. Sting segued effortlessly into Love is the Seventh Wave, turning his stage into a green, red and yellow coloured fiesta set. Brining the song to a gospel lull and then unleashing shrieks of passion, Sting was definitely enjoying himself.

With the melancholic soprano sax backgrounds of Branford Marsalis and his jazz-club intimacy evoked by Sting's band, Radio City had the aura of a Broadway revue. The Police's When the World is Running Down had a hotter salsa groove and Sting bounced around onstage like a pogo stick.

But Sting has one rock's social consciences and he juxtaposed the fun and humour of the night with some piercing remarks. He avoided playing his greatest solo work, Russians but played Love is the Seventh Wave back to back with We Work the Black Seam. The first he noted was about surfing, the latter, about coal mining in England. I might have bopped down the sidewalk on my way home but the black seam locked in my mind.

(c) Unknown newspaper by Steve Wosahla