Ghost In The Machine: 1981/82

Police, Go Gos warm youthful audience...

A clique of rock bands dating back to the early '70s and even the '60s has dominated the pop charts for the past year: the Rolling Stones, REO Speedwagon, Journey, Rush, J. Geils Band and Styx. Only a handful of groups associated with the so-called next-big-thing - new-wave rock - has penetrated the upper reaches of the charts: the Cars, Blondie, the Police and the Go Gos."

The latter two teamed up for a rewarding concert Tuesday at Met Center before 15,000 fans who thought the hockey arena had been turned into a high-school sock hop. The Go Gos, a female quintet from Los Angeles, got the loudest cheers accorded any opening band in recent memory. The band was lively and fun, and the music had a beat you could dance to. The neophyte group showed much improvement over its local debut several months ago at Duffy's bar and its initial album, 'Beauty and the Beat', which is No. 11 on this week's pop chart.

The players' limited instrumental ability fits their simple but effective sound, an updated version of early '60s girl-group pop. And they dressed the part: mini-skirts and tutus with glamour-sleaze, ratted hairdos. Many of the female concertgoers sported similar out- fits with the addition of ubiquitous vogueish head-bands.

Go Gos lead singer Belinda Carlisle demonstrated a fresh but none-too-innocent voice; her dancing was less than graceful. By contrast, rhythm guitarist Jane Wiedlin carried on like a tantalizing dervish. Lead guitarist Charlotte Caffey manifested mastery of the requisite Ventures-like guitar licks. But drummer Gina Schock was too primitive and often leaden to the point where it might stifle the Go Gos' potential. That's critical because this band must develop more top-notch original material beyond 'Our Lips Are Sealed' and 'We Got the Beat' to prove that the Go Gos are for real.

With the Police's fourth and current album, 'Ghost in the Machine', the British trio has established itself as an important recording group. Tuesday's show at Met Center indicated the Police are a solid, if not remarkable, performing group even though the players lack showmanship.

The Police make the most effective use of three instrumentalists of any rock band since Cheap Trick. The Police is essentially a rhythm machine disguised as a trio. It is a controlled band playing carefully orchestrated music with little room for spontaneity. But there is something very entrancing about the sound.

For the uninitiated, the Police would seem like Steely Dan with straightforward lyrics, more energy and reggae flavouring. In fact, the British trio has done more to spread reggae to the world than any other non-Jamaican performer. Reggae rhythms are the foundations of many of the group's songs, including its first hit, 'Roxanne'. Moreover, lead singer Sting uses that elongated, lazy phrasing often associated with Jamaican reggae singers. His high tenor is quite likable and distinctive.

Sting, 30, who has acted in movies, made for a striking frontman. Regrettably, he was stationed behind a bass for most of the night and thus came off as less than dynamic. Occasionally when one of the three guest horn players took a solo he would dance around.

Sting also proved to be an effective cheerleader, which has been crucial to the band's amazing international acceptance. Yet too often he got carried away leading the audience in chants of his favourite gibberish, "e-ah-o." Certainly one of the Police's biggest hits owes its success to such a tactic: 'De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da'.

The hits came early during the 12-hour set, which made for awkward pacing. They were bright and bouncy, and the fans stood and sang along. However, there followed a half hour of less familiar and contrastingly boring songs, including 'Shadows in the Rain', featuring a mirrored ball and stage fog for effect, and 'Demolition Man', which was dense and dark and, at times, more strident than anything else played all night. It also was one of the few times guitarist Andy Summers took a solo.

Instrumental solos are few and far between in the Police's economic sound. When the band formed in 1977 out of England's punk scene, it began developing a mesmerizing synthesis of jazz, reggae and rock that would be a sound for the '80s. After all, Sting had come from jazz bands, American drummer Stewart Copeland from a progressive rock group and Summers from the legendary Animals.

The Police, who sing some numbers in French, aimed at performing and selling records in every country of the world. And the band has succeeded. Because what sells in Bangkok also sells in Bloomington. Tuesday's concertgoers-most of whom were young enough to be the children of the 38-year-old Summers - clearly have succumbed to the Police force. If I could have bottled the youthful energy there, I would have had enough to heat my home all winter.

A final note: the lax security staff did a less than exemplary job in keeping the aisles clear. It was a major effort to make one's way to the rest room, which has never happened before at Met Center.

(c) The Minneapolis Star by Jon Bream

Police's arresting concert proves good music can haul in a crowd...

The Police, the popular three-man new-wave group from England, supported by the Los Angeles punk band The Go-Gos, played Tuesday night to an enthusiastic audience of 16,920 at Met Center.

The attendance, among the highest ever for a concert at Met Center, is especially intriguing considering that the Go-Gos are just now breaking in as a national act. In addition, the Police, the evening's headliner, which only recently began playing arenas, is hardly a conventional, mainstream rock unit of the sort that usually 

Some would argue that the Police is simply too good to attract the size audience that shows up for Foreigner or used to for Led Zeppelin. Obviously, Tuesday night's crowd refuted that. Others would argue that the Police isn't good enough isn't rough enough, "authentic" or rebellious enough. That was the argument often stated by the British music press in 1977 and 1978, when the Police was getting started and when its members were being mistaken for punk rockers.

(Actually, the Police members bassist-vocalist Sting, guitarist Andy Summers and, the one American in the group, drummer Stewart Copeland encouraged that mistake in 1977 by dying their hair blond to play the part of a punk group in a chewing gum commercial. The dye-job remained.) 

Along with the latter argument, the case was made that the Police was simply appropriating Jamaican reggae rhythms, in the manner that white musicians had done for decades: diluting black idioms to make them more palatable for the mass white audience.

Surely, however, a certain number of white musicians have managed over the years to use those idioms merely as a point of reference and to fashion out of them something fresh of their own, whether it be jazz or rock and roll or the Caribbean rhythms that the Police utilizes in many of its songs.

The result in the Police's case, given the musical sophistication of each of its members, has been, on the four albums the band has released so far, a clever amalgam of jazz spontaneity and pop energy, of tunefulness married to complex but inviting rhythmic play. And certainly the 90-minute set the band played Tuesday night underscored that mix in the intricate but often playful rhythm patterns established among bass, guitar and drums and in the plaintive jazz-inflected falsetto singing of Sting (born Gordon Sumner).

Rhythm is what this trio is about. It's their subject, more, actually, than are the lyrics and even more so in concert, where the players are allowed the freedom to improvise and to shape their ideas over long forms. Summers uses his coloristic effects with liberal doses of echo and synthesizer sounds sparingly. Some of his most exciting moments, however, came in 'Demolition Man', a rhythm-and-blues-tinged number off the trio's new album that was his most conventional rock solo of the evening.

This is not a band that customarily indulges in long solos. Sting's funky solo during 'One World', with punctuations from the three horn players who occasionally augment the trio, was another highlight. All in all, it was a superb set, a combination of intellect and visceral appeal rare in the jungles of arena rock.

The Go-Gos, five women from Los Angeles, choose not to tax the intellect quite as much. The group's music, most of it written and arranged by guitarist Charlotte Caffey, is meant simply to be a fun combination of mid-'60s pop, surf-guitar lines (The Ventures recently recorded Caffey's 'Surfing and Spying') and a kind of innocent rag-tag punk sensibility and visual image. It works, and the audience loved them.

(c) The Star Tribune by Michael Anthony