Ghost In The Machine: 1981/82

The Police do an arresting concert for a grateful crowd...

A Seattle new music fan once told me he liked his music to be like his teeth: ''Tight when I bite.'' I hope he was at the Coliseum last night to hear the Police and Huey Lewis and the News. Both groups played as tightly as possible, bunkering down on the melodies without letting up on the beat.

The crowd that packed into the Coliseum was clearly a Police crowd, displaying a taste I can't say I entirely shared before the trio lit up into their set. For me, listening to this group's albums can be a stiff sentence.

A few great tunes stand out, such as 'Don't Stand So Close To Me' and 'Spirits In The Material World', but the majority of their material tends to run together, clean melodies blended with reggae's slightly bent rhythms heated up to on a rock'n'roll burner. Granted, The Police are superb musicians, and lead singer Sting has the purest tenor voice to come out of England since Paul McCartney.

On their albums, however, they sound encased in their own proficiency, as if skill were for them a barrier to felling.

No such problems afflicted their live performance last night. They played all out, with flair and emotional resonance. I think the crowd brought out the best in the group. The fans present made a living wave of grateful reaction that immediately washed back up on the stage, bathing the performers in its genial grace.

Because the group tended to play their songs in tight succession, they squeezed a lot into this one set, including 'Spirits In The Material World', 'Message In A Bottle', 'Every Little Things She Does Is Magic', 'Walking On The Moon', 'Roxanne', and 'Demolition Man'.

The light show during The Police set was the best I can remember seeing at a rock show. It wasn't flashy, but it made light a palpable presence, another chord in the music.

San Francisco's Huey Lewis and the News had to work harder to win the crowd, but win them they did. Lewis and his group have their musical feet planted firmly in rhythm and blues. Lewis's gravelly but sweet voice is perfect for the blues-style growls and warbles.

The group favoured material from their recent album, 'Picture This'. Particularly good was their live version of 'Working for a Living' from that album. They slowed it down and made it more raucous. Another highlight was Lewis on mouth harp with John Colla on sax, in a blues duet.

Both Lewis and The Police can be vacuous in their material, but last night both groups played so well it was hard to fault them for occasionally weak material.

(c) The Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Regina Hackett

Police make Coliseum seem small...

The Police will never top their unforgettable performance at the Showbox two years ago, but last night's Coliseum concert came close. The Showbox show was special mainly because it was small. The audience could get close to the band and vice versa, which made us all seem one. Eventually everyone was bouncing in unison, turning the floor into a trampoline. We almost literally tore the house down. Last night the Police tried to create the same kind of intimacy by getting the near capacity audience involved as much as possible.

Sting, the lead singer and bassist, called for crowd response almost from the moment the band stepped on stage. And he got it, whether asking for a sing-along or a yell of approval. That unified the audience and helped make the concert less impersonal than most Coliseum rock shows. The audience responded readily because the Police deserved it. Away from touring for a long time while Sting made movies and the other two members did solo projects, the band was refreshed, tight and determined to please.

The sound system, suspended above the stage, helped considerably. Big and powerful, it turned some of Sting's bass solos into tangible sonic waves that vibrated listeners' bodies. It made Andy Summers' guitar solos crisp and shimmering and Stewart Copeland's masterly blend of rock and reggae drumming come through loud and clear.

Already influenced by reggae and rhythm-and-blues, the British group's music was funkier than ever before because of a soulful three piece horn section that backed it on many tunes.

All the songs in the 90 minute set came from the band's albums but most were reworked, some rhythmically, others instrumentally. The crowd loved all of them.

Having Huey Lewis and the News open the show was a brilliant stroke. Its music is all over the radio and on Music Television, so the band didn't have to prove itself - the audience already was on its side.

Its classy blend of traditional instrumentation - sax, harmonica and keyboards as well as the usual guitar, bass and drums - and earthy lyrics was a big hit with the crowd.

(c) The Seattle Times by Patrick MacDonald

Police concert shoots for the moon...

What The Police have going for them aside from taste, precision, energy, polish, technical wizardry and style are a sense of anger and a vivid aversion to impracticality.

They're slick, organized and efficient. Wednesday night at the Seattle Coliseum the British threesome (Andy Summers, Stewart Copeland and Sting) zipped through more than a dozen numbers in a little more than an hour dispensing echoes, reverberating guitar lines, ice fog, tempestuous philosophical observations, hi-tech lighting effects and sophisticated harmonies with impressive assurance.

For a trio, The Police generate amazing volume. Most of it is provided by electronic gadgets that, among other things, transform ordinary guitar licks into sonic probes. But they're capable of rocking conventionally, too, and the presence onstage of three horn players added immeasurably to the effect.

At full bore, with the guitar soaring, the drums ratcheting, the horns blaring and the lights flashing, the group achieved an exotic musical panorama that was both fresh and emphatic. They don't sound quite like any other band and, yet, they're plunk in the middle of the pop mainstream.

Their songs reflect the sarcastic and/or defi ant tone of most new-rock groups: 'Demolition Man', 'Living in the Material World', 'Bring on the Night', 'Shadows in the Rain', etc.

However, The Police are far flashier and more lyrical than most of their competitors. The dissonance that occasionally surfaces in their numbers is strictly controlled and integrated into the patently identifiable whole. Their songs are built on hooks (catchy themes) but such elaborately complex ones that they barely deserve that potentially derogatory designation.

Huey Lewis and the News, the pop-rock combo that opened the Coliseum show, not only deserve that appellation, they sound as if they invented it. Romping through numbers like 'I Hope You Love Me Like You Say You Do' and 'Sooner or Later' and 'Working for a Living', Lewis' oddly conventional, very musical group resembled nothing so much as a souped-up version of an early 1960s' dance band. They went straight for the glands.

Like The Police, Lewis' act was as shiny as a well-cared-for revolver. The News (which, I presume, was the band) pounded out the slightly-more-than basic rhythm patterns with confidence and style, while Lewis, whose singing is smooth and methodical, bounded around the stage self-consciously, in what amounted to a caricature of an uninhibited rock'n'roller.

Nevertheless, Lewis and his group and The Police are light years ahead of old rock'n'roll. They utilize virtually every improvement that has come along over the years. At times, with their tonal devices in play or just chopping out the noise expertly, they were almost like compilations of rock history. But they were always interesting and proficient, and they were perfectly in tune with the times- that is, strangely noncommital.

(c) The Herald by Jim Kelton