Soul Cages: 1991/92

But yours is rock, dear Mr. Sting - The English artist has kicked off his Italian tour in Calabria. And Reggio is thrilled...

Everything's fine. Controversies aside, rock is moving forward very well, even in good health. And in response, Sting, a former schoolteacher and now a champion of more advanced and noble ideas for popular music, has given his concert a decisive rock edge.

The line-up and setlist are more or less the same as the spring-summer tour, but everything that seemed scattered, slow, and a little disjointed has acquired a new cohesion. The dominant tone is energy: raw, tense, and pressing. There's no longer any room for slower, more sparse songs. Instead, surprising references emerge, from 'Gimme Some Lovin' to 'Purple Haze'. Everything flows at a pace that seems slightly accelerated, as if an imaginary director had turned the tempo dial forward.

Sting is now demanding a greater commitment from his partners—guitarist Dominic Miller, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, and keyboardist David Sancious—thanks to the close bond they've built over the past few months. The four of them seem to proceed with immediate and burning automatism. They all move at breakneck speed, running through the setlist's highlights with indomitable determination.

It's Sting's first time venturing into the deep south, and the five thousand people in attendance at the new Reggio Calabria sports hall (musically a kind of metropolitan nightmare with its slurred bass and piercing, mushed high notes) celebrated the event with utmost enthusiasm, a hubbub and joyful cheer that would perhaps be less likely in big cities, more accustomed to rock concerts and, especially, today more disenchanted with the little myth Sting has built. His arrogance and excessive narcissism had significantly dented his popularity. He seemed plagued by presumption, a grave sin and difficult to forgive, especially when the musical product doesn't live up to the accompanying arrogance. And on Sting's latest album, 'The Soul Cages,' there was a chorus of disconsolate tepidity. Ultimately, rather than presumption, the album seems afflicted by those tortuous and complacent autobiographical twists and turns that many artists express when they're lacking creative freshness, when the spell that sustained them breaks with no apparent explanation.

But in all fairness, it must be said that the concert seen the other night, the latest leg of this very long tour (Tuesday in Naples and Wednesday in Bari) that began in January and is still packed with dates, clears away many of these doubts. The overall acceleration imparted to the music, the excited and feverish atmosphere, greatly reduce that tone of arrogance, leaving little time for excesses of self-satisfaction. Even the solos are significantly reduced. Sometimes the songs are performed one after the other without interruptions, structured with the utmost essentiality. This fate is experienced by the great classics of the past like 'Driven to Tears', 'Roxanne', and even 'Message in a Bottle', played at breakneck speed, thus eliminating the usual rhetoric reserved for ritual masterpieces. It's also experienced by the new songs, those from 'Soul Cages', which seem less heavy in this live version.

Sting, moreover, plays only the electric bass, so that the final impression is unavoidable and very precise. Anyone who remembers the last Police tour will find incredible similarities. There too, the three seemed to be in a rush, re-proposing almost every song from the repertoire at a faster-than-normal pace. These are significant similarities. The truth is that Sting has regained some ground by shedding wherever he can that poetic overtones that had burdened his image, and in doing so he had no choice but to return to his great, unrepeatable experience with the Police.

(c) La Repubblica by Gino Castaldo (thanks to Valeria Vanella)