Sting 3.0

Sting at Arena Zagreb: It's possible without perfectionism...

At his eighth concert in Croatia, held on May 27th at the Zagreb Arena, Sting performed for the first time with a line-up that matches his initial band – The Police.

Although it was initially announced that Sting would repeat his Zagreb concert from October 2022 when he performed the program My Songs, a repeat of his Las Vegas show, in the meantime he decided to make some changes and set up a new tour. It is called Sting 3.0 and refers to two things - that he performs in the format of The Police group, as a tercet and that it represents, in a way, the third part of his career - when he has already achieved everything he wanted as the leader of the band that mainly pushed the new wave towards the mainstream and as a mega-successful solo artist, he can now quite relaxedly combine parts of his past work in the way he wants.

He performed on stage with his longtime collaborator, guitarist Dominic Miller, who performed at his last concert in Arena Zagreb, while Luxembourger Chris Maas, who is also a member of the Mumford and Sons tour line-up, sat behind the drums. On Monday, May 27, Sting performed in Croatia for the eighth time (so far he was three times in Pula and four times in Zagreb), and it was the first time he played in such a small line-up, not counting the performance with Edin Karamazov in Zagreb's Vatroslav Lisinski hall in 2009.

Although he emphasised several times that the Zagreb performance is the first in which he plays in a power trio line-up, the Sting 3.0 tour began on May 25 in Dresden. Perhaps that performance served him as a kind of training, an examination of the audience, so the Zagreb concert was truly the "first real one", but Sting made an effort to really offer a concept different from another rehashing of old hits. At the same time, it was really interesting to hear how there were mistakes in the performance, how Sting got rid of perfectionism and how he can enjoy the concert with the band. In a way, the Zagreb concert was also a rehearsal, a taste of the audience, to see how the tour could be polished. It was clearly no coincidence that the band members had the same instruments from the beginning to the end of the performance.

Sting decided to reconcile several postulates from his career – he added several Police songs to the repertoire that he had not played for a long time, stripped some songs down, left the same arrangements for some as on the My Songs tour (e.g. inserting a part of Bob Marley's song "No Woman No Cry" into the Police's repertoire song "So Lonely"), and simply kept some, such as the final "Fragile", the only one he played on an acoustic guitar, not a bass.

Lighter songs from his solo career such as "Fields Of Gold", "Shape Of My Heart", as well as the excellently received "Desert Rose" were discreetly covered with the sounds of additional instruments from tapes, which was also evident during the performance of the opening "Voices Inside My Head" from The Police repertoire. On the other hand, Miller and Maas almost didn't even get into the microphone, which was quite noticeable in some of the performances. Where Sting was helped by the audience, such as "Englishmen In New York", a song that was one of the highlights of the performance, Sting really didn't need backing vocals, but in some songs the choruses were kind of bald.
Sting

A good part of the responsibility for that lies with the insufficiently well-tuned sound system, which only worked after an hour of the performance, during the song "Mad About You". At the age of 73, Sting still looks great, but his vocal performances are not so good any more and playing only his vocals should have been handled differently. In the second part of the concert, however, the vocals were amplified, as were the other instruments, and everything seemed much better.

After the performance of the opening three songs, Sting and his companions took pieces of paper out of their hats that said what they would play next, so the first part of the concert was spent in (seemingly?) arbitrary selection of songs and his solo career. In some songs, Sting made an extensive arrangement, and that's where the joy of playing music together, as well as their playing superiority, was mostly felt. That's how "Roxanne" got an extra part in the encore.

The regular part of the performance lasted 90 minutes, and the encore during which "Roxanne" and "Fragile" were performed was about fifteen more, so although it seems too short for such a calibre of superstar, about 13 thousand visitors (there were fewer than in 2022, but three times more than in 2012 when he performed at the same place) left the performance more than satisfied. Sting delivered everything that was expected of him, while ceasing to be a slave to perfectionism.

A solid supporting act was the Italian Giordana Angi, who in her career also recorded a duet with Sting.

(c) Glazba by Bojan Mušćet

Sting at Arena Zagreb enjoyed the brave trio performance and pulled songs out of his hat...

Sting and his two sidekicks proved to be even more of a top instrumentalist, and of course a singer, and they were so good that it was often unbelievable how just three people could "fill" the sound and play a diverse concert.

Just a year and a half after his last performance at Arena Zagreb, Sting once again attracted around 15,000 people to the hall, despite the fact that he was also playing in Ljubljana two nights later. It was a brave decision by the organizers, because usually during the tourneys people "rest" and miss the cities where the concerts were held previously, but the stands were full on both levels, and the floor was densely packed all the way to behind the mixing console.

The biggest difference was that on the current "3.0" tour, Sting is performing in a trio formation, with only guitarist Dominic Miller and drummer Chris Maas, so he has returned to the Police era, at least formally. This was also the biggest advantage and interesting thing about the concert, because in a little over a hundred minutes of performance with 22 songs, he showed the joy of playing in a small combo, where there is no hiding, long solos or sections of backing singers, keyboards, percussionists and "filling" time. On Monday night, Sting, with his two sidemen, proved to be even more of a top instrumentalist, and a singer of course, and they were so good that it was often incredible how only three people could "fill" the sound like this and play a diverse concert. With additional effort, we would say, but also with great material and arrangements of songs in which everyone had to give their best.

This year, Sting also introduced some Police songs, such as the opening "Voices Inside My Head", which he hadn't played since 2006, "Never Coming Home" from 2012 or "Synchronicity II" from 2018, wanting to refresh a repertoire that has so many hits that he might have gotten bored. "I know how to start a concert, I know how to end it, but I don't know what to do in the middle," he said at one point (and of course he was lying), so to make things even more interesting, they played a dozen songs in the middle of the performance by drawing the names of the songs from pieces of paper in a hat, which makes every concert different. Sting did everything to make it more interesting for him, and for the audience - although, I think, they got tired of some of the lesser-known songs, because they only know the hits - and as a top bassist, he played a concert where his work on four strings alone would show the passion for music of a pop star and author who is in that position by no means accidental.

(c) Večernji list by Slavni Glazbenik