Sting 3.0

Like in the days of The Police. Sting went back to basics in Prague…

His summer open-air concerts are becoming a nice tradition. After the castle park in Slavkov, the Lochotín amphitheatre in Pilsen and last year's Colours in Ostrava, he has now returned to Prague. He dedicated half of the evening to songs by The Police.

English singer and bassist Sting left his best-known band The Police when it was at its peak. "The band is a bit like a street gang. You don't want to stay in it forever," he says. "I felt like we had achieved everything we could. I wanted to explore and expand the instrumental palette in my music," he explains on YouTuber Rick Beat's show why he left in the mid-1980s, started a solo career and began performing with keyboards or saxophone.

Now the 74-year-old artist has made a move in the opposite direction. He has removed all the additional instruments from the band and is performing again in the basic trio with just a drummer and a guitarist. Every evening they play around twenty songs, half of which come from The Police's repertoire. This was also the case at Sting's Sunday concert in Prague's Letňany, which culminated in the tenth annual Metronome festival.

The winner of 17 Grammy awards, who has sold over 100 million albums worldwide, played for an hour and a quarter. Several thousand people listened to his hits, mostly from the 1970s to the 1990s.

This was his seventh performance in the Czech Republic since the end of the coronavirus pandemic. Since last year, he only managed to film a chamber evening for Arte television in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where he sings with the famous painting The Night Watch by Rembrandt van Rijn behind his back. Otherwise, he devoted most of his time to the partly autobiographical musical The Last Ship, which flopped with critics and audiences after its premiere on New York's Broadway in 2014. The commercial failure was not reversed at that time, even when the author of the music, Sting, himself jumped into the lead role.

Now the tables may be slowly turning. Through persistent work, Sting is managing to return the musical to the repertoire. This year alone, he performed with it in France and Australia, and this month he sang The Last Ship nine times at the prestigious Metropolitan Opera in New York. After which, after the last performance, he boarded a plane to Europe to continue his world tour with the trio.

He comes to the stage in Letňany in a tight T-shirt and pants, with his hair cut short, several bracelets on his left arm, a peeling Fender bass guitar around his neck and a headset microphone behind his ear so that he can move freely around the stage with the instrument. From the moment he and guitarist Dominic Miller and drummer Chris Maas start the first notes of the hit Message in a Bottle from The Police repertoire, they set the bar high and for several dozen minutes they practically do not let the audience breathe. One song goes into the next without pauses for applause.

Sting has a pretty unbeatable catalogue of pop hits with elements of rock, jazz and reggae, which he has now united in exceptionally straightforward arrangements. Former chart regulars If I Ever Lose My Faith in You, Englishman in New York or Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic retain the most important in the current version, although the musicians play them sparingly, shaved to the bone.

"Musically, the most interesting thing for me now is to reduce things to their essence, to focus on the most essential and to hope that when you remove everything around, a healthy core will still remain in each song. For the past year, I have been verifying that this is indeed the case," he replied last year when asked by the DPA agency why he does not perform with a larger group.

This is how he first appeared at Metronome in 2017, when he and Miller invited both of their sons to the stage at the Holešovice Exhibition Grounds and, in addition to the vocalists, they had an accordion player with them.

Since then, they have slowed down some of the tempos. This Sunday, they are taking a decidedly chamber approach to a few songs, and Sting is leaning on a high stool for part of the concert. Many songs benefit from new arrangements - Never Coming Home, whose complex riff Miller plays with both hands, ends with a long joint improvisation. And with the current arrangement of So Lonely, for example, the singer playfully cheers on the somewhat colder audience in places.

Performing an entire evening as a trio is challenging for both the seventy-year-old Sting, who sings while simultaneously playing often contradictory lines on the bass guitar with his fingers, and the sixty-year-old Miller. They have been working closely together since the album The Soul Cages, recorded in 1991 after both of the frontman's parents died in the same year.

Miller is the author of some of his most famous riffs and melodies. In Letňany, he plays them all evening on an ordinary 1960s Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. He uses his left foot to step on the so-called volume pedal, which he uses to control the sound level, and he uses a compressor a lot to balance the dynamics.

Otherwise, he makes do with a basic set of guitar boxes such as delay, tremolo or chorus. Only in a few songs where he plays rock solos, does Miller include overdrive or flanger effects. But the most important thing, the tone, the choice of notes, the overall feeling, lies in his hands and his perfect knowledge of the instrument, which Miller controls at a truly world-class level.

For several years now, the trio has been complemented by Luxembourg drummer Chris Maas, who played with the band Mumford & Sons and belongs to the generation of musicians who grew up on Sting's music.

All sounds are created here and now, only in the oriental hit Desert Rose does a pre-recorded sample sound. Some songs lack a bit of variety in other instruments, such as the bagpipes in Fields of Gold inspired by a walk through a barley field. In the current versions, however, Sting leaves more free space, thanks to which his bass lines can be heard perfectly. He is also still in excellent condition as a singer, phrasing is great, he retains his characteristic pronunciation and he still sings The Police hits in a relatively high tenor voice including falsetto.

It is of course retro, Sting had his last hit at the beginning of the millennium and with the exception of the only new song I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart) he does not play anything from the last 57th & 9th albums or the excellent The Bridge. The audience demands the best of and that is what he gets. He reaches the huge hit Shape of My Heart with a Bach-like descending bass line, an allegory for life on tour Walking On The Moon, King of Pain written after a divorce or Every Breath You Take. This 1982 song about jealousy has already been streamed 3.5 billion times on Spotify alone, making it one of the most-streamed songs of all time.

Even Sting has a hard time explaining why. “Maybe it’s because ‘Every Breath You Take’ is so ambiguous. Some people see it as a romantic love song, and some people see it as a song about a stalker. I think both versions are correct,” he said on CBS last month.

But perhaps the magic lies in what Sting’s current tour is revealing: how robust his songs are. That it’s not just about the riffs, melodies, or choice of specific instruments, but the overall structure of the song, including verses, choruses, bridges, key changes, and the final coda. Sting has managed to write so many hits with memorable scenes, characters, developments, and resolutions on this basis that even Sunday’s 21-song concert won’t be able to cover them all.

Of course, there is Roxanne towards the end, about a man who falls in love with a prostitute. In his autobiography Broken Music, the singer describes how he and The Police slept together in a cheap Parisian hotel at the time the song was written.

“The entrance is in a narrow, smelly alley right next to the boulevard. In the evening, it is lined with the blaring lights of a sex shop and the dimly lit window of an antique bookshop. About twenty women walk down the alley, leaning against the door and smoking one cigarette after another. They are wearing shiny open raincoats, miniskirts, cheap boots or high-heeled shoes,” he says. In the dirty hotel lobby, an old poster inviting a production of the play Cyrano de Bergerac is sadly peeling off the wall. “That night I go to my room and compose a song about a girl. I’ll call her Roxanne. I’ll conjure her up from the street in front of the hotel for free and wrap her in the romance and sadness of Rostand’s play,” he writes.

And then, of course, there’s the fragile ballad Fragile, which culminates the Prague concert. Sting wrote it in the late 1980s after a young American was shot dead in Nicaragua, but it took on a different meaning in the following decade. “When I sing it today, I think of Bosnia,” he said during the war in Yugoslavia. Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. That same day, Sting was filming a long-planned concert at his Tuscan villa. Visibly shaken, he opened it with a performance of Fragile dedicated to “all those who lost their lives today.” Many years later, he dedicated the song in Prague to the victims of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

This Sunday, the Englishman, who speaks minimally during the evening, will avoid a dedicated address. With the tactful accompaniment of Dominic Miller and Chris Maas playing with whisks, he will simply conclude his 18th concert in the Czech Republic. "I hope to see you again soon," he says goodbye.

(c) Seznam Zprávy by Daniel Konrád

Sting is always a warmly welcomed old acquaintance. He finished the Metronome Prague festival...

The Czech singer and musician Sting is a frequent guest in the Czech Republic. Last year he was the star of the Colours of Ostrava festival, this year the star of the Metronome Prague festival. He has previously visited our country as a musical guest more than ten times, so when it comes to world aces, he is one of those who come to us often and regularly.

This is definitely not a criticism, just a statement. If there is one thing the domestic music audience loves, it is top-quality musicians who do not hesitate to tour the world with their concerts.

The 74-year-old Sting, whose real name is Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, is one of them and thanks to this he returns to the local stages as an old acquaintance and always welcome.

The fact that he became a performer at the Metronome Prague festival was due to the fact that he had already performed there in 2017. His set at that time entered the nine-year history of the event as unforgettable, so when the organisers of this year's edition were looking for an artist who was also supposed to be at the ten-year celebration, Sting's choice was clear.

And he arrived. He is travelling the world with his Sting 3.0 Tour. He is accompanied by guitarist Dominic Miller, his long-time collaborator, and drummer Chris Maas, who played with the British group Mumford & Sons, for example.

As if they were The Police, the band in whose line-up Sting introduced his talent and vision to the world. It was also basically a three-piece.

Even though the breakup with his bandmates in 1986 was not overly friendly, Sting remembers songs from their repertoire. In Prague, they played Message In A Bottle at the very beginning and later added to it, among others, Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, So Lonely, Every Breath You Take or Roxanne.

Sting made a much stronger line behind his stage in The Police than behind their repertoire. After all, that band no longer exists. If those great songs hadn't been in his concert repertoire, they wouldn't have been performed live.

The majority of the concert set, and not just on the current tour, is of course songs from Sting's solo journey. He released his first solo album The Dream of the Blue Turtles in 1985. Although he doesn't play a single song from it on the current tour, he does play two from the 1987 No. 2 album Nothing Like the Sun, Englishman in New York and Fragile.

The Police songs and the two mentioned solo ones are proof of how timeless his authorial style is. There is no fundamental difference in the atmosphere of the older and newer songs. Yes, the lyrics are period, but the musical performance is defended by a sound that is just Sting-esque enough to send the archaic into a timeless form that his audience likes.

Moreover, for many years now, it seems that he has not lost his good singing condition. He is not a singer who would be God knows original, but his interpretation is so authentic that it was enough to enter the ranks of musical personalities.

There is no need to doubt the professional erudition of Miller and Maas. If they did not have it, Sting would not have gone on tour with them. Moreover, he has been working with Miller since the early nineties, so they have maximum trust in each other.

(c) Novinky by Jaroslav Špulák

Sting returns to prostitute Roxanne and old hits...

The tenth year of the Metronome festival was closed by Sting. He arrived in a line-up with a guitarist and drummer like in the days of The Police and played the best of his discography.

Gordon Summer aka Sting has felt at home in the Czech Republic in recent years. Last year he played at the Colours of Ostrava festival and later at a solo concert in Brno, this year he returned to Prague for Metronome. All this as part of his tour called Sting 3.0, where he returns to his roots as The Police.

In version 3.0, Sting plays in a minimalist three-piece line-up (just like The Police) with guitarist and long-time collaborator Dominic Miller and drummer Chris Maas. Sting plays bass guitar and sings at the same time, and although this is nothing new, it is still admirable how well he manages to keep the rhythm. The concert started right away with the song Message in a Bottle and then alternated material from his solo albums with The Police approximately half and half. From his own, there were Englishman in New York, Fields of Gold, Shape of My Heart, from the Police, Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, Every Breath You Take and of course Roxanne.

It was an almost two-hour full concert, Sting managed over twenty songs, played, sang and seemed completely relaxed and content. I would definitely not guess his current age of 74. Sometimes he said a short introduction to the song, repeatedly thanked with the Czech words "děkuju, Praha". In the line-up with Miller and Maas, they play the songs in raw rock arrangements with just bass, drums and guitar. It seems live, raw and yet completely full enough. Simply a rock power trio with everything.

In the encore, the band returned with Roxanne, which lit up the entire Letňany area red and the audience sang the famous song about a prostitute in unison with Sting, far from the first time that evening. Then, for the first time in the entire concert, Sting picked up a guitar instead of a bass and played the delicate song Fragile on it, and then he said goodbye for good. He promised to see us again. I believe him.

Thus ended the tenth year of the Metronome festival. The move from Výstaviště to Letňany was not very happy, especially due to the current heat, but at least on the second and third days the organisers really tried their best in terms of distributing free water. Over the three days, the festival offered three large, uncut performances by headliners, of which the captivating Nick Cave in particular will be among the best concerts of the year. In addition, famous and upcoming bands across genres performed, including the honey-voiced cowboy Orville Peck, shoegazers Slowdive, Scandinavian pop singer Lykke Li, Manic Street Preachers and Razorlight, my personal festival discovery Smerz, and the Czech discovery of the year Marie April.

(c) Headliner by Ondřej Kubín 

Sting confirmed his legendary status in Prague. Visitors to the Metronome Prague festival were completely captivated by Sting...

He influenced entire generations, from the youngest to the oldest. Sting is simply a concept, an icon whose hits are deeply etched under your skin. And the legendary British musician proved it again during the closing ceremony of the Metronome Prague festival at Letňany Airport. His polished performance took your breath away.

Sting is known for preparing for concerts carefully – thanks to this, he does not seem the least bit nervous on stage. He talked about this in an interview years ago: "I do vocal exercises. The vocal cords are a muscle, so I have to warm them up just like an athlete does before a performance. Then I drink water with lemon and apple cider vinegar. I take my job really seriously, so thanks to these preparations I don't suffer from nervousness and I know what to do. That's why when I go on stage, I don't drink Jack Daniels beforehand."

It should be noted that on Sunday, June 21st, he also appeared on stage in perfect shape. During a two-hour set, together with guitarist Dominic Miller and drummer Chris Maas, he confidently served the audience a cross-section of his career - from The Police era to solo hits.

Many fans' hearts skipped a beat when well-known songs such as Message in a Bottle, Englishman in New York, Fields of Gold, Shape of My Heart, Desert Rose or Every Breath You Take rang out throughout the venue. There was also an encore – after a storm of applause, Sting returned to the stage with the hit Roxanne and the intimate song Fragile, during which most of the audience just listened quietly. The fans simply couldn't get enough. Sting thus confirmed once again that even after more than half a century on stage, he has not lost his ability to move, captivate and stop time for a few minutes.

Sting loves the Czech audience and even said to them in 2017: "The fans in the Czech Republic are always a great audience, they enjoy the music." Perhaps that is why he likes to come back to us so much. He indirectly sent the same message this time too. So where will he show off his charisma next?

To his credit, he also said a few Czech words, which brought him closer to his domestic fans. His sincere "Thank you, Prague!" was answered with a touching "Thank you, master!".

(c) Forum 24 by Iveta Reinisch