Sting: My Songs Tour: 2021 - 2023

Sting is a master of meditation pop – and a music teacher...

The musical superstar Sting oscillates between dynamic brilliance, muzak and unexpectedly modern meditation pop.

In Gothenburg, he also takes on the role of music teacher.

– How nice of you to come with us! exclaims a mother in line to her teenage son with company.

– We're thinking of turning around, this one replies lightning fast.

In the dogmatic youth, it's easy to sneer at certain artists. Good music is always a risk – that includes Sting.

Inside the Tradgardsforeningen, the comfort factor is high. Soft drinks, seagulls and fountains. The atmosphere is very Sting, if you like. The musical superstar has sometimes been accused of being quite pleased with himself and his song collection, like a British Tomas Ledin.

Gordon Sumner comes to Gothenburg after just finishing a series of shows in Las Vegas. He was there as late as yesterday, he says. Only a man with seventeen Grammys under his belt calls months of concerts at Caesars Palace “a small gig”.

The lithe 70-year-old, tonight in a striped T-shirt and short jacket, sings through a headset. A detail that says a lot about the artist who has often been more interested in the functional than the traditionally dressy. This grip allows Sting to move smoothly across the stage while singing, as if in a constantly microphone-free music video.

The Police classic “Message in a bottle” quickly turns into “Englishman in New York”, a piece of backbeat rock with harmonica that gets the audience waving their arms and clapping their hands. The opening sets a clear tone. Sting continues to alternate between The Police and the most popular number of his solo career.

Musicality is his signature. Rock, jazz, reggae, whistling – everything turns into catchy songs in the hands of Sting. In many ways, the meditation pop of the late 80s and early 90s has aged better than the punkish period of The Police. “Fields of Gold” has more in common with the present than, say, a rather gaping “Roxanne”. “Shape of my heart” is a piece of sensitive scented candle pop that my younger self would have snorted at. “Fragile” makes me long for the bossa nova album that picks up where the Jobim collaboration “How insensitive” left off somewhere on the beach of Ipanema.

Sting’s boundless musicality is both a blessing and a curse. The music sometimes ends in muzak, sometimes in dynamic brilliance. The Englishman’s musical teaching skills know no bounds. When he asks the audience to clap for the song “Seven Days,” he stops them when they accidentally increase the tempo (the song is impossible to clap along to begin with).

In the long-awaited uncomplicated pop moment “Every breath you take,” I can’t stop staring at Sting’s thumb, and how nimbly it moves over the bass while he sings.

(c) Aftonbladet by Per Magnusson