Sting & Shaggy: The 44/876 Tour

Sting and Shaggy, The Roundhouse, review: (almost) every little boombastic thing they did was magic...
 
Somebody call the Police! With every sinew of my being, I expected this concert by Sting and Shaggy – the po-faced English multi-millionaire bass player and the cartoon-like Jamaican dancehall star, respectively – to be as enjoyable as hangover at a lute recital. It’ll be like one of those incongruous collaborations they put on at the Brit Awards in an effort to shoehorn all the nominees in, I thought. Nightmarish (and thankfully never realised) pairings of Mark Knopfler and Chaka Demus & Pliers, of Peter Gabriel and Peter Andre, ricocheted around my head. But how wrong I was. This “Staggy” night turned out to be a heartwarming and hugely entertaining celebration of music by two men who were clearly loving every curious moment.

What bonds the men is Jamaica. Reggae and ska formed the bedrock of The Police’s sound, and Shaggy’s chart-friendly pop about, well, shagging has become one of his country’s biggest musical exports. What started as a one-off collaboration between Sting and the self-styled Mr Lover-Lover in a Los Angeles studio in 2017 became an album called 44/876, named after the telephone calling codes for Britain and Jamaica.

The record went on to win the Grammy for best reggae album earlier this year (pity fellow nominees and reggae stalwarts Black Uhuru, who 35 albums into their career were pipped to the award by these arrivistes). It also caused something of a career flourish; 44/876 was Sting’s first UK top 10 album for 16 years and Shaggy’s first for 18 years.

This concert worked for three reasons. Firstly, it added some much-needed levity to Police songs, which I’ve always found straitjacketed by earnestness. Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic became the sun-kissed anthem it has always threatened to be. (The show also lent a touch – just a touch, mind – of musical heft to Shaggy songs). Secondly, it showcased two complementary voices: Sting’s dextrous and silky tenor worked surprisingly well with Shaggy’s throaty “toasting”. Englishman in New York became a celebration of immigration, with Shaggy changing the lyrics to become a “Jamaican in New York”, substituting the “walking cane” in Sting’s hand for “a spliff” (of course). Meanwhile Shaggy’s Oh Carolina segued neatly into Sting’s We’ll Be Together.

But the third reason it worked was because both performers seemed aware of how ridiculous the whole thing was. They played up to their differences. Sting, 67, wore “serious” figure-hugging black while Shaggy, 50, sported the works: a white stetson, billowing white shirt, shades and chunky jewellery.

They had sing-offs. At one point when Shaggy hip-thrusted his way across the stage, Sting retreated into the darkness in mock horror. In a recent interview, the bassist said he was reluctant to sing the line about “banging on the bathroom floor” in Shaggy’s It Wasn’t Me because “I’m Sting, for God’s sake”. But he did sing it, and the song started sounding like a morality tale rather than a song about nookie.

It didn’t always work. The mixture of The Police’s Roxanne with Shaggy’s Boombastic paired a song about prostitution with a song about a “fantastic lova”. Bit weird. And Sting’s painfully sincere and frankly awful Desert Rose was far too Womad for the night’s Notting Hill Carnival vibe. Even Shaggy looked flaggy at this point.

But, my goodness, it was fun. I was going to give this concert four stars because in the review world five stars are reserved for infinitely credible, genre-defining shows, but my ear-to-ear grin on the Tube journey home convinced me otherwise. Sometimes, it pays to let your guard down. 

Just ask Sting.

(c) Daily Telegraph by James Hall

Sting and Shaggy review: A light-hearted experiment with some toe-curling moments...

And you thought Sting’s lute album was weird. How about collaborating with Shaggy, the mastermind behind hits such as Mr Boombastic and It Wasn’t Me? 

Despite their disparate CVs, the Sting and Shaggy experiment has proven surprisingly the popular. Their joint album 44/876 – a reference to the international dialling codes for their respective homes of the UK and Jamaica – won the Grammy for ‘Best Reggae Album’ and the Roundhouse was packed for the London stop of their UK tour. 

Opening number 44/876 saw the two men trade verses over breezy reggae backing, while Englishman in New York was changed by Shaggy to a “Jam-ai-can in New York”. 

As one might expect, the Sting and Shaggy experience is not without its toe-curling moments. “The ghost of Bob Marley haunts me to this day,” sang Sting in his dodgy white patois. Perhaps more surprising, though, was how many of the songs worked. Latest single Gotta Get Back My Baby was a sumptuous slice of palm-fringed pop on which Sting’s keening voice and Shaggy’s earthy rapping combined brilliantly.

What’s more, Shaggy’s demonstrable silliness – at one point he was wearing a judge’s wig sentencing Sting to life in prison – makes him a good wingman for an artist who, left to his own devices, has a habit of disappearing up his own posterior. 

Ultimately, few will be clamouring for a second Sting and Shaggy album or tour. However, as light-hearted experiments go, music’s odd couple hit all the right notes.

(c) Evening Standard by Rick Pearson

A very odd two hours: Sting and Shaggy reviewed...

Many is the pop star who has craved gravitas. Only Sting, however, has pursued it by covering John Dowland on an album on which he played the lute. Only Sting has released an album of winter-themed madrigals. Only Sting has written a musical about the closing of the shipyards in Wallsend. He’s the rare pop star who could, should he wish, have a pop at Slavoj Zizek for being just a bit too populist and crowdpleasing. All of which makes his current activities - an album and a tour with Shaggy, the reggae star who’s the reduced-for-quick-sale ready meal of the genre, and a man who is to gravitas as Chris Grayling is to competence - rather astonishing.

That they paired ‘It Wasn’t Me’ and ‘Every Breath You Take’ late in the show was surely not just about these being their best-known songs. Both are about jealousy and spying, but whereas ‘It Wasn’t Me’ is a Carry On film of a song (Shaggy’s persona is that of a Jamaican Sid James) in which our hero is caught ‘banging on the bathroom floor’ by a girlfriend who ‘even caught me on camera’, ‘Every Breath You Take’ is a sly and unsettling lyric about jealousy and control, paired with a taut, coiled melody. It’s the best song Bryan Ferry never wrote.

Side by side, the two tracks suggest that while to Shaggy everything is a joke, to Sting nothing is a joke. Perhaps, though, he’s had enough of being pop’s Mr Po-Faced. He headed back towards more straightforward pop on the 2016 album 57th & 9th, and the album with Shaggy - 44/876 - took him back to the UK top ten last year for the first time since 2003. The problem is that the songs on it are nowhere near as good as either Shaggy’s solo hits -which, for all their grindingly obvious sexuality, are at least fun - or Sting’s songs. It’s as if Sting has sanded down Shaggy’s lubriciousness, while Shaggy has broken Sting’s focus. There were moments when one thought: honestly, how has it come to this? Did Sting ever think he would be taking the role of a sidekick called Rayvon, playing an old Steve Miller bassline as Shaggy performs ‘Angel’ in front of him?

There were moments of unintentional bathos, too. Presumably Sting was dressed all in black, and Shaggy in some diaphanous white affair, to highlight the fact that, you know, we’re all the same under the skin. Ditto Shaggy’s speech about coming together despite our differences. Ditto the snippet of Bob Marley’s ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ that pops up in ‘Walking on the Moon’. But this was an audience that was not just all the same under the skin, but all the same on the skin, too. None of them were likely to have to stand up for their rights on the way home.

‘Reggae people!’ shouted Shaggy at one point - he shouted a lot, often at times when one wished he wouldn’t - and they cheered, possibly because this was the only time in their life they would be called reggae people.

Inevitably, it was the old Police songs that got the biggest cheers and the camera phones held aloft. They simply sounded sharper, clearer and more direct than anything else. ‘Walking on the Moon’ - all empty space, living up to its title - was glorious. And both ‘Every Breath You Take’ and ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ (narrator threatens to kill himself to make his ex feel bad) reminded one what a peculiarly vindictive songwriter Sting was before he decided that if you loved someone you should set them free.

It wasn’t a boring two hours, by any means. Just a very odd two hours. Still, at least there was no lute.

(c) Spectator by Michael Hunn