Summoner's Tales: 1993/95

Sting: something simple...

You had to be there, really, but after his first number on stage at the Albert Hall, Sting told a joke!

He'd come on in a buttoned-up frock coat and launched into 'If I Ever Lose My Faith in You', the constant plod of his bass working with the easy lope of the drums. And when it was finished, he caught sight of a small conga of late arrivals, hunched down and sneaking along the main aisle. ''Pah! Critics!'' he said.

OK, it's not exactly Groucho Marx, but this is Sting we're talking about here, a man not renowned for comic turns. There's been much talk of a recent character shift, easing off on the clenched seriousness. There's a fair chance that this is mostly just convenient PR, an easy narrative for the magazines to help give his new album a bit of top-spin.

Sting may jaw on about the rainforests far less frequently these days, but then again, there he is in this month's Esquire, demonstrating for the interviewer the yoga exercise with which he vacuums his bowels. Plus ca change.

Still, there's definitely a light airiness blowing through this current touring show. It sets Sting at the heart of a simple but extraordinary band, his best context (witness the Police); Vinnie Colaiuta plays drums; Dominic Miller is the skinny guitarist, almost completely obscured behind a floppy fringe; and at the keyboards sits the remarkable David Sancious, who seems at times to be playing with five hands.

They were with him last time round, touring to promote 'The Soul Cages' which, caught up with Sting's own writer's block and explicitly about his father's death, was by no means the album of a party animal. Still, even then this band kicked life into songs that lay defiantly flat on the record. Their reward is to return and have a lot more fun messing with the numbers from 'Ten Summoner's Tales', an album that isn't, strictly speaking, ''about'' very much other than Sting's enjoyment in making it.

We're told he knocked the songs together in a fortnight, and it's meant as a compliment that, played loud and clear here, they sound as though they took him a good deal less. Some of the numbers are quick and unfussy in a manner you could reasonably have thought you would never hear from Sting after the Police broke up and he started fooling around with jazz musicians. The album does have its complications - its occasional self involved curlicues, its moments of puzzling 7/4 time. But these seem to have more to do with noodling about for a laugh than with voyaging into the (doubtless fascinating) recesses of Sting's soul.

'Seven Days', played here with additional bounce and snap, is a gorgeous song with a chorus that, unusually in pop, evolves, rather than simply walks a nice phrase round the block a few times. 'The Shape of My Heart', meanwhile, is this album's 'Fragile', sweet and spacey.

The show doffs its cap to the Beatles by taking a brave stab at 'A Day in the Life' and including Penny Lane as a karaoke encore. But there were far more convincing gestures towards a group who were nearly as successful.

''Here's a song by the Police,'' said Sting, and the backdrop lit up, while the band charged noisily into 'Synchronicity', unseating the entire stalls area.We also got a rather woozy and inflated 'Roxanne'.

More reliable by far were the numbers that were austerely clipped - 'Fortress Around Your Heart', say, and the encores, 'Every Breath You Take' and 'Fragile', which brought him ovations. These are never entirely guaranteed in the Albert Hall's muggy hush.

It must be the way Sting tells them.

(c) The Independent by Giles Smith

Old songs still prove safest for fortysomething Police survivor of the 1970s Punk Wars...

Headlining at The Royal Albert Hall is certainly a long way from a walk-on part in a Wrigleys chewing gum commercial.

Strange but true: Gordon Sumner, the son of a milkman and founder of The Rainforest Foundation, is the world's most popular bassist, yet the thousands of people up on their feet at one of London's most prestigious and hallowed venues prefer not to call him by his real name. Gordon Sumner is the man they call Sting - so named due to his early days as a wearer of black and yellow striped jumpers.

The bassist - who, along with Elvis Costello, is the only high profile British rock star to have commercially survived from his early days on an independent record label - is also one of the select handful of rock stars known by a one word moniker. Along with Cher, Madonna, Prince, Morrissey, and, er, Donovan, Sting has managed to capture the imagination of a collective psyche whose worldview is measured in sound and sight bites. Latterly, however, Sting has been on the receiving end of a media mauling. Call it the forty-something cerebral blues, call it a lack of common touch, but these days Sting is not as golden a boy as he used to be. It wasn't always like that...

Back in the mid 'seventies, when whey-faced youngsters were girding their loins for action in the Punk Wars (1976-1978), Sting was a school-teacher in the north of England, playing jazz bass, part-time, with Last Exit. Moving to London in search of fame and fortune, Sting was head-hunted by American Stuart Copeland whilst both were in a band called Strontium 90, an occasional jazz fusion outfit led by a former member of one of rock music's most surreal groups, Gong. Guitarist Andy Summers was also an on-off member of this band. The seeds of The Police were duly sown, and soon the threesome flowered into a fully fledged mature rock band, albeit drip fed on the commercial possibilities of punk. In 1977, the band released their debut single, 'Fall Out', on Illegal, a label owned by Stuart Copeland's brother. Once they'd signed to a major label, it was hits all the way... 

For over six years, The Police could do no wrong, their combination of astute, ironic lyrics and a variety of styles - reggae, pop, ersatz punk - keeping them well above the murky waters of pop's Bermuda Triangle. At the helm, Sting reigned supreme.

In interviews, he fast became known as one of rock music's intellectuals, slyly name-dropping literary icons such as Vladimir Nabokov and Arthur Koestler in song titles and lyrics - the former with the single, 'Don't Stand So Close To Me', the latter with the album, 'Ghost In The Machine' (A&M). Even the title of the group's third album, 'Zenyatta Mondatta' (A&M), was tainted - or so it seemed to critics far too quick to lambast a snotty rock star for lapses into supposed pretension-with a degree of intellectual snobbery and arrogance: it's Sanskrit for Top Of The World'.

Some of those same critics were at Sting's recent concert in the Royal Albert Hall, and they certainly seemed to be enjoying The Police material more than the man's solo output. Even Sting's Joe and Josephine Punter contingent seemed to thrive on the old songs. It was easy to understand why.

The difference between his latest single, 'If I Ever Lose My Faith In You' and The Police's 'Synchronicity' is the difference between apathy and energy, the difference between Sting's original jazz background and his clever assimilation of punk's corporate tenets. The crowd recognised this and, so it would seem, did Sting. Only a fool or a person locked in a flotation tank - and don't be too surprised, it takes all sorts to make up the numbers in a Sting audience - wouldn't have noticed the surge of vitality that invested those present to transform themselves from mild mannered and eco-friendly pop fans to a bunch of slavering, primitive beasts. Or something like that...  

Following a couple more Police hits, 'Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic' and 'Roxanne', Sting brought down the enthusiasm levels with a track off his latest album - 'Ten Summoner's Tales' (A&M) - the rather quaint and genuinely lovely 'Shape Of My Heart'. But by then it was too late to reconcile Sting's image as an environmentally-caring, socially aware, intellectual rock star with the reality of what we saw on stage - a man whose roots appeared to be in conflict with his conscience. For an audience - specifically this audience - Sting's value lies in his ability to come up with the goods. The oldies wanna rock? Fair enough... For Sting, the audience's values lie in their willingness to support the headliner through good and bad songs, tight pop tunes and jazz doodlings. Sting had the decency to perform with a modicum of restraint and respect for his fans. And why shouldn't he? He's the post-Live Aid rock star who tours the world's chat shows with Indian chiefs, who is as much inspired by Bach and Shakespeare as he is by The Beatles and Charlie Parker. 

Sting? He's a music snob as well as a pub rocker. And a clever one to boot. The all-round entertainer.

(c) The Sunday Tribune by Tony Clayton-Lea