Synchronicity: 1983/84

Police at the Spectrum: Stars haven't lost the common touch...

By showtime everyone who had passed the draconian security arrangements for last night's Police concert at the Spectrum were safely tucked inside, leaving many, many more standing out in the humid summer air, faces pressed to the huge glass doors.

Five minutes later, just before the band began taping their concert for international pay TV, Police manager Miles Copeland came to the front of the hall, gestured to the guards, and a hundred kids who'd figured they'd missed their chance came scrambling through the turnstiles to take their places at history in the making.

The occasion was a rare opportunity to see and hear the Police in a hall that didn't require the use of binoculars and a fertile imagination.

Equally though, it was an opportunity for the Police drummer Stewart Copeland, guitarist Andy Summers and bassist, singer and storm centre Sting, mightily augmented by a female vocal trio to rekindle their own imaginations in the face of a career that has lifted them from obscurity to the very pinnacle of contemporary musical success in four reality-bending years.

What transpired in the next couple of hours was a pop event to recapture the essential spirit of rock'n'roll, a concert to confirm the near-forgotten truth that music can change the world, and a great excuse to tie on your dancing shoes.

These three guys are not the Second Coming, you understand. It just seems that way after suffering through the corporate greed, corruption and intellectual self-indulgence that was the bottom line for the international rock industry of the 1970s.

The Police have initiated a different order, a brave new world for rock and the business of rock as we stumble forward toward the end of the century, and they've done it by keeping their game small, by listening to their own voices and the voices of the kids on the street before making their own decisions.

They have, in effect, become the new main- stream, and they could have easily have played the Big O tomorrow night and escaped with the cash. But part of the Police appeal is their refusal to entrench themselves in a parody of their shamelessly appealing, and cunningly simple, pop-reggae selves.

So they played for the fans last night (and smartly tied in an important video gig to boot) and tested the waters at club floor level for a new edition of the Police.

For the band that played last night is a rougher, bloodier, and infinitely more exciting band than the glossy, note-perfect trio that has always appealed without ever stirring thoughts of glory.

All the stuff they played from the recent LP 'Synchronicity' sounded like anthems, be it the eery, distant sounds of 'Tea In The Sahara' (Paul Bowles would approve) or the heartlifting 'Every Breath You Take', while the older material took on much more value that that of sheer nostalgia. It all worked.

(c) Montreal Gazette by John Griffin

Police do a 'sock-hop' show for 600 at Montreal nightclub...

"Gaza!" gawked the platinum blonde teenager as she crunched her way through the crowd, "this is just like a high school sock hop."

Some sock hop.

Up on stage, the smash British rock group the Police launched into a rare, two-hour nightclub concert for the benefit of 600 enthusiastic fans and eight television cameras that were video-taping the gig for use on pay TV.

The performance, at the downtown Spectrum club, harked back to the late 1970s when the three-piece outfit who play tonight before 25,000 at the Olympic Stadium first toured North America in 1978-79 on a shoestring in relative obscurity.

"Does anyone here know who we are?" asked charismatic lead singer Sting at one point, in a jestful reference to those lean times. Tuesday's show is to be telecast in December on the First Choice network in Canada and Showtime TV in the United States.

Dedicated Police fans had to play a name-the-tune game on a local FM rock radio station to win free tickets to the exclusive show - a gimmick that prompted cautious promoters to ask for police surveillance of the club entrance at show- time.

Once those lucky ones with tickets got in, however, band manager Miles Copeland - brother of drummer Stewart Copeland - told security guards to admit 100-odd ticketless fans loitering on the sidewalk.

They scrambled into the hall screaming, and the show began with the title track of the band's current LP, 'Synchronicity', which has gone triple-platinum-300,000 copies sold in Canada this summer.

Guitarist Andy Summers and drummer Copeland, backed by three female singers in black Islamic garb whose presence seemed superfluous, delivered tight, driving performances as befitting a live television taping.

But it was bassist-singer Sting who dominated the show, playing to the eight TV cameras with a roll of the eyeballs here and a macho flying leap there. At one point he also thought it important to complain how his red combat pants were slipping off from sweat.

His voice, which seemed to approach the cracking point by show's end, risked becoming synthetic at times because of the pristine quality of the sound system.

Visual effects were limited to needle-sharp pillars of coloured lights and the occasional shot of dry-ice smoke for romantic effect.

Crowd reaction after the show was predictably favourable, with the band coming back for a three-song encore.

"I've never seen them play so well; they were relating more with the audience here," raved Isabelle Prud'homme, 24, who had been leaning against a camera-dolly track at the threshold of the stage.

"I like being so close and really seeing them," added Martin Coulombe, 16, wearing baggy pants and dishevelled fair hair a la Sting.

Sharing the bill for the Police concert tonight are the trend-setting funk outfit Talking Heads, reggae star Peter Tosh and guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan. The Police play in Toronto Friday.

(c) Waterloo Region Record by Robert MacPherson