Police infect 42,000 at Dome with delicately throbbing performance...
Police fever - a slow burn that rises and falls and flirts dangerously on the edge of breaking. More than 42,000 people caught the fever Saturday night from the threeman band, The Police, at the Carrier Dome.
From the beginning, the air tingled with the anticipation, like an unplurked string, taut and riveting. Throughout the 90-minute concert, the energy level rose, ending with two encores.
The English-based hand was making its first stop in America on the current leg of a tour that began last summer. It drew the fourth-largest Dome musical audience, behind 45,000 that saw The Who and two 43,000 crowds for The Rolling Stones.
Unlike the disappointing Police concert two years ago at tho Dome (before 25,000), the trio added the raw edge of rock and the primitive rhythms apparent in their recordings. Each song, whether it was 'Message in a Bottle' or 'King of Pain', was revitalized from radio overkill. Costuming and the light show all spoke of the best kind of professionalism - born from seven years experience.
Tho aching tone of 'Oh, My God' was not lost in the rocked-up rendition but heightened by vocalist Sting's and backup female trio's vocals. And Andy Summers' crisp solo guitar riff on the metaphysical 'Spirits in the Material World'. Summers warmed to atmospheric guitar solos on 'Invisible Sun' and 'King of Pain'.
Stewart Copeland remains one of the finest drummers in popular music. He is a study in choreography as he keeps the founding rhythm and offers the audience delicacies of percussion with vibes, bongoes, cymbals and triangles.
Tho show flowed from older Police material to selections from their newest release, 'Synchronicity'. The rise and fall in temperature resulted from the blend of songs such as the up-beat 'Do Do Do, Da Da Da' followed by the poignant 'Wrapped Around Your Finger'.
The Police have continued to evolve with each album. Their earlier work is more ornate - with reggae rhythms, a funk sound and influences of Arab, African and Indian music. With 'Synchronicity', the band moved toward minimalism - playing fewer notes and considering the time between notes as part of the composition.
Sting overcame the limitations on intimacy which the sprawling Dome presents, with a confident, relaxed but impassioned performance. He moved from electric and stand up bass to clarinet to pan pipes fluidly. The simulcast filming of the concert, projected on a screen above the stage, allowed Sting's subtle expressions during the intensely personal 'Every Breath You Take', last summer's AM and FM hit.
Perhaps the secret to Sting's success lies in his willingness to unmask his sense of alienation and yearning. This is the man who writes of "a hole in my life" and being "So Lonely" with "God so far away." A man who also writes of his broken marriage in 'King of Pain' and 'Every Breath You Take'.
Tho Police remain the dominant band of the second British invasion, as innovative as The Beatles 20 years ago. It's not Beatlemania, despite the occasional hysterical scream from the audience, rather a voice for the '80s - both personal and spiritual.
(c) The Syracuse Herald American by Elizabeth Edmonds
'Police' Put on Best Dome Show...
The world's top rock band Saturday put on the best show ever staged at the Carrier Dome. Opening act MTV Music Television didn't do so badly either.
The Police breathe the thin, heady air at the top of Pop Mountain; before them arrived such acts as the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Elvis and The Who. None of those remain there, having either expired or just slipped off.
The Police are on top because of great music, great playing and frontman Sting's showmanship - three great assets, but not enough to put a band on top. What put this band in its place is the lyrical content of the music.
To reach the top a band must project a great big fat world view, an eschatological shtick that promises revelations beyond whether a song is good to dance to.
Sting's lyrics speak of love, pain, loss, tolerance, and of seemingly random events which are, in fact, connected in mysterious ways, perhaps initiated by God - synchronicity. Big picture stuff.
And you can dance to it.
Bassist/singer Sting, drummer Stewart Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers performed magnificently 20 songs from five albums, reaching back to their early songs ('Sending Out an SOS', 'Message In A Bottle') reggae touched numbers ('Roxanne', 'One World Not Three') and working through their big hits of 1983 ('King Of Pain', Every Breath You Take', 'Murder By Numbers').
A great concert: Missing the band at this stage of development would be like missing the Stones in '72 or having ignored the Beatles.
The Police rolled out all this Saturday before 41,500 people who pretty much understand what the band is about.
I'm not sure they understand that brief opening act... MTV.
MTV is not a band. It's a cable television channel that airs brief videos of mostly white pop stars and their music. Some of the videos are good; some bad, just like popular music.
MTV sponsored the Police concert and MTV video cameras watched the act and gave folks in the distant corners of the dome a view of the action on a big screen above the stage. MTV vee-jay Martha Quinn was there to introduce a tape of MTV programming to keep everyone grooving while roadies prepared the stage for the Police.
The overhead screen came to life with the MTV logo and theme and the crowd burst with pleasure! Vee-jay Quinn, she of small voice and whizzy video-enthusiasm, stepped to the microphone and burbled something about MTV presenting the Police to Syracuse.
Martha got a nice big hand. MTV's got a lot of friends in this town. The big boys at Warner-Amex, though perhaps not themselves fans of the Police or Carl Jung or rock music, would be pleased.
MTV is big, big business. It sells stuff to the 14-34 year old market by pretending that MTV itself is part of some hip youth culture, a 1980's successor to free-form FM radio of the 1960s.
Of course it's not. It's not like the '60s FM at all: It's a lot like '60s deejay Murray ''The K'' shrewdly improving his share of the New York radio market by baptizing himself 'The Fifth Beatle' during the Beatlemania frenzy. The MTV programming between the videos is just a clever corporate put-on pretending to be mass culture. The purpose of MTV is to sell air time to commercial advertisers.
MTV operates like the new Apple computer commercial where a vast gathering of dusty droogs sits passively watching a huge video image of Big Brother totalitarian rhetoric. Suddenly a woman athlete runs into the hall and hurls a hammer at the screen, smashing it.
MTV is just like that, except no one throws a hammer.
(c) Syracuse Post Standard by Steve O'Sullivan
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CREATE A DISPLAY NAMEI remember working at CESF-SUNY in 1984 next to the Dome and The Police were performing that night…I was coming from The Dome area after working hours that late afternoon and was by myself walking back to the parking lot at CESF-SUNY to go home, when I spotted a big white limo coming up to the Dome area, and it slowed up, as it was passing me, and I remember feeling a bit nervous, because it was like whoever was inside the limo was sort of “checking me out,” but I couldn’t see, because the windows were blacked out…then I crossed from the sidewalk next to the Dome and looked back at the limo, which was continuing on up the roadway to the Dome, and I got the chills, because I realized it was The Police in the limo arriving for their performance that evening at the Dome! What a thrill of a lifetime, will never forget it! Eleven months later, I gave birth to my first-born son after not being able to conceive for the first 12 years of marriage…wow, that was the magic of Sting! (a/k/a The Police) :)