Synchronicity: 1983/84

Police hold 50,000: no complaints...

The Melbourne Showgrounds resembled Woodstock late last night when 50,000 Police fans with blankets, mattresses and pillows crammed the main arena for Melbourne's largest concert.

The British pop group, Police, billed as number one in the world, completed their Synchronicity world tour before a devoted crowd.

At 8 pm, the lights suddenly dimmed and the crowd surged as one towards the stage. "We saved the best till last," the band announced, and the audience went wild. It was the last concert of their world tour, reputedly their last concert for two years, possibly the finally concert for a band lately dogged by rumours of strife between the group's members.

For drummer Stewart Copeland, lead singer Gordon Sumner (Sting), and guitarist Andy Summers it has been a very satisfactory year, money wise - they are believed to have grossed $100 million this year. Their album, 'Synchronicity', has sold seven million copies world-wide. Their recent Ameri can tour grossed $8 million.

And if the pace of almost year round touring has taken a toll, it wasn't showing last night. Yelling out, "OK, Melbourne, let's go", they launched into the mix of pop, new wave, and hard rock and roll beat, laced with bits of reggae, that has made them the most successful band since the Beatles.

Transport caused the greatest concern as the huge crowd poured from the grounds to make their way home. Twenty buses and only one extra train from Ascot Vale station were scheduled.

(c) The Age by Rebecca Batties and Olga Fernley

Prisoner of The Police...

This is a love story.

I am up here in the stands at the Showgrounds, waiting for the sky to get dark, waiting for the action to begin. This is last Sunday I'm talking about here, of course. The big Police concert. Fifty thousand people. One of whom, down there in the Gandhi-like press on the oval, is my 15-year-old rock guitar superstar aspirant son.

Ben.

Ben and the Police go way back. As, of course, do I.

Yes, this is the self-same devoted father talking to you now who, three or so years back, when his lad was a mere stripling tot, accompanied the infant fellow to the Festival Hall where the Police were giving a couple of concerts, earning for himself not only the sober distinction of being the oldest chap in the audience, but for three days and nights a simultaneous deafness and ringing in the ears such as to make what the Hunchback of Notre Dame must have felt after work a pleasant buzz.

Besotted, my son with the Police.

Absolutely in love.

T-shirts, posters, calendars, fan magazines he's got them all, an amazing collection.

Plus, of course, their music, their every record, their every song, endlessly booming out from his room at the end of the house, still ear-shattering, despite the seven closed doors, in the front room where I'm attempting to wind down after a difficult day with a small bowl of chicken soup and a touch of Thelonious Monk.

And if that's not enough for you, the self-same identical Police mu- sic is also leaking out of my daughter's room, a more recent convert, but that's another story.

So you can imagine the tension and anxiety in our house when this concert at the Showgrounds is announced, the sleepless nights the poor boy suffers, the queuing up in dawn's first light to make sure he gets a ticket.

And that's only the start of it. Because whose eagerly trembling son is it, laden with blankets and groundsheet and extra jumpers and money for food, who goes off on the Saturday, a full 30 hours before the Police are to ap- pear on stage, to camp out through the night outside the Showgrounds door?

"Dad, it's all right for you in the stands," he explains, "but I have to see their fingers."

OK, relax, relax, enough already with being a Jewish mother, I tell myself, it's a whole gang of them going, seven or eight, and there hasn't been a mention of white slavery in the papers for months. Off he goes.

Three hours later I get a phone call.

It's a mother just back from the Showgrounds, her daughter one of the group.

"I know it's no use being Victorian and saying don't," she wails, her voice stretched with concern, "but they're just on the footpath, right next to a tramstop. And there isn't even a shop for miles to buy food."

Naturally, I drop what I'm doing and speed there at once, visions of an entire Florence Nightingale- type night flooding my brain, end- less trips with hamburgers and Kleenex and Thermoses of hot broth, and then I get there and it's all OK, the essential act of mercy has already been performed - they've opened up the Hall of Man- ufactures and that's where the kids will spend the night, admittedly on a concrete floor, but look, it's out of the weather, plus there are toi- lets, there's even a shop inside sell- ing pies and drinks.

"I'm all right, dad," says Ben. "See you tomorrow. And yes, yes, I've eaten, stop worrying, I've had fish and chips."

And so here it is tomorrow, 7.30 going on eight, the last of the sun slipping away nicely there behind the packed stands to the west, the sky already dark around the stage with its huge banks of black speakers and amps to left and right and above it suspended by a crane the giant video screen so that fans less motivated than my eager son will be able to grab some close-ups of the action too.

Australian Crawl are playing. They're great.

I'm eating an apple. I'm sitting comfortably. I'm having a fine time.

And yes, yet again I see that I am easily the oldest fellow here, not another person coming even anywhere close to this craggy aged visage of mine, this experience-soaked grey grizzled beard, and that's fine too, let me sit here taking in the atmosphere, a secret Humbert Humbert to the mass of teeny boppers or whatever the word is for wild-dressed slim-hipped gaily garbed nymphets these days-swirling everywhere about, gorgeous little mouths busy with junk food and cigarettes and gossip and the growing excitement of just scant minutes to go. It's eight o'clock!

The stage is suddenly dark. Then in a flash of lights and colour and swirling smoke - there they are!

The Police! We're away!

God, I hope he made it to the front, I think, as the music that's been filling our house these past many years booms out now over the Showgrounds, into our 100,000 waiting ears.

Ben staggers home at midnight, totally exhausted, lobster-red.

The Hall of Manufactures was a nightmare, he tells me. More and more people kept arriving all night. By five in the morning it was packed, there could have been over a thousand kids in there, and they wouldn't let them out - O Black Hole of Calcutta! - till after 10.

"They had guard dogs," Ben tells me. "One of them bit a chunk out of a kid's leg."

"Did you get to the front?" I ask.

"About 10 metres," Ben says. "I could see all right. Sting had eye-liner on, I suppose for the video. But it was no good," he says. "They didn't play well. There was no excitement. They didn't push themselves. I mean, Sting didn't even take off his jacket. They didn't try."

"You don't think you were over-eager?"

"No."

Oh dear.

Disappointment oozes out of him.

What can I possibly say?

I told you this is a love story, and it is, and part of the picture is love's twists and pains, and betrayal too, terrible to witness.

"Will you do it again?" I ask him. "All this sleeping out stuff?" "No," says Ben. "Never again." "Not for anyone?" I ask. "Well," he says, thinking. "Maybe for Pink Floyd."

(c) The Age by Morris Lurie