Zenyatta Mondatta: 1980/81

Police put the Sting in blue-eyed reggae...

He calls himself Sting, he gave up school-teaching along with his baptized name of Gordon Mathew Sumner, and he writes popsongs of invigorating freshness.

Movie cameras love his aristocratic blondness. An English newspaper, a serious one, compared him to Len- non and Jagger and might have mentioned Roger Daltry too. It's star time, folks. 

But not superstar.

Not yet. At least, not at Detroit's Masonic Auditorium Sunday night.

The man with the single name and the plural talents led his band, the Police, back to the city for their first major engagement. The show was a precisely-scaled investment in a career that's intended to last. The Police are in no rush; they want to be around for the long run.

They could have gone for the quick cash-in; after all, they have three albums out, all hits, with appropriate singles.

And yet their first couple of tours in North America were back-of-the-van affairs, laying the groundwork in little clubs such as Bookies' in Detroit.

Now they're touring with a couple of trailer-trucks to cart around the equipment. Still, the Masonic is relatively cosy compared to some of the barns they could have tried, as if they still wanted to play directly to each of the 4,000 or so assembled faithful.

I wish they'd left at least one of the trucks behind. The only thing out of scale Sunday was the volume pumping out of the wall of speakers.

The band hasn't entirely adjusted to the bigger settings.. The opening song 'Don't Stand So Close To Me' was clamorously harsh. Sting's high nasal tenor cracked at the top and the lyrics - an evocative story paralleling Lolita, with the only rhyming couplet I know featuring that novel's author, Nabokov - were completely pulverized.

Not until the fifth number, the streamlined 'Man in a Suitcase', did the amplification put the instruments in balance while Sting's voice found its pace.

In the roar, the Police wiped out the gentle drama of their albums and instead pushed and punched the songs. And yet the momentum began to roll. 'De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da', 'Shadows in the Rain', 'It's Alright for You', 'Don't Stand So Close to Me', 'Can't Stand Losing You', 'Roxanne'. Message in a Bottle - muscular, abrasive, expanded  from the recordings, and yet  with the syncopation of the  beat tugging wonderfully against Sting's priestly voice. 

The songs tell stories, though the lyrics got lost in the din. Like the beat, the words suggest a special place, or at least a special state of mind.

Blonde reggae, it's been called, or white man's reggae, blue-eyed. The beat travelled with Jamaican immigrants to England and has infiltrated been said that this is the first the punk-new-wave. It has black music that white English rockers have picked up from non-American sources.

Whatever or wherever, the Police have established a special identity. 'Zenyatta Mondatta' is their most mature and accomplished al bum; their show suggested they have plenty more to come.

XTC preceded them with a measure of the same approach, depending too much on teeth-rattling volume, yet showing an imagination and curiosity in their writing that eludes so many of the power-pop bands.

(c) The Windsor Star by John Laycock