Author: Urban Bolta
Photos: Jernej Vene
Location: Cividale del Friuli / Italy
Concert date: 25.07.2017
Attendance: 7000
Summer concert seasons have gotten properly exhausting in recent years. If not on home turf, then right in the neighborhood, there’s a whole range of gigs with giants of the world pop and rock scene. One of the busier regions in that respect is Friuli – Venezia Giulia, which this summer played host to, among others, Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, better known by his stage name Sting.
Sting is a giant of the British and world music scene. With The Police, at the turn of the seventies into the eighties, he tasted all the sweetness of stadium greatness, and after the band broke up in the mid-eighties he focused on his solo career. He stepped out of the new wave framework and, with a genre-agnostic approach, started speaking to an even wider crowd of listeners, which eventually put him among the greatest British musicians. Last year Sting released his twelfth studio album »57th & 9th« (review here), and this year he has devoted entirely to promoting it live.
Sting’s tour was advertised even on jumbo billboards across central Slovenia, inviting people to the amphitheater in Pula, but for northern Primorska folks and the Rockline crew the concert date in Cividale (Cividale del Friuli) was a better fit. The closer we got to Cividale that Tuesday evening, the darker the sky got, and the menacing-looking clouds just ominously waited for the moment to wash out the evening’s event. Luckily the weather held, so apart from chairs sinking into the soaked grass of the venue, it had no effect on what happened on stage.
The crowd, which swelled to more than five thousand heads, was first warmed up by British singer-songwriter (and Sting’s son) Joe Sumner, but with the crush at the entrance and the hunt for our numbered seats, Jernej and I missed almost his entire set. The wait for the evening’s headliner was a long one, and Sting and his backing crew only appeared on stage around half past nine, when night had already settled over the landscape.
Sting kicked off the evening with The Police hit Synchronicity II. Dressed in simple clothes, bass guitar in hand and a stationary mic in the middle of the stage, Sting came across as simple – old school. No pomp in the performance, no needless stage production, projections or anything of the sort. Just him, a small backing band and the music – in two words: old school!
The opening stretch alone served up a string of hits, a treasure chest that is literally bottomless with Sting. If I Ever Lose My Faith in You, Spirits in the Material World and Englishman in New York followed one after another, and the great run of hits was spoiled only by gusts of wind that carried the sound away, with the listeners furthest from the stage getting the worst of it.
Sting had promised his most rock-flavored tour in years, which is, after all, a logical move after the release of »57th & 9th«, on which he shed the classical and Renaissance touches he’d flirted with over the last decade. And that’s what we got, but despite the bouncy tempos of The Police covers and the rock skeleton of his later songs, flirting with world music is also part of the musician’s DNA, which the sound of the accordion and percussion took care of in She’s Too Good For Me and Mad About You. After the acoustic, emotionally intense Fields of Gold and Shape of My Heart, Petrol Head and One Fine Day finally brought the time to present his latest studio work.
Even though the British musician is a venerable 65 years old, his stage presence is outstanding! His athletically sculpted body testifies to great physical shape, and you can hardly blame him for a somewhat lower vocal register. That unique vocal color is the recognizable trait of his singing identity, one that even the average music fan can’t miss. In the choruses, Sting got vocal backup from Joe Sumner and his band The Last Bandoleros, and they too were drowned out by some 7000 throats on hits like Message in a Bottle and Walking on the Moon. Between songs Sting chatted warmly with the crowd, almost always in Italian. He kept throwing fuel on the fire all evening, which during The Police hit Roxanne from their debut resulted in a general stampede from the seats right up under the stage into the middle of the action. The backing band, made up of guitarist Dominic Miller, drummer Josh Freese and Dominic’s son Rufus, also a guitarist, spiced up Roxanne with a themed detour into an even older evergreen, Ain’t No Sunshine (original by Bill Withers), before the musicians left the stage for the first time after a good hour and a half, give or take.
On their return, the heated atmosphere (for an otherwise chilly summer evening) was fired up even more by the new wave hit Next to You, followed by a live rendition of the punchy single from the new album, I Can’t Stop Thinking About You, which in its rhythmic setup bashfully recalls the golden days of The Police. The farewell fell to the biggest radio hit of Sting’s career, The Police classic Every Breath You Take, and so of course the air was full of thousands of mobile devices, tablets and screens of all kinds and sizes, which has become a truly annoying factor at concerts in recent years. Almost goodbye! While part of the crowd was already squeezing toward the exit, Sting came back on stage, this time without the band, with an acoustic guitar and played one more tender ballad, Fragile. Magical!
Sting’s presence is still strong enough in 2017 to kidnap a concertgoer for a good hour and a half and take them on a trip through hits from the last four decades. The years barely show on him, and having seen it, you’d have a hard time believing the man is already in his late sixties. The sky was on our side too, and despite the threatening clouds it held out without a downpour, so we each headed from Cividale toward our own homes with a fresh, powerful concert experience.
Setlist
1. Synchronicity II
2. If I Ever Lose My Faith in You
3. Spirits in the Material World
4. Englishman in New York
5. Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
6. She’s Too Good for Me
7. Mad About You
8. Fields of Gold
9. Shape of My Heart
10. Petrol Head
11. One Fine Day
12. Message in a Bottle
13. Ashes to Ashes
14. 50,000
15. Walking on the Moon
16. So Lonely
17. Desert Rose
18. Roxanne
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19. Next to You
20. I Can’t Stop Thinking About You
21. Every Breath You Take
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22. Fragile
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