Sting
Wednesday, 29 May 2024
Ljubljana / Arena Stožice / Slovenia
Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner — the legendary English singer, bassist, activist and actor who most of the world knows far better by his stage name Sting (and reportedly the only name he answers to, even within his own family) — has, over the course of his extraordinarily rich and prolific career as a live performer, visited our capital four times. This was his third trip to the Stožice Arena. His second show here was on 4 June 2019 — almost exactly five years ago! His first Stožice appearance, thirteen years ago, didn’t leave most music fans with the warmest memories — despite Sting giving everything he had, as he always does at his meticulously professional shows, the whole thing was sunk by catastrophic sound. The Stožice arena, built primarily for sports events, simply didn’t have adequate concert acoustics back then. That sorry state has gradually improved over the years — with the odd bump along the way — so that by Sting’s latest visit we could finally enjoy solid, perfectly satisfying sound, which is exactly what a musical legend of his stature deserves.
Sting, a 17-time Grammy winner who sci-fi film fans will best remember as the villainous Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in the first film adaptation of the cult novel ‘Dune’, has dubbed his current concert tour 3.0, because his live band is currently operating as a trio. The tour itself actually kicked off back in 2019 under the name My Songs, originally set up to promote Sting’s fourteenth studio album “My Songs” (2019).
At least as celebrated as Sting’s solo output is his early work with the unforgettable The Police, a band known for their distinctive blend of new wave, reggae and jazz — so it’s no surprise that Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull) once called them the last prog rock band of the seventies. Which is exactly why it was great to see the evening’s setlist feature a dynamic and intelligent mix of Sting solo material and The Police standards. Guitar maestro and Sting’s long-time sidekick Dominic Miller, along with excellent drummer Chris Maas, are obviously not Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland, but they pulled off The Police classics with flying colours all the same. Miller, wisely, made no attempt to emulate Summers’s distinctive technique, and instead played The Police numbers with his own distinctly jazz-inflected approach.
For the warm-up, Sting’s set opened with The Police standard “Voices Inside My Head” from “Zenyatta Mondatta” (1980), a track defined by its minimalist rhythm and thick bass lines. “Synchronicty II”, one of The Police’s finest moments, was the first real highlight of the night, though Sting’s vocals in this early phase were slightly let down by the tuning sitting a touch too low. The trio finally came fully alive during “Message in a Bottle”, by which point they’d ironed out the tuning issues, and from there to the end the packed house was eating out of their hands, the crowd joining them in a kind of mutual symbiosis that conjured up an unforgettable atmosphere.
The run of The Police classics was broken by Sting’s big solo hit “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You”. Those of us who grew up in the early nineties know it well — the video got heavy rotation on MTV back when MTV still played music videos. “Ten Summoner’s Tales” (1993) was also represented with the tender ballad “Fields of Gold” and the melancholy elegy “Shape of My Heart”. Credit to Sting for not dipping into his more recent solo material either — most of it, with a few exceptions, doesn’t quite reach the very high bar he set in the eighties and early nineties, even allowing for the fact that Sting has always had an exceptional gift for writing music and lyrics. The most recent solo offering was “Never Coming Home” from the now more-than-twenty-year-old album “Sacred Love” (2003).
The trio of seasoned musicians then launched into a sort of ‘lottery’ — Sting explained to the crowd that he knows by heart the first five and last five songs they have to play in the same order every night, but has no idea what to play in between the opening and closing stretches of the set. Sting held his hat out to Miller, who reached in and pulled out a slip of paper with the title of the next song. Dominic had a lucky draw — the slip read “Tea in the Sahara”, a The Police number that’s far from their biggest hit but one that music connoisseurs hold in high regard for its artistic depth and jazz-fusion leanings. Another draw followed, this time landing on the Sting solo classic “Why Should I Cry For You?”, the first of three tracks from “The Soul Cages” (1991) played that evening.
Among Sting’s big solo hits before the end of the main set, we also got the nostalgic immigrant anthem “Englishman in New York” and the desert-nomad vibes of “Desert Rose” — two tracks no solo Sting show can go without. Fans of the early The Police material were well served by “Driven to Tears” from “Zenyatta Mondatta”, which alongside “Tea in the Sahara” was probably the biggest surprise of the night. You might also throw in the not-so-predictable inclusion of The Police classic “Can’t Stand Losing You”, which they cleverly segued into an arranged version of the instrumental “Reggatta de Blanc” from the album of the same name.
The closing stretch of the concert was predictably dominated by The Police’s biggest guns — “Walking On the Moon”, “So Lonely”, “King of Pain” and their most iconic hit “Every Breath You Take” — all delivered brilliantly. For the encore, Sting’s trio played “Roxanne”, another unforgettable The Police classic that’s a must at any show by the English music legend with an emphasis on his early years. Before launching into it, the old musical fox showed off a sense of humour, suddenly appearing onstage with a rose in his mouth. He intended to tuck it behind Miller’s ear, but Miller promptly resisted his boss’s cheesy scheme. The concert’s finale was still, as befits a longtime activist who has long spoken out on pressing social and environmental issues, played out in a much more serious mood. Sting bid farewell to the crowd with “Fragile”, arguably his most beautiful solo ballad, during which he also showcased his acoustic guitar skills — something we don’t get to see and hear from him all that often.
Sting, the true cosmopolitan that he is — always keen to pick up at least the basics of the language of whichever country he’s visiting — thanked the crowd with a ‘hvala’ and promised we’d definitely see each other again. The charismatic musician, despite being 72 years old, is still in excellent vocal form and remarkable physical shape for his age, and with two such top-tier musicians alongside him it wasn’t hard to conjure up some of that unforgettable The Police magic that still captivates listeners across generations. Sure, the crowd was predictably dominated by people in their fifties and sixties who discovered The Police as teenagers, but the Stožice show — which also drew a large number of foreign visitors, particularly from Austria — had a good number of noticeably younger faces in the mix too, which gave you at least some warm feelings about the future.
Author: Peter “Dr. ProgRock” Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik (Edita Klemen no. 41–43)
Setlist:
1. Voices Inside My Head (orig. The Police)
2. Synchronicity II (orig. The Police)
3. Message in a Bottle (orig. The Police)
4. If I Ever Lose My Faith in You
5. Fields of Gold
6. Never Coming Home
7. Tea in the Sahara (orig. The Police)
8. Why Should I Cry for You?
9. Mad About You
10. Driven to Tears (orig. The Police)
11. When the Angels Fall
12. Englishman in New York
13. Can’t Stand Losing You / Reggatta de Blanc (orig. The Police)
14. Shape of My Heart
15. Walking on the Moon (orig. The Police)
16. So Lonely (orig. The Police)
17. Desert Rose
18. King of Pain (orig. The Police)
19. Every Breath You Take (orig. The Police)
—encore—
20. Roxanne (orig. The Police)
21. Fragile
