Posted by Right or wrong, by the time September 16th, 2022 arrived life with/after/ignoring stupid covid seemed to have settled into something that was starting to feel sort of normal. M’lady had just returned from a work trip to Ontario, I was getting on a plane to do the same a week hence, we’d just capped a great summer full of visitors, gigs, and ample socializing, and here we were on our way to St. John’s for another concert at the big arena, the recently renamed Mary Brown’s Centre*.
(As we were driving to Town I leaned in and mentioned exactly that to m’lady. She replied that it wasn’t “normal” because people [like us] would still be wearing masks. I agreed that we weren’t traveling back in time to what normal used to be, but I pressed my point. Compared to almost everything about the way the world had been living, things were definitely starting to approach a semblance of normalcy. For the unmasked concertgoers – which was almost everyone – I suppose things seemed even more normal.)
The concert we were driving to was Sting, featuring an opening set from Sting’s son, Joe Sumner. I did some googling and learned that Joe’s band Fiction Plane had opened for The Police when they had toured back in 2007. I caught a show on that tour but I didn’t remember Joe or his band. I dug out my concert books and it looked like I had skipped their set – probably because I didn’t know there was Sting DNA in the opening band – so I made a point of getting to the show nice and early this time so I’d be sure to see him.
Joe only played a half-dozen songs, tops. It was all solo; just him singing and playing acoustic guitar. He introduced his final number telling us that he wrote it while tucking his daughter into bed one night. Sounded like it, too. It was a sing-song lullaby called Jellybeans that was much closer to Barney the Dinosaur than it was to arena rock and it was waaayyyy worse than you’re probably imagining. I mean c’mon now, you don’t go on a world tour opening for the main guy from The freakin’ Police singing a stupid two-line Baby Shark wannabe thoughtfart that hit you one night during bong rip daddy time. Geez.
Jellybeans was the final insult of a six-pack of musical disappointment. After the first of too many choruses I whispered into m’lady’s ear, “I wish I was late.” As in: the late Todd. I tell you, the guy looked like his dad and even sang a bit like him but he clearly inherited his songwriting chops from his mother’s side of the family, and she’s an actor. And we all know what happens when Hollywood actors write songs. I mean, the dude sucked.
Sting, on the other hand, was quite fantastic. He brought a seven-piece band with him and they were all great. The show opener (Message in a Bottle) had my blood pumping from the outset, even if Mr. Sting had a sizeable frog in his throat throughout (one that he’d swallowed by the second number).
Amazingly, the previous three times I had seen Sting had all been 30+ years earlier, and back in those days he was trying his level-best to not sound like The Police. But after decades of developing a clear and distinct solo career he was now clearly comfortable revisiting the sound of the band that had made Sting a household name.
And not only did the The Police songs sound very Police-y (and there were many: Everything Little Thing She Does is Magic, Every Breath You Take, Spirits in the Material World, Walking on the Moon, etcetera), the songs somehow had a little extra-reggae pep in their step, which was amazing. The hands-down peak of the show was when Sting jammed So Lonely into Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry (which Sting credited to Tata – as Marley himself did – though the courts have since disagreed). Man, it was so, so good.
He gave his musicians each a bit of the spotlight too, and they all deserved it. Shortly after the concert started I wondered if it was a coincidence that the drummer was a young doppelgänger of Stewart Copeland but go figure…it was Copeland’s son. And man, he had his father’s feel and chops totally together (again, go figure). The two backup singers were killer as were both guitar players (especially the guy playing the Telecaster), the Jamaican keyboard player kept the grooves super-solid and the eighteen-year-old prodigy playing a chromatic harmonica (with a sound that landed somewhere magically between Toots Thielemans and Stevie Wonder) was spectacular. I had never noticed how often the harmonica features prominently in Sting’s solo material, but it sure does.
Speaking of which, there was quite a lot of Sting solo material interspersed with the The Police material (once more: go figure) which led to a few “Oh yeah, this song…” moments (like If I Ever Lose My Faith in You for instance). He played a couple of new ones too, one of which began with the lyrics, “I woke up this morning, poured a cup of coffee and made myself some breakfast…” Not exactly Murder By Numbers or Synchronicity I but I suppose a septuagenarian millionaire rockstar is bound to lose a bit of his sting. (Sorry/not sorry.)
For the encore Sting et al delivered an epic Roxanne that traversed through the classic original to a slowed-down tempo overlaid with a long story before snapping back to a frenetic pace that left the whole arena standing and cheering. And then – can you believe this? – he played one more, and a ballad at that. Sure it was a pretty good song but up until then the concert had been a veritable clinic of standard concert procedure. Open big, then slow things down a bit, then smack ‘em hard again, then a couple of numbers everyone has forgotten about, then a couple of new songs followed by bam-bam-bam everyone’s favourites, get the opening act onstage for a song**, play your nearly-biggest song for a set-closer and then encore with your smash hit and milk it completely dry so that everyone walks out with your biggest song at the front of their brains.
But somehow he didn’t end it that way. Instead, for some ungodly reason the consummate performer mellowed things out and let us all down nice and easy for the drive home.
Which in a rare feat of financial prudence, m’lady and I did. We saved $100 on a hotel room and were back home snuggling with the cat by midnight.
*During our pre-show walkabout neither m’lady nor I noticed a single Mary Brown’s location amongst the arena’s rather slim concession options. Seems like a gapingly huge missed opportunity to me.
**Sting brought his son out to help sing King of Pain which made a lot of sense, because in the original recording Sting sang his own backup vocals. When Sting gave Joe the lead on the last verse it became blatantly clear just how far the apple fell from the tree. Which was pretty damn far. Turns out nobody can sing like Sting, not even people that are genetically half-Sting.
Todd Man Out 