Writing the following day on his personal website, Stewart Copeland describes their performance as “unbelievably lame.”
According to the American, things started off badly, got worse in the middle and completely fell apart at the end.
“I stride manfully to my drums,” he recounts. “Andy has started the opening guitar riff to ‘Message In A Bottle’ and the crowd is going nuts. Problem is, I missed hearing him start. Is he on the first time around or the second? I look over at Sting and he’s not much help, his cue is me – and I’m lost. Never mind. ‘Crack!’ on the snare and I’m in, so Sting starts singing. Problem is, he heard my crack as two in the bar, but it was actually four – so we’re half a bar out of sync with each other. Andy is in Idaho.
“Well, we’re professionals so we soon get sorted, but the groove is eluding us. We crash through ‘Message’ and then go straight into ‘Synchronicity’, but there’s just something wrong. We can’t get on the good foot. We shamble through the song and hit the big ending. Last night Sting did a big leap for the cut-off hit, and he makes the same move tonight, but he gets the footwork wrong and doesn’t achieve lift-off. The mighty Sting momentarily looks like a petulant pansy instead of the God of Rock. Never Mind. Next song is going to be great… But it isn’t. We get to the end of the first verse and I snap into the chorus groove – and Sting doesn’t. He’s still in the verse. We’ll have to listen to the tapes tomorrow to see who screwed up, but we are so off kilter that Sting counts us in to begin the song again. We are the mighty Police and we are totally at sea.”
Copeland promises that the set will de-glitched by the time The Police descend on Croke Park on October 6.