A Sting in the tale

Following much rumour and speculation, The Police officially announced their reunion tour on February 12 this year, a day after performing ‘Roxanne’ at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Having enjoyed good reviews and strong sales, the tour – which marks the 30th anniversary of the group’s formation – stops off in Croke Park this month. The past decade has seen a remarkable number of old bands get back together and hit the road once again, but Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland are operating on a bigger scale than most.

The Police reached the height of their popularity in the mid-'80s, a time when stadium rock was very much in vogue. As such, the group have been playing a circuit of venues that very few acts are capable of filling. Indeed, probably the only other outfits currently touring who could headline the same stadiums are The Rolling Stones and U2, the group who originally succeeded Sting and friends as the biggest rock band in the world (there was even a symbolic passing of the torch between the two groups on the 1986 Conspiracy of Hope Tour).
Predictably, demand for the Best Buy-sponsored tour has been huge. Tickets for the British shows sold out within 30 minutes, while worldwide sales have reached 1.5m, with revenues expected to hit $168m (a portion of ticket sales is being donated to WaterAid) – although curiously tickets were still on sale for the band's Irish show last week, despite earlier reports of a sell-out.
Following rehearsals at Sting’s home in Tuscany, the tour kicked off with a two-hour performance in Vancouver on May 28, in front of an audience that included stars such as Eddie Vedder and Penelope Cruz. While the tour got off to a cracking start, there was much speculation about whether or not old tensions would resurface within the group, given that relations between the three members of The Police were notoriously strained in the period before their break-up.
Speaking to hotpress’ Roisin Dwyer earlier this year, Andy Summers explained of the current band dynamic that, “It’s the same, sparky, kind of, we haven’t got mellow; we are not those kind of people. Every guy is the same, we might be a bit older, but it is a strong, fiery chemistry. That is how the band works no matter what we all do, we come back to that thing. It sounded great at the end.”
Nonetheless, some quarters of the press believed that a feud had already commenced a mere two shows into the tour, following a rather bizarre post by Stewart Copeland on his own website. Headlined “Our first disaster gig!”, Copeland referred to the show intro as “our big pompous opening”. Evaluating the overall performance as “lame”, he suggested that, at one point, Sting looked like “a petulant pansy”. He also stated Andy Summers was “in Idaho” when the guitarist was half a bar out of sync with the drum rhythm.
Although the piece was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, some reporters didn’t see it as such, and Summers subsequently admitted to one online publication that it was “possibly ill-advised.” He went on to say that, “We’re laughing about it and the media is just trying to turn it into a piece of dirt.”
One notable aspect of the tour is that the band have re-worked the arrangements of several of their biggest hits. ‘Roxanne’ now has a slower, jazzier tempo, while the extended versions of ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ and ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’ both feature improvisations from Copeland and extended solos from Summers. The guitarist said to Hot Press that, “We don’t want to play everything exactly as it was, as we have been playing a lot longer since then, but I think we have added a couple of great things. We are creative musicians, we don’t want to just copy our own records.”
The stage set-up for the tour is simple but impressive, featuring a split-level oval design ringed with blue lights. There are seven LED screens, with three in front of the stage (one devoted to each member of the band), one at each side and two at the rear. Support on the North American and European legs of the tour, meanwhile, comes from English pop-rock trio Fiction Plane, fronted by Sting’s son Joe Sumner. Other bands who've supported The Police this year include The Fratellis, Maroon 5 and Maximo Park, while Kanye West and John Mayer joined them for their performance at the American leg of Live Earth in New York.
Although the tour has been a huge success, there have been a few dissenting voices. In a recent interview with Virgin Radio, John Lydon (who himself is to once again reunite with The Sex Pistols for three shows in London this November, to mark the 30th anniversary of Never Mind The Bollocks) compared The Police to “soggy old dead carcasses”. He went on to say that, “listening to Stink (sic) try to squeak through ‘Roxanne’ one more time, that’s not fun. It’s like letting air out of a balloon.”
Still, The Police themselves are more than happy with how things have gone.
“It's something many people have wanted for many years,” Andy Summers told hotpress. “I thought we had passed the date when it was even possible anymore, and then when the word came that we were going to do this… it was mixed emotions… perhaps a bit of paranoia. Maybe we have been suffering under an illusion that in fact we got out and it’s not that thing that we thought it would be. Maybe people don’t want to see us, we left it too late. But happily it is even more staggering than we could have imagined.”