Me vs Sting

I have a dark secret. Actually I have lots of dark secrets. But I digress.

Occasionally a beautiful girl will come to me in a bar¹ and say, “Hey boy! What was the first band you ever saw?”. In such cases, I look her squarely in the eye (or eyes, if she has two) and say with complete honesty, “Why, my dear, it was The Damned, I do believe”. Which is a goddamn cool first band to have seen. However, if the imaginary beautiful girl was clever enough to ask instead, “What was the first gig you attended?”, the answer would have been shamefully different. For the first gig I attended (aside from numerous terrible local bands) was, in fact, Sting. Not the Police. Sting. On his Dream Of The Blue Turtles Tour, no less.

My first memory of Sting is not, in fact, of Sting, but of his erstwhile drummer, Stewart Copeland. I remember being in my primary school playground and a kid having a tape of the Police’s second LP, Regatta de Blanc. On Side 2 after the world-destroying single Walking On The Moon and immediately prior to my favourite Police song, On Any Other Day, Copeland intones, “the other ones are complete bullshit”. How hilarious we found this, aged 9 years old! Over and over again we played it.

Copeland is an interesting character, who had a career of sorts before orbiting around the Sun that is Sting. Doubtless he would be annoyed by being called “Sting’s erstwhile drummer” as I did in the preceding paragraph. In my fallible memory he has especially long arms, which aside from being good for drumming, lend him a slightly gangly, monkeyish vibe, which is accentuated by his flowing locks. I see him as a Shakespearean Fool to Sting; a foil to Sting’s impenetrable, sometimes intolerable, self-confidence. Aside from mocking Sting’s pretensions, he intermittently physically assaulted him, breaking his ribs on at least one occasion – which Sting bore with his usual good grace.

When I was a child it seemed like the Police were permanently at number 1 in the charts. That’s because they were permanently at number 1 in the charts. They made five albums. The first three had very similar names and artwork. Then they made a funky one with a strange cover which I don’t like very much². And then there was the last one, which comprises Every Breath You Take; a wonderful, evocative number called Tea In The Sahara and 8 filler tracks, and which has the most spectacularly clean, minimalist production.

It would be wrong not to mention the third member of the Police, Andy Summers. Andy Summers is, implausibly, from Lancashire. Dapper and compact, he perpetually looks as though he is precisely 34 years old. He is the kind of elegantly ‘right’ person who would slip unnoticed through a party were it not for the supermodel on his arm. Like Stewart Copeland, he had a career “Before Sting (BS)”, playing with The Animals, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Thelonious Monk. I suspect he is the genius arranger of most of the Police’s songs; Warwick the Kingmaker to Sting the King.

I stopped actively listening to new product by Sting on or around 1986. The last records he made that I can recall are Englishman in New York and the bland one about the fields of barley. Nevertheless, I have retained a strange obsession with him. Whether dressed in a vest top; a flowing cloak; tiny Speedos, or fully clothed in a tweed suit whist standing in the middle of a river, Sting always maintains excellent posture. His skin is taught and tanned, but not vulgarly so. Although his hair has thinned, it has done so in a ‘just so’ way, accentuating his looks. He looks like he could run a marathon, chop down a tree, build a log cabin and then prepare a high protein, low-fat salad for lunch. I never feel the urge to violently shout, “FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING CUNT” at him, the way I do with Bono and Geldof, into whose company he is often unfairly lumped.

But the thing I find most fascinating about Sting is his gaze. It is, of course, massively self-confident and commanding, but there is another, empathic quality to it that I have struggled for a long time to define. The best I can come up with is that it is like Sting can see your underwear through your clothes; however, not in a sleazy way, simply that he knows you’re not wearing your best pants, haven’t trimmed recently and have an unfortunate hole somewhere – but that’s OK, because your secret is safe with him.

The advent of the digital age has been a boon for Sting stalkers worldwide. I am now able to follow Sting across various social channels and track his hashtag feverishly. It appears that Sting is still healthy and active. In recent years I have seen him:

• Travelling round Jamaica with Shaggy, on motorbikes
• Pressing olives at his villa in Tuscany
• Opining on Brexit
• Brandishing a lute
• Treading grapes at his chateau in France
• In various states of dress and undress
• Holding and/or gazing at Trudi Styler or being held and/or gazed at by Trudi Styler
• Performing yoga in his Manhattan apartment
• Garnering $380 million on his tour with the reformed Police

and so forth.

The last time I saw Sting in the flesh was, however, in 1986 at the King’s Hall in Belfast. I was such a gig ingenue that I turned up at the opening time specified on the ticket and therefore had to stand for 1 hour and 40 minutes waiting for the great man to come onstage.

Friends and colleagues know that I am a motherfucking streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm and that that’s the way I like it, baby, I don’t wanna live forever; BUT, I must confess that at Sting’s gig I actively participated in many great crimes against the punk cause including:

• TACITLY EMBRACING jazz
• BEING IMPRESSED by a twenty minute drum solo
• OPENLY ENJOYING a mid-gig solo acoustic set by Sting
• NOT KILLING other punters who held lighters aloft at various points
• NOT KILLING other punters who sang along to the songs

Sting played the whole of the Blue Turtles album, as well as eleven Police songs. I know this because I still have the bit of paper upon which I excitedly wrote down the setlist when I got home. It records that, among other things, he played the terrific Police songs I Burn For You and Bring On The Night as well as the terrible Police songs Demolition Man and When The World Is Running Down, brilliantly. I enjoyed every second of every minute.

Sting was engaging and chatty throughout. It felt that he was on our side. He could see of all our sins, all of our dark secrets, all of the holes in our underpants – AND HE FORGAVE US.

I love him.

by Mike McConnell

1^ This never happens

2^ Apart from the three amazing singles. Actually I don’t like Zenyatta Mondatta either