Middle-aged White Men Rock Out

We’re now in KL where I’m relaxing a little after a ferociously busy run to the Chinese New Year. I made things even busier for myself by attending a concert on Monday evening, which in some respects wasn’t terribly wise. However, as Dickens wisely makes clear in Hard Times we muth be amuseth so it was off to see, and more importantly listen to, The Police on the Singapore leg of their world tour at the Indoor Stadium.

We were never going to pay silly prices for good seats, so we were seated behind the band, in roughly the same spot we occupied at Sting’s previous show some two or three years back. This makes me sound like a big fan of Sting, which I’m not, though brother-in-law Fuad is, which helps account for our presence on both occasions. However, there are aspects of the solo work I enjoy and I was a fan of The Police on their original emergence as a sort of super group so I wasn’t exactly unhappy to attend the concerts, especially Monday night’s.

If anything I was more looking forward to hearing Copeland and Summers play live, and in this respect I must say the band delivered big time. Copeland is one of those drummers with a rhythmic flexibility leading to genuine funkiness rather than powerhouse pyrotechnics and he was in tremendous form – especially when abandoning the main kit for the percussive fusillade surrounding him, as on Wrapped Around Your Finger, probably the best single piece of the night.

And Andy Summers, all sixty-plus years of him, emerged as one of the finest, most intelligent, guitarists I’ve ever heard in a band context, filling the space with textures that were both rhythmically and harmonically on the money. He took solos sparingly but nailed each one – especially a simple but gorgeous break on King of Pain, which followed the one on the original recording in spirit but blew it away in terms of presence.

The set essentially covered all the big hits, but it was the lesser known material that seemed to me to come off best, its simple lack of familiarity giving them more room to breathe. Driven To Tears and When The World Is Running Down were two of my personal highlights. And it helps that the lyrics for these actually work. For all his other considerable virtues, on occasion Sting has a tin ear for a line. Somebody should have told him how bad the Nabokov line is in Don’t Stand Too Close To Me, almost ruining an otherwise serviceable song. But I can forgive that in the guy who came up with Too many cameras, not enough food in Driven To Tears and got into words what it is like to read the papers on a bad day.