GIG REVIEW: The Police
- Posted on November 5, 2007 9:44 AM
- 0 comments
The Police
10th October 2007
Wembley Arena
Review by Matt Killeen
There is a little voice in my head which has the temerity to suggest that in musical terms this show is nothing special. I shush it, but it keeps whispering that the emperor is in fact naked.
I rationalise. I’ve waited 24 years for this moment. I was here. That should be all that matters.
No, it says. This is just average. Like The Velvet Underground. Remember how disappointing that was? Remember why you didn’t go to see the remains of the Doors? It’s like The Rolling Stones pissing away their legacy in a series of endless mediocre and tedious displays. A hundred quid? Nothing is worth that much surely?
Now you’re spoiling it, I say, this is important to me.
The Police were the epitome of cool – that wasn’t a trendy view point to have in 1986. Sting was making jazz and dragging the others into the studio to rethink a classic in a way that would inevitably alienate and annoy. So why was I having my haircut like Sting and teaching myself to play the bass to ‘So Lonely’?
To me they were perfect. Brilliant, successful, clever. They were dangerous too. It is easy to forget they came from punk roots and carved their own niche, dragging the music industry with it. Furthermore they could write a pop song – my world view demands an element of accessibility and even then I understood that an artist making art for no-one but themselves was just masturbating. They became the biggest band on the Planet on their own bizarre and twisted terms. Angular, abrasive but musically complex, haunting and beautiful with all the arrogance and haughty venom vital for a true star act. Most of all they didn’t really exist. There was no new album to stress about, no decline in standards, just five perfect albums to savour. I had never seen them live, that just made it all the more special. How amazing would that have been?
Over two decades later and time has not been so kind to their memory. Their most famous tracks have been played too much or stripped of their real meaning – a song about an unbalanced stalker has become something people dance to at weddings, a song about a prostitute deemed suitable for light hearted laughter. Their early videos look like a joke and their whole output reduced to an endless array of greatest hits albums. My collection – complete I might add – sits on the lounge shelf in neglected vinyl form. I have to be here though. The ceremony will be incomplete without me, and if the ticket is in three figures then I suppose it’s worth it.
What price good, tight music played by the original artists, especially when they’ve eschewed backing singers, brass section and the other trappings of the elderly on tour? During the opener ‘Message in a Bottle’, and before the giant screens provide a closer inspection of pensioners rocking out, the view from back blurs the features of those on stage. It could have been 1983. What gives it away is the age of the audience. Apart from the child next to us dragged by over enthusiastic parents, I am the youngest person here. I am lucky. This is the ‘intimate’ gig on the tour. Just a little gathering amongst friends. Just ten thousand of them. For a change, however, Wembley makes a decent fist at it. No-one sits, at all, at any moment, even when ‘Voices Inside My Head’ signals the beginning of what everyone knows is an eight minute jam and a mass exodus to the bar. So the event is established, the box is ticked, and no matter what my inner voice says it isn’t bad. They play a nice mix of early hits and album tracks and you can’t complain. It’s expected. It’s OK.
My melancholy nature cannot help but feel a twinge of disappointment and my inner voice begins to harangue me.
About halfway through something definitely shifts. It’s a subtle but certain change of emphasis and it begins with my favourite song. The version of ‘Every Little Thing...’ that they play, a seemingly downbeat reggae infused arrangement, essentially the heart of the song, creates a genuine frisson of emotion through the crowd. We hear fascinating rhythm lead versions of ‘Wrapped around your finger’, ‘Walking in your footsteps’ and ‘King of Pain’, the songs from ‘Synchronicity’ in which the demands of the less well known members of the band can be heard best. Hearing ‘Invisible Sun’ again after the years of relative peace in Northern Ireland served to remind us of the countless other pockets of misery and despair driving men and women to extreme measures around the world today. It’s impossible not to be impressed and that is what we’re truly after. I am also aware, as my inner voice finally sods off, that those who have mocked me and my continued adoration of the Police machine, ghosts and all, simply don’t know what they’ve been talking about.
I strongly suspect that the nature of the tracks in the second half of the set contribute to this. The subtle cymbal work and shifting rhythms that made the older material so different from the rest of the New wave are flattened and lost in the ceiling of the arena. The less predictable beats from Stewart Copeland, with xylophone, tam tam and eastern percussion work audible in the latter half, flag up what really made these people special in the first place. Sting has not sung the tracks that work best tonight during his solo career, as he has ploughed his furrow elsewhere, and the delight is in the rediscovery.
This reveals the ironic and unexpected Achilles Heal in this aged version of The Police – Sting. Even allowing for the worn out vocals that nearly scuppered the whole thing, it is clear that in this context Sting is not what he was. He is not the rock god of the past. No matter how tanned and muscular he has remained, something has shifted. I have seen him regularly over the years and couldn’t quite out my finger on the reason for his increasingly disappointing output. Watching him with his original band mates I put my finger on it.
He is old. It sounds obvious now but as a society we’ve allowed the stars of our little sixty year old branch of popular culture to live forever in our minds, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Watching a perfectly fit and healthy Mr Sumner finishing the show tonight, it is apparent that they do not. It is a dark thought that cuts to the heart of our own mortality.
Depth, darkness, death. Sounds like Rock’n’Roll to me.
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