TODAY'S QUESTION:
STING. WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE HATE THE MAN?

I've been reading a couple of topics in a forum that I frequent on the net regarding The Police this week. I have chipped in on a topic regarding whether The Police have ever made a perfect album. They didn't, as far as it goes for me, as there are a few tracks that I always skip. Some of those instrumental jams they recorded to bring their albums up to full length were not my thing. But other people love them. They wrote a whole string of fantastic singles, but a number of their albums were patchy affairs. It's all personal taste. Not everybody can like everything. So there. Grin and bear it. Stop beating your chests about it.

Sting is also being sued by his two former partners in The Police as they seem to believe that they are due some further financial recompense from him. The Internet Experts are busy and gleefully explaining what's going on (or their guesses at what is going on, anyway).

Some seem to believe that Andy Summers is still terminally aggrieved that he doesn't get half of the money from Every Breath You Take. Maybe he is - maybe he's not. Songwriting is a fairly simple thing to apportion the correct credit for, until it's not. Someone sits in a room and comes out with a song. Other people may later play on it, but that doesn't in any way mean that they wrote the song. Andy Summers guitar riff - beyond any shadow of doubt - transforms the finished arrangement that song into something else. He still didn't write the song.

Sting's original solo demo appears on the Synchronicity Super-Deluxe box set. It's absolutely awash with keyboards. The chords and melody are all there - done and dusted. It's a finished song that would later see its arrangement be massively improved, as far as they were concerned, by the band recording it. That demo was the first recorded version and none of the band were involved in any way at all with that song until the band later came to re-record it. If they were going to come to any legal arrangement regarding their songwriting credits, they should have done it there and then.

If Andy Summers had said to Sting that his guitar part had significantly altered the song and that he deserved a co-write credit, he could maybe have got it. Of course, it may have caused the band recording to be scrapped and have also caused a massive fall-out that ended the band. Whatever... They did not come to any arramngement at the time and returning to slug it out 40 years later just seems grasping and undignified, especially when each of them is so very wealthy anyway.

Ona lesser note, I once had someone claim to someone else (after my band played a song of mine at a gig) that they had co-written a song with me, just because he had added a couple of 'woh-oh-ohs' in odd places when we recorded the song. I was told about this claim during our break and I had to go up to the singer and loudly disabuse him of that notion.

It's irritating on a tiny and insignificant level like mine, but in the case of noe of the world's most successful bands, it's a major stress and it must be hugely upsetting to be attacked by your former workmates in that way.

Andy Summers is quoted somewhere as having earned a million dollars a night from their reunion tour, so he's not exactly struggling to find money for guitar strings. Stewart Copeland isn't exactly broke either. It's a bit undignified. The Police went out while they were still very much on top, rather than fading away, left a lot of pleasant memories behind and came back years later to play for their fans again. The fans bought the concert tickets and whatever the prices were, they must have considered the tickets to be value for money.

Various forum members are saying that Sting has too much money and that the other two should 'rinse him' and 'bleed him dry'. I find it hard to believe just how horrible some people are. Little green-eyed monsters. Sting has earned his money from people buying and playing his records and from concert ticket sales. He's earned it very honestly and for people to start carping that he has too much money... It's just bizarre and mean-spirited. Is this what happens when someone works and achieves something?? if it was their favourite artist who had done well, I'd hope that they'd be clapping. But it's Sting, so maybe not. They do tend to get a bit needlessly vicious.

OK, he may not be someone that everyone warms to these days (if he ever was). People who have never met him have their opinions on what he is like and what is wrong with him. Like they do with Paul McCartney and other highly successful musicians. None of them appear to have ever actually been in a room with him. And, yes, ok, his comments on the subject of tantric sex, made many years ago, may have been slightly risible, but he DID state quite clearly that a couple of hours of the proceedings were 'taken up with begging'. He does have a sense of humour, though he may not look like he has, sometimes.

Someone said that Sting has not made a good record since he ended with The Police. Clearly not true. I've just listened to The Dream Of The Blue Turtles (1985) and I can't find anything at all that I object to.

If You Love Somebody Set Them Free is a gloriously-constructed opener. Soulful, a little bit joyous. Bursting with melodic hooks. A good choice for a single, it brightened up the airwaves and only a curmudgeon would complain that it wasn't The Police.

Love Is The Seventh Wave visits sprituality and social conscience and has a gently lilting reggae feel. There were a number of records at the time that sounded like this - the backing vocals singing the chorus in unison with Sting. It's beautifully recorded. Not totally my thing and I might skip it sometimes. Not offensive. He playfully revisits the lyric from Every Breath You Take on the fade out at the end - "Every cake you bake."

Russians puts the case for the humanity of the Russian people, as opposed to their leaders. Peace as opposed to war. It was an interesting track and a good single with a captivating video to promote it.

Children's Crusade again visits the subject of war. This is the kind of song that Sting can turn out in his sleep. The lyrics are worthy enough and the tune floats along nicely enough.

Shadows In The Rain is a re-visited Police song - the original is from the album Zenyatta Modatta. Sting's version swings a lot more than the original and it's a nice jazzy workout for his new musicians. There's a sax solo and it is played at about twice the speed. Sting employs several vocal tricks he used with The Police, but he's entitled to sing his songs however he wants to.

We Work The Black Seam has a lovely chorus, but I can't get on with the rather laboured verses. Sting sings about the miners in the North East.

Consider Me Gone is more of that Jazz. Gently-delivered. An interesting lyric. It doesn't seem to be about anything in paticular. It just sets up a mood. Background music.

The Dream Of The Blue Turtles is a short instrumental, which sees Sting giving his musicians another jazz workout. The keyboards are exceptional. The band really works well. They laugh at the end.

Moon Over Bourbon Street is sung over a walking fretless bass. A lone sax tootles in the rear distance, before being joined by other horns. It's really a bit of a show-tune and wouldn't feel out of place being sung by a character in Oliver.

Fortress Around Your Heart is the album's closer and was another single. Sting sings about war and peace again. Some very clever chord progressions in the verses give way to one of Sting's absolutely titanic winning choruses. It's the track that sounds most like The Police had recorded it, as the instrumentation is fairly standard, though an oboe pops up here and there.

Sting likes jazz music very much and of course he plays it sometimes. Some of his best and most successful songs are jazz-tinged in places. It's a step onward from what he did with his old band and he's entitled to make his new music sound different if he wants to. There's little worse than someone repeating themselves ad nauseam. I'm going to work through his back catalogue and I suspect I will maybe have issues with his later Lute-Based album. Or maybe I am just thinking that because some dullard has wailed about it somewhere. I'll see.

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His Bring On The Night (1986 - live 2CD) is currently playing and there's a lot of jazzy stuff on there. He doesn't play bass on the live album. He re-visits old songs and re-imagines them, as opposed to being lazy and playing them just like the original recordings. It's often brilliant and it's not all what you'd call pop music.

The arrangement on We Work The Black Seam is much-simplified and I prefer this version to the studio version. Another Day is exclusive to this album and is a mid-paced funk workout, with lyrics about child starvation and missiles. Down so long is a twelve bar jazz-blues that allows his musicians brief feature spots.

He does (probably out of necessity) re-visit quite a few Police songs - When The World Is Running Down, Low LIfe (a B-side), Demolition Man, I Burn For You, Driven To Tears and Tea In The Sahara. I'm sure he did a few more at the live shows on the tour, but the songs he has put on the album certainly suit his musicians and lend themselves to extended workouts.

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Nothing Like The Sun (1987) is for many Sting's best album. It sounded very current at the time and was hugely successful. The production is flat, even and glossy and totally lacking in sharp edges. Most of the songs are maudlin and it says a lot for Sting that the personality of his vocals carries them and elevates them.

The Lazarus Heart was a strong jazz-funk track to open with. It sounds like typical Sting. I can't get particularly excited about it. The way the beat skips at 2.55 is a neat touch.

Be Still My Beating Heart is a wash of reverb. The song is another typical Sting track - he sometimes got into a formula of writing songs that were a cross between Driven To Tears and If You Love Somebody. The chorus is a strong one, but the song is overall a bit anonymous for him.

Englishman in New York.... Now we're talking. The best song on the album by a very long way. The production is a little less glossy and restrained on this.

History Will Teach Us Nothing is another one of those Sting tracks that just resembles Driven To Tears and is pale by comparison.

They Dance Alone [Cueca Solo]. Sting certainly likes his woodwind. There's a really nice tune and a deep political message buried under pan pipes and washes of keyboards. The tune drags along really slowly, but is in its way perfect.

According to genius.com, Sting wrote They Dance Alone when he was in Chile while he was with The Police and saw that the wives and mothers of those who had disappeared put pictures of their loved ones on clothes and danced with them. Unfortunately, the song was banned in Chile.

Sting said this about the song: "This was something that I saw when I went to Chile with the Police. The mothers and wives of "the disappeared" do this amazing thing; they pin photographs of their loved ones to their clothes and go out in groups and do this folk dance with invisible partners in front of the police station. It's this incredible gesture of grief and protest. But it's a feminine way of combating oppression. The masculine way is to burn cars or to throw rocks. Yet this feminine way is so much more powerful because what can the police do These women are simply dancing. What I'm trying to say on the record is that the female ultimately is superior to the male. That's what will bring Pinochet down - the mother's sense of injustice."

Fragile. A haunting song that is very uniquely a Sting song. He was writing these off-beat commercial songs, with more and more political messages. I can't imagine anyone else coming up with this song. A fantastic chorus.

We'll Be Together is a truly funky pop song. It's a bit of a word game, but that doesn't really matter. It's a great dance track and a lot of fun.

Straight To My Heart is another one of these tracks that Sting comes up with that really sounds like it's written to a formula. It's very similar to other songs by him.

Rock Steady sounds like it was recorded in a smoky jazz bar. It's really well done and the bass playing is a lesson on this.

I find Sister Moon quite dreary for some reason. Yes, it's a perfect recording. It is faultless in its execution, but it does nothing for me. It's another formulaic Sting song. If it had been accompanied by guitar instead of those bland keyboard washes and the wind instruments it would have some guts. I know a lot of people will love this, but I prefer my Sting with a bit of bollocks included.

Sting's version of Jimi Hendrix's Little Wing is exemplary. The recording has the same glossy production as the rest of the album, but for me it is the standout track, along with Englishman In New York. The guitar playing is just beautiful. The restraint of the backing musicians is wonderful to hear. They don't give in to the temptation to let rip. The bass guitarist slaps and pops quite discreetly and it's wonderful to hear.

The Secret Marriage is one of what I tend to think of as Sting's show-tunes. It's awful. Expertly written, he does what he intended, but it is so dreary. What a bad song to finish an album with. At least it's not very long.

All in all, the album is one that I would mainly skip through.

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The Soul Cages (1991) is an album that I have to confess that I'm not overly familiar with. It's written with much thought given to the aftermath of the death of Sting's father. I'd parted company with Sting after hearing an amount of Nothing Like The Sun and not caring for it very much.

"I lived next to a shipyard when I was young and it was a very powerful image of this huge ship towering above the house. Tapping into that was a godsend - I began with that and the album just flowed." - Sting

Sting wrote largely this album in the studio. After two weeks of rehearsing his existing song ideas with his line-up of musicians - Dominic Miller on guitar, Kenny Kirkland on keyboards and Manu Katché on drums - together they moulded these ideas into proper songs in the studio, either through arranging them or recording jams that could be edited into a song. They spent six weeks doing the basic tracks at Studio Guillaume Tell in Paris, before hiring the Le Voyageur II mobile studio for overdubs and vocals in Villa Salviati outside Pisa, Italy.

Island of Souls is a rather laboured, lumbering track and it was probably hard work to play, as well as to listen to. It starts with what sounds like Uilleann pipes (actually they are Northumbrian Smallpipes, played by Kathryn Tickell). These got fashionable aound this time Lyrically it is excellent, and you really do get the grim feeling of the Newcastle shipyard. I don't feel good, voicing my dislike for somerone else's work -because I don't feel particularly warm towards it doesn't lessen its worth or value at all. But I'm not in the frame of mind for this.

All This Time is a nice, tuneful song and was the first single from the album. Reminiscent of The Police in that it has a clean, chiming guitar featured prominently. The melody line looks forward a couple of albums to I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Crying. There's an opening melody that's some ancient well-out-of-copyright thing. Naggingly commerical and a relief after the opening track.

Mad About You is played over a naggingly complex drumbeat, and has wood wind diving in again to make it all sound a bit comfortable-easy-listening. The song has great acending and descending parts - classic Sting. The melody is lovely, but I don't like the instrumentation very much.

Jeremiah Blues (Part 1) leaves me a little bit cold. It's a gentle enough funk-blues workout with a horrible jazz interlude in the middle. The song is about five minutes long. The woodwind starts piping up again. Now I realise exactly why I parted company with Sting.

Why Should I Cry For You was selected as the fourth single from the album. Possibly one too many. There's nothing wrong with the song, but it's another one where you feel like Sting is writing to a proven formula. The playing is great. The drums are really good. It just sounds a bit middle of the road.

There are six different percussionits on this album.

Beautiful classical guitar opens Saint Agnes And The Burning Train and I'm slightly turned off. This is not music for me. It's an instrumental, so I have no idea where the title comes from.

The Wild Wild Sea sorts of drifts along in the background in a muzak sort of way and I hardly notice it.

The Soul Cages actually has a real bit of guts to it. It rocks a little. The guitar is very slightly distorted and has some meat to it. To cut a long story short, the lyrics are about where sailors go to when they die. It's long.

"He dreamed of the ship on the sea.
It would carry his father and he to a place they could never be found.
To a place far away from this town.
A Newcastle ship without coals. They would sail to the island of souls."

When The Angels Fall starts with a dreamy, slow guitar part and the album immediately feels like it's going to peter out. Everything is drenched in reverb and the song crawls along. There's some masterly playing and singing at the back end of the song, which I wish had been there earlier. He closes the album with a softly spoken 'Goodnight' that I doubt was addressed to us.

I mentally start compiling a decent album from this and his previous effort. I'd probably have to dip into his next album to get ten good tracks.

I don't want to label Sting's tribute to his father as pretentious, as I have no right at all to do that. It's not an album that I would revisit. I wouldn't have put a couple of the singles out, either.

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Two years later (in March 1993), Sting released Ten Summoner's Tales. This is definitely the Sting album that I will go to more than any other. It feels like a bit of a triumph to me. A live video with all fo the songs from the album being played at his home studio came out at the same times as the album and it was a great watch. Sting plays bass throughout and the album is better for it.

If I Ever Lose My Faith In You starts with a lovely skip beat and a lovely guitar figure behind Sting's voice. His commercial touch is all present and correct on this song. This is one of the very best songs he's ever come up with.

Love Is Stronger Than Justice (The Munificent Seven)
As near as Sting comes to jazzing-out on the album. Decent lyrics. Cleverly shifting beats, a really nice walking bass part and a total shift on the choruses. It goes country.

"The outcome was predictable. Our banditos were despicable
Of blood we lost a dozen liters. A small price to pay for las senoritas
The town mayor was happy but his face was glum. The maidens numbered only one
But there weren't seven brides for seven brothers. I knew I had to get rid of the others"

Fields Of Gold
Anyone who writes songs would have been thrilled to have come up with a line of this song. It's pretty much perfect. A lovely, restrained arrangement. A prefect vocal delivery. A triumph.

Heavy Cloud No Rain
A stop-start, rather spare arrangement, loosely funky and good lyrics, interesting key changes and a great feel. His choice of musicians dictated the feel of the album. He didn't go overboard-jazzy. It's great.

She's Too Good For Me
I love this. I've always wanted to do it with a band, though rearranging the section where it slows down a bit would be a problem. It rocks. It swings. It has humour and a cracking tune. Five songs in and no clunkers yet.

Seven Days
One of those songs that I think that only Sting could write. He has quite a unique style at times. The whimsical and slightly theatrical verses give way to perfect titanically soaring choruses. He teasingly throws in a few lines from Don't Stand So Close To Me towards the very end of the song, at which point it stops abruptly.

Saint Augustine In Hell
Lightly Jazzy. A fairly tight and complex rhythm pattern, but it is nicely meoldic on top. The double tracked vocals on the chorus are excellent. It drops down in the centre to a rather theatrical spoken word section, reminiscent of Andy Summers' Sally on the first Police album.

It's Probably Me
Wonderfully laid back, with a lovely latin feel. It's a gorgeous song. Light washes of keyboards, gentle bass. Sting's song is a masterly piece of writing and he sings it fabulously. I can forgive the trumpets on it.

Epilogue (Nothing 'Bout Me)
Funky Pop. Lively drums with a lively dancing walking bass part.  An irresistable tune and a fabulous call and response chorus. Absolutely nothing worng with this. Sparing use of horns. As commercial as it gets.

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In 1993 Sting also released an extended play Demolition Man, which featured the title track re-recorded for a film soundtrack, along with a superb live version of King Of Pain, The EP also features live versions of Shape Of My Heart, Love Is Stronger Than Justice, It's Probably Me and a really faithful terrific version of A Day In The Life.

His band play faithful versions of the songs and they sound like they are having a great time. Sting doesn't play bass on the live tracks.

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1994 saw a sure fire hit Very Best Of album, Fields Of Gold.

When We Dance (previously unreleased)
If You Love Somebody Set Them Free
Fields of Gold
All This Time
Fortress Around Your Heart (remixed version)
Be Still My Beating Heart
They Dance Alone (Cueca Solo)
If I Ever Lose My Faith in You
Fragile
Why Should I Cry for You?" (remixed version)
Englishman in New York
We'll Be Together (previously unreleased version)
Russians
This Cowboy Song (previously unreleased)

If it wasn't for the quality of his previous (and next) album, I'd say that this is all the product that you need to buy by Sting. Of course, record companies like their Best Of's and there would be more of them and the 2011 2CD edition of The Best Of 25 Years is probably the one to get..

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Mercury Falling, released in 1996,

The Hounds of Winter

I Hung My Head

Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot

I Was Brought to My Senses

You Still Touch Me

I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Crying

All Four Seasons in one day

Twenty Five to Midnight

La Belle Dame Sans Regrets

Valparaiso

Lithium Sunset

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This page is currently a work in progress that I am currently adding to - plaese come back when I have done some more writing.