Sting - Fields of gold

Sting's solo career officially began two years after the last Police album, a period during which he worked to define the coordinates of a music that, without straying too far from what had brought him immense success, could still come across as sufficiently distinct. Many were waiting to pounce on him, accusing him of having been not only the prime architect of so much glory, but also, through his egocentrism and arrogance, the one responsible for the end of a myth that no one had quite come to terms with. Sting was already considered one of the most personal and prolific rock songwriters of all time, but it was clear that shaking off the ghost of a band with such planet-wide success and so many great songs behind it would be no easy task.

In truth, on The Dream Of The Blue Turtles (1985), Sting's first post-Police album, the operation only partly succeeds, because while the arrangements veer heavily towards jazz — the musician's first love, and a tendency only hinted at in a few of the band's songs — the compositions are still very much shaped by the author's habit of working with Copeland and Summers. Sting surrounds himself with a band of jazz musicians: Branford Marsalis (brother of the better-known Wynton) on horns, Kenny Kirkland on keyboards, Darryl Jones on bass and Omar Hakim on drums. Hakim's style in particular, on several tracks, leans distinctly towards Copeland's (“If You Love Somebody Set Them Free”, “Fortress Around Your Heart”). Guitar duties are taken on by Sting himself, who certainly can't imitate Andy Summers, and indeed the little guitarist's classy brushstrokes are sorely missed. It's also noticeable that some songs were written back in the Police era with the intention of handing them to his old bandmates — this is especially evident in the closing “Fortress Around Your Heart”. All in all, The Dream Of The Blue Turtles is a record that certainly contains perfectly solid songs destined for commercial success — hardly surprising given the author — but it suffers from the absence of his old bandmates, despite the excellent musicians brought in to perform it.

Looking in detail at the most interesting tracks, the opener “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free” is the classic Sting-style number destined to top the charts. It's striking how, with an almost cheeky ease, he's able to churn out hits like this which, despite their enormous mainstream success, can rarely be dismissed as mere trifles. “Russians” deals with the nuclear threat in a world still gripped by the Cold War, drawing on a theme by Prokofiev (credited with sheet music included in the liner notes), with classically-styled arrangements and dramatic tones. “Children's Crusade”, along with the closing “Fortress Around Your Heart”, is the album's finest moment: warm and aching, it features a rather unexpected chord sequence. “We Work The Black Seam” is dedicated to the British miners' strike against Thatcherite reforms, which at the time dominated political and economic debate for a long stretch; it's not the only socially-engaged theme on the album, but we'll return to the question of Sting's activism later. “Moon Over Bourbon Street” is the album's most straightforwardly jazz track, based on Anne Rice's novel “Interview with the Vampire”, which years later would be turned into a successful film. Sting seems to have a knack for such literary-cinematic prophecies, since “Tea In The Sahara”, on Synchronicity, was already inspired by the novel “The Sheltering Sky”, from which Bernardo Bertolucci would make the film “The Sheltering Sky”, and “Darkness” on Ghost In The Machine was based on “Siddhartha” (from which “Little Buddha” was made). The closing “Fortress Around Your Heart” has — as mentioned — a clear Police imprint and brings to mind the air after a summer storm.

As mentioned, with this album Sting definitively takes on the guise of the intellectual, socially engaged musician, a role he had already assumed several times in the final Police years, and in the years that followed we would always find him involved in a myriad of charitable causes around the world, now defending the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon (who, after collaborating with him, would also find occasion to criticise him harshly), now championing the causes of Amnesty International (the Police briefly reunited for the Conspiracy Of Hope Tour in the US in June 1986) or Greenpeace, now taking part in the Live Aid project that would, to some extent, define the 1980s. All of this, however noble and positive in absolute terms, would at times cause Sting to lose sight of his role as a simple musician, turning him into a sort of prophet of charitable rock, almost in friendly rivalry, or cohabitation, with Bono of U2 for the role of Pop Messiah.

It goes without saying that, despite the doom-mongers, the album is a great commercial success and is also well received by critics, almost as if this were an inevitable destiny for Sting.

After the release of the live album Bring On The Night, drawn from the Dream Of The Blue Turtles tour, things fall into place more convincingly with his second studio album, the double Nothing Like The Sun, and Sting's music takes on a truly distinctive dimension of its own. This despite the fact that Andy Summers appears on two songs and Manu Katché — one of the drummers most influenced by, and most indebted to, Copeland's innovations — is brought in on drums, with much of the band made up of the same musicians who played on the previous record. The jazz arrangements are of course still there, but they're no longer used as a pretext to mark a difference, being far more naturally “integrated” with the songwriting.

“Lazarus Heart” opens the album with Caribbean-flavoured latin jazz atmospheres, insistent off-beat percussion and a lovely clarinet line, and “Be Still My Beating Heart” is a slow ballad where we finally hear Sting return to the bass. “Englishman In New York” is a bouncy reggae-jazz number that would become one of his most successful singles as a solo artist. The second side presents a more politically engaged Sting, who in “They Dance Alone” directly attacks Pinochet, telling the story of Chile's desaparecidos through the women who dance alone in Santiago's Plaza de Mayo to remember them in defiance of the regime. After the fall of the Chilean regime, Sting would refuse to perform this song again. “Fragile” is another romantic, melancholy mood ballad for acoustic guitar and Latin percussion, about human fragility and its attraction to violence. “Straight To My Heart”, with a lovely piano tumbao, takes us back to the Caribbean, but in a strange and effective blend with a certain Celtic folk feel. “Sister Moon”, like “Moon Over Bourbon Street” on the previous album, is the most overtly jazz song on the record. On “Little Wing”, Hendrix is superbly reinterpreted in a jazz vein, helped in no small part by the presence of Gil Evans and his orchestra — a reading quite different from the usual take on the Seattle southpaw, where the guitar solo is wisely quoted without overdoing it. “The Secret Marriage” is the album's brief closer, openly Brechtian in origin.

Nothing Like The Sun gives us back a Sting fully in command of his own compositional and interpretive powers. Nothing tremendously innovative, no revolution, but clarity of purpose, fine lyrics, well-judged melodies and several clever touches. Ultimately, that's exactly what one asks of this artist. On the world tour he proves a passionate interpreter of both the new material and his perennial classics, a far cry from the cold professional he would become years later. A version titled “Nada Como El Sol” was also released, a shortened, Spanish-language take on the album, obviously superfluous for anyone but the most die-hard fan.

On 11 July 1987, as part of Umbria Jazz, Sting performed at the Stadio Comunale in Perugia in a single show with Gil Evans' orchestra. In the second half of 1988, once his own tour had wrapped up, Sting took part in the Human Rights Now! Tour, again in support of Amnesty International, alongside Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen, Yossou n’Dour and Tracy Chapman, in one of the most colossal and consistently high-quality package tours of all time. In Italy the tour stopped in September at the Stadio Comunale in Turin, where this writer experienced one of the most unforgettable days of large-scale, “open-field” rock of his life.

After four years of recording silence, during which, besides various tours, Sting devoted himself to supporting charitable causes around the world, The Soul Cages was released in 1991. The new record is deeply marked by the death of the musician's father, to whom the album is explicitly dedicated, starting from the slow, strongly chant-like opener “Island Of Souls”, where ethereal harps, a metallic guitar tone standing in for a funeral bell, and a constant underlying bagpipe evoke a melancholy atmosphere, fog-scented and wistful. The following “All This Time”, the album's first single, has by contrast a bright, upbeat feel, but remains rooted in the Newcastle of childhood memories, amid images of priests and funerals, reflections on the transience of things and the river of life that flows on relentlessly. “Mad About You” is the song that most recalls the previous record and once again shows off Sting's skill at arranging broken melodies that worm their way in precisely because of their “fragmentation”. This song would unfortunately become the “victim” of an Italian-language remix with lyrics written by Italy's own Zucchero, which Sting would sing with almost comic effect. Along with these, the album's most interesting tracks, in that each in its own way best captures its overall mood, are “Why Should I Cry For You” (with distinct, pleasing African echoes), “The Soul Cages”, and the closing “When The Angels Fall”. If many consider the album a tedious succession of dirges, that's understandable, but while it's certainly no masterpiece, one has to enter into the spirit of mourning that runs through this record in order to understand it and give it its due. It is, at the very least, a deeply felt and emotionally dense work. In this writer's view, it musically hits its mark, letting the author's catharsis and personal consolation filter through to the listener, via unhurried compositions, enveloping arrangements and a sound suspended in a muffled atmosphere, as if everything were unfolding in a kind of purgatory, quietly awaiting the inevitable.

The Soul Cages was recorded for the most part in Italy, specifically in Tuscany, which from this point on starts to become a second homeland for Sting. After buying and selling a villa in San Rossore near Pisa, he purchases an estate in Figline Valdarno, just outside Florence, where over the years he'll spend more and more time, devoting himself in recent years, like a modern-day country squire, even to producing and selling wine and olive oil under his own label — with dramatic effects on his music, however.

1993 brings Ten Summoner's Tale, where the effects of this newfound bourgeois comfort start to seriously show. The opening single "If I Ever Lose My Faith In You" gives the impression that the magic still holds: a catchy melody, lovely chord progressions, a strong bassline and a performance straight out of the old days. Unfortunately, the following "Love Is Stronger Than Justice (The Magnificent Seven)" shatters any illusion, with a pathetic attempt at a chorus lifted from some banal western theme, randomly glued onto confused verses that go nowhere in particular, plus a closing jazz piano solo that also feels tacked on from somewhere else entirely. The lovely ballad "Fields Of Gold" restores some hope, soft and disarming as a woman's embrace, but however pleasant the rest of the album is, nothing really stands out or sticks in the memory. The whole thing comes across as bland, already-heard-before, with very few real ideas and without even the excuse of inner searching anymore. Perhaps the only exception among the other tracks is "Seven Days", mostly thanks to the opening of the chorus, which uses the old trick of reciting the days of the week to turn it into an easy-to-remember nursery rhyme. This record is something of a disappointment, or a wake-up call — let's call it a slow slide from a precarious balance between pop melody and jazz refinement, rock echoes and the sensibility of a seasoned songwriter. It's too risky to attempt real change when you want, and need, to keep satisfying an audience that has by now become quite diverse, and largely very different from his original fanbase — far closer to easy listening than rock. The thinking must have been: better to play it safe, even at the cost of sounding like a self-parody.

In the '90s, Sting has children with his new partner Trudie Styler and gives interviews in which, from time to time, he rather banally proclaims that rock is dead, that he's going deaf (a veiled comparison with illustrious predecessors?) and that this allows him to pick up on new sonorities, and that he can make love for eight (!) hours straight thanks to tantric sex — only to specify afterward that this includes at least six hours of restorative sleep and preparation. All of this regularly gets huge coverage, not only in the "official" music press but also on TV and in the more or less scandal-hungry tabloids. Sting is one of the leading figures of the gilded world of superstardom, so he can afford to say and do absolutely anything, and its opposite. Old fans look on, baffled, meanwhile drifting toward other shores of rock, which, for its part, is of course alive and well.

The decline in inspiration becomes plain with Mercury Falling, from 1996, a record utterly devoid of bite, a cloying, classy homogenate with literally nothing worth pointing out.

Brand New Day, from 1999, offers as its lead single a dreadful collaboration with raï singer Cheb Mami titled "Desert Rose", a flat, muddled dirge with no apparent point, built from a syncopated pop beat and a banal, already-overused pseudo-Arabic melody. The album is a collection of songs that won't go down in music history, squandered in a constant attempt to find something, anything, that sounds original, reaching now for bossa nova, now for gospel, now indeed for Arabic music. The one thing worth salvaging, if anything, is the title track.

In May 2000, in the middle of yet another world tour, Sting pays tribute to his adopted city of Florence by giving it a huge free concert at the Parco delle Cascine, attended by more than thirty thousand people. The Sting who shows up on this special occasion, to the eyes of someone who's seen him live in every incarnation, with the Police and solo, as the writer of this piece has, is a flawless performer, without a single audible or visible flaw, backed by an excellent band, armed with dozens of magnificent songs, but so professional that he comes across as cold, detached, almost glacial in his perfection. The tricks of a consummate (and, let's be honest, crowd-pleasing) rock star are everywhere, the mind stays on guard, but the wonderful melodies of old, in the atmosphere of a mild spring evening in the park, keep making you suspend judgment every time, cursing yourself for your nostalgic weakness of heart. You only have to ask around to realize the impression is widely shared. Everyone leaves that concert happy, but no one leaves convinced, let alone enthusiastic: by now Sting has definitively changed, and not for the better.

On September 11, 2001, preceded by a fanfare of press coverage, Sting gathers his trusted musicians and a select group of illustrious international showbiz superstars at his Villa Il Palagio in Figline Valdarno (Florence), to act as the audience for the recording of a strange live album. The point of the whole operation was a mystery then and remains one today. Be that as it may, this little showbiz elite will instead end up watching the harrowing television footage of the attack on New York's Twin Towers, but the "concert" goes ahead that evening regardless. The final result is titled All This Time, an unremarkable, neither-good-nor-bad product that survives only thanks to the old songs, and on which you can hear that the voice is no longer what it once was. Along with mostly unexciting versions of the tracks, what remains is pleasant car-ride music, one of the countless "best of" releases from the man, of which by now one has lost count.

The rest is recent history: aside from a further appearance in 2002, following one in 1993, at one of those dreary, self-congratulatory charity galas alongside the same increasingly bloated "friends" who dogged us for years as reliably as Christmas with relatives (a tradition now, thankfully, discontinued), 2003 brings the album Sacred Love, on which Sting once again delivers a poor collaboration, this time with Mary J. Blige. However subjective and debatable "poor" might seem, it's the only simple word that comes to this writer's mind. Everything slides into mediocrity: nothing experimental (as if — this is glossy material made for radio and MTV), nothing melodically compelling for those who'd been spoiled by his earlier compositions (inspiration, sadly, is a thing of the past), no surprising performances (the production no longer takes any risks at all). One question naturally arises: why? The answer comes just as naturally: a large family to support (in luxury).

Perhaps tired himself of this state of affairs, Sting completely changes tack in 2006 with Songs From The Labyrinth, devoted, remarkably, to a historical reconstruction of 17th-century musical performance practice, released on the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon label. The former Police man, accompanied by renowned lutenist Edin Karamazov, reworks the compositions of John Dowland, an English composer who lived in the 1600s, in the Elizabethan era. These are mostly lute compositions, interspersed with instrumental tracks (notably "The Battle Galliard") and brief excerpts from Dowland's own letters.

In this unusual guise as Renaissance balladeer, at the very least, Sting manages to shake off that irksome shadow of mannerism that had tainted his most recent work. Dowland doesn't seem like an obvious fit, given the distance between his own musicality and vocal style and the composer's, but the timeless enchantment of pieces like "Can She Excuse My Wrongs" and "Come Again" ultimately makes you forget all that.

This "eccentric" digression in Sting's career continues, in a way, with If On A Winter's Night, which in 2009 repeats the partnership with Deutsche Grammophon, drawing on wintertime imagery. But it's not your typical Christmas-songs record: the fifteen tracks alternate between traditional pieces and others composed by various musicians, including Sting himself. It ranges from literary references (the evocative "Christmas At Sea", drawn from a poem by Stevenson) to a return to the 1600s, this time via the repertoire of Henry Purcell ("Cold Song", "Now Winter Comes Slowly"). Among those taking part are violinist Kathryn Tickell, guitarist Dominic Miller, harpist Mary Macmaster and saxophonist Kenny Garrett, who caps off "The Burning Babe" with a brief but cutting solo. Edin Karamazov's lute also returns to add a touch of class to the closing "You Only Cross My Mind In Winter" (Bach). In this setting, Sting ends up practically a bit player, but at least he performs a dignified role as a pop ambassador for early music.

The artist waits until 2013 — a full ten years — to give Sacred Love a genuinely new follow-up: it's titled The Last Ship and originally contained 12 songs written for the musical of the same name, which was set to debut the following June. The work takes its inspiration from the closure of the shipyards in Wallsend, the town where Sting grew up. The album, also released in a deluxe edition with bonus tracks, features a string of guests born in the north-east of England, including Brian Johnson of AC/DC, Jimmy Nail, the Unthanks, the Wilson Family and Kathryn Tickell. Openly autobiographical, partly through a vocal performance that leans into the cadences and accent typical of his home region, it has some genuinely inspired moments, such as the title track and the confessional "Dead Man's Boots" and "Practical Arrangement". Sting would go on to appear as an actor in some stage performances.

At the very least surprising is the episode that is 44/876, a sudden return to reggae territory shared with Shaggy. With a title referring to the UK's and Jamaica's respective telephone country codes, the record even won a Grammy Award in February 2019, putting the two artists back in the UK top ten after more than fifteen years (with decent results pretty much everywhere). It's a project that feels like a joke, and more than a few critics did not take it well, while the two men themselves seem to be having a good laugh about it. At times unpleasant, especially due to the Jamaican singer's dreadful baritone delivery (though, as they say, it's a matter of taste...), it does have a few redeeming numbers, like the lively but far-from-silly "Just One Lifetime".

At the end of 2021, Sting releases The Bridge, a bridge toward a new life, toward post-pandemic hopes, toward a new renaissance. But it's a record lacking in both spark and ideas, as it retreads and at the same time sums up the career of this adopted Tuscan. Everything sounds well made, played with skill, polish and composure, but there's no spark to it. Mid-tempo numbers like "Rushing Water" or "If It's Love" chase each other, clearly echoing old numbers from a glorious past. Ballads abound, very restrained and all too similar to one another, as shown by the back-to-back "The Bridge" and "Waters Of Tyne". The record closes with the enjoyable semi-instrumental "Captain Bateman's Basement" and with the illustrative cover of "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay", a bonus track that nonetheless perfectly captures the routine of an old hand at the popular song trade.