Sting cools, Lennox rules: Live at SPAC on the 4th of July

by Thomas Dimopoulos

SARATOGA SPRINGS - Sting ruled center stage with a kingly air of royalty Sunday night.
He dressed in a sleek black suit accented by white collar and cuffs, and looked every bit the English country gentleman dressed for a special occasion.

He waved his bass like a scepter over the heads of the faithful who flocked to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center on the Fourth of July. The irony that he stood a few miles down the road from the battlefields of the American Revolution was not lost on the 52-year-old performer.

'Independence Day is a tough day to be English,' he joked. 'We used to own this place:
New York, Albany, Sche-nec-ta-dy,' he announced, then compared the feeling of being English on American Independence Day to being a Red Sox fan at the World Series. A number of the flock did not laugh.

It has been 20 years since the breakup of The Police, the reggae-fused power trio Sting rode across the English Channel of the musical New Wave. And these days, there seems to be a
more bourgeois pomposity in his tone. It is not an air with which the Spa City is unfamiliar.

Sting alternated between bass and acoustic guitar, fronting a seven-member band that included multiple keyboards and percussionists.
The set played for 90 minutes, nearly half of which was culled from his recent 'Sacred Love,'
and included a mixed bag of tunes from his solo career as well as a smattering of tones
dating back to his days with The Police.

He wove memorable performances, playing acoustic guitar on the song 'Fragile,' and delivered
a snappy version of 'Englishman in New York.' Three tunes into the set, the crowd was brought to its feet when he was joined by Annie Lennox for the song 'We'll Be Together,'
as Sting played the country gentleman to Lennox's energetic shimmy and shake.

Lennox performed amiably earlier in the evening.
An entertaining performer who is comfortable on the stage, her set was highlighted by the piano-driven ballad 'Here Comes the Rain Again' and a jazzed-up version of Bob Marley's 'Waiting in Vain.'

A commanding presence in spangle-trimmed blue jeans that clung to her thin frame, Lennox belted out the pop tune 'Walking on Broken Glass,' and donned a black vinyl Elvis-like motorcycle jacket to deliver a gritty 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).'

Of Sting's newest material, 'Dead Man's Rope' worked nicely, the singer strumming what he introduced as 'the smallest guitar in New York state' while framed by multiple video images of nature gardens and full moons, swaying trees, solar eclipses and surreal underwater villages inhabited by topless vixens.

The video accompaniment was most poignant during the intense performance of 'This War,' depicting war planes dropped their bombs as Sting's vocals wailed with a thrilling remorsefulness and the band pounded and throbbed in the emotionally charged song.

Rather than riding the wave to a higher intensity, however, the momentum was stunted by
the mid-set lull - that self-indulgent section of the program when artists force-feed their audience with ill-suited new material.

Not even the swirling light-beam psychedelics, nor a parade of video screen strippers
could save the dreadful one-two punch of 'Whenever I Say Your Name' and 'Sacred Love,'
which stank up the air with such ferocity that even the happily buzzing mosquitoes circling through the night were murdered by its dull and stagnant air.

You had to wonder if some of the audience might have been felled as well, the best seated of whom shelled out a cool $100 per for the privilege.

Sting offered up 'Synchronicity II' from The Police songbook early in the set and eternal deliverance from the mid-set lull was promised as the quarter-century old hit 'Roxanne' was dusted off and revved up to ride into the night. But this too - mixed with bits of 'King of Pain' - was murdered by the bland hand of its musical leader, whose jazz-cheesy indulges rendered 'Roxanne,' now 25 years older, little more than a nostalgic tease incapable of delivering her former glories.
So broken was its momentum at the end, that even King Sting and all the king's men couldn't put poor Roxy together again.

The mass exodus began even as the singer stood in the emptying amphitheater taking bows
and performing curtain calls, the sounds of 'Desert Rose' and 'If Ever I Lose My Faith'
drifting into the long, bittersweet night.

published in The Saratogian, July 6, 2004.