2nd best concert. Ever. August 2, 2007 ~ 9:54 am
Posted by Julie in : Reviews , trackbackAnd the Police were only edged out by Queen + Paul Rodgers because of my love of Queen…and Brian’s guitar playing. Andy Summers is a brilliant guitar player, but not quite the same as Brian May.
Fiction Plane opened up the show, and they are a damned good band - a little more towards the alternative style of rock than the Police, but high energy and really entertaining. I especially liked Joe Sumner’s repeated jumps off the speakers and the fact that he played to those of us sitting behind the stage. He sounded eerily like his dad at a couple of points, but on the whole he’s got his own style of bass playing and singing. He may be Sting’s son, but he’s his own musician.
There was a half hour turnaround between Fiction Plane and the Police, and then the Police took then stage at a little past 9. For the next two hours I was on my feet, dancing and singing. It was a greatest hits concert in the best sense - “Message in a Bottle,” “This Bed’s Too Big Without You,” “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” “So Lonely,” “Roxanne,” “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da,” “King of Pain,” “Next To You”…I think the only song that I was really dying to hear that they didn’t play was “Fallout,” but I was probably the only one who really wanted to hear that (I was surrounded by people who didn’t know the words to half the songs, with the notable exception of a group of four to my left and a drunk guy three rows down. And Mom. She knew the words to most of the songs.).
All told, the Police played for just about two hours, and I literally think I sat down for three minutes. I’ve got every song they ever recorded on CD (and thus on my iPod), but until you hear them live, you don’t realize how much of a groove there is, how based in reggae and ska a lot of their songs are. At one point, when everyone was on their feet and singing (I think it was during “Roxanne”), I could feel the ground moving under my feet. Even Sting stopped doing a call-and-response with the audience to say “This stage moves. There is definitely a seismic reaction going on here.”
Long and short of it: when the three of them are on stage, you can tell one of them has been doing rock concerts and working out for the past twenty years and two of them havent. Sting hardly broke a sweat, he was playing to the entire audience, he looked just as fresh at the end of the concert as he did at the beginning. Andy’s playing is on, but a lot of the time he looked like he was focusing more inward than on the crowd around him. Stewart is on, but he has a vacant stare on his face and his jaw is hanging slack for the majority of the time, like he’s on something. He and Andy looked tired by the end of the show, although he recovered enough as they were leaving after the second encore to shout “Yeah!” at the crowd a couple of times. I think all three of them enjoyed the hell out of it, they just have different ways of playing now that they’ve been following different career paths for twenty years.
If I can get tickets for their Halloween show at the Garden, I am totally there.
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If I could get tickets to the Garden in October, I’d be totally there too!
Wait, they were in NY, as well? I couldn’t touch the tix at Fenway. Your mom rules for knowing all the words.
I was considering seeing them, but it would be Toronto and between tickets, drive to the show and all that, it wasn’t worth it to me. I like the Police but not that much.
Sounds like it was a great show, however. I really like Andy Summer’s work. It’s quite tasty. He knows just what to put in a song without going overboard.