The one song Sting thought his fans ruined: “Disconcerting”
The last thing any artist wants is to be going through the motions onstage. The whole point of any great concert is putting some degree of emotion into every song, and it can be hard to have that same passion in your work when you have to keep singing a song that got old after the first listen, let alone the 400th. But ever since Sting left the confines of The Police, he made sure that every song that he ever laid down was going to be a new experiment for him.
Dream of the Blue Turtles was already a sign that he was working with new genres like jazz, but every piece of his career was about moving on in one sense or another. ‘Englishman in New York’ may have received the kind of airplay that any artist would kill for, but there are also albums like The Soul Cages that were more personal. It might not have resonated with audiences, but it was always about Sting pushing himself forward rather than worrying about the sales figures.
But sometimes the singles are legitimately the best songs. ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’ is one of the highlights of Ghost in the Machine, and anyone who doesn’t sing along to ‘Every Breath You Take’ is either kidding themselves or legally dead, but even for Sting’s pedigree, ‘Fields of Gold’ was a thing of beauty.
There are plenty of adult-alternative artists who slipped into this cheesy ballad territory, but Sting earns every bit of the tune’s runtime. Anyone else with this kind of track would have come off as laughably pretentious, but with the help of masterful arranger Michael Kamen, the bassist put together the kind of record that any seasoned veteran would have killed to have written, especially with the strings echoing behind him.
It’s one thing to make everything work in the studio, but the stage is a much different animal, and Sting felt that the song was mutilated when fans started to sing it, saying, “Now the audience has taken to doing this when I sing it he sways like barley in the breeze, en masse, which is disconcerting. But you can’t stop them, can you? Oi! Stop that f***ing shite!” They are simply showing their appreciation, but it’s easy to see why Sting would get annoyed.
Outside of turning every audience into an ocean of swaying bodies whenever he plays the tune, this would be the equivalent of someone going to a James Brown show and proceeding to clap on the offbeat. It might be a good time for that one person, but when everyone else is trying their best to get into the groove and enjoy the show, that one person holding everyone down is bound to get really annoying really fast. So imagine that being the entire crowd, and you’d want to stop playing altogether.
But not all the fans were quite as musically challenged as the crowds. Even when listening back to some of the accolades he has been given, Sting was knocked out knowing that Paul McCartney was jealous of ‘Fields of Gold’ and wished he had written it first. No matter how little someone feels about their song, after a while, being commended by a Beatle is like being welcomed to the land of musical gods.
So if Sting’s material is good enough to be the envy of Macca and other songs are good enough to be played with Frank Zappa, it’s not like there’s much room for arguing over his chops. His material might not be the most interesting thing in the world every single time it comes on, but anyone looking to understand the mechanics of music would benefit from studying the harmony on his finest records.
