The show Sting said was “one of the greatest moments of his life”
Every artist wants the chance to stretch every now and again when they perform.
It can get monotonous doing the same old schtick if you know what you’re going to get out of the audience, so it’s better to show the crowd something they didn’t know they wanted. But while Sting could take his show in any direction he wanted to, there were always going to be those times when the audience knocked him out.
Granted, before Sting started, he already had a pretty healthy education about what rock and roll was supposed to be. He had studied some of the biggest names in music since before the genre even existed, so he was never afraid to throw some music theory tricks into the equation that messed with people’s heads when working with The Police.
Every one of their albums was meant to be a new creative endeavour half the time, and when they started incorporating genres like jazz, the masses were greeted with songs that no one could have conceived. Bob Dylan wasn’t going to make a tune like ‘Synchronicity II’, nor was Paul McCartney going to write the kind of strange musical world of ‘Murder By Numbers’, but that all came from Sting’s knowledge of music.
A song like ‘Every Little Thing She Does it Magic’ might scan pretty well as a pop song, but that all came from him listening to calypso music whenever you hit that chorus. It’s one thing to be immersed in that kind of music and deliver it to rock and roll fans, but it works much better when seeing people who don’t know the first thing about rock experience a concert for the very first time.
Although The Police would perform anywhere that would have them, Sting relished the opportunity to work in Bombay. It’s easy for some of the dancing and spectacle of the concert to get a bit lost in translation, but as far as the frontman was concerned, it was always his job to deliver a good time no matter the cost.
It took a few minutes for the crowd to realise what was going on, but Sting looked back on those gigs in Bombay as one of the highlights of his career, saying, “One of the best moments of my life was in Bombay, playing for an audience that had never seen rock, that had no idea how to behave toward it. There was an incredible range of social strata there – the intelligentsia, the media, the sophisticates, kids with no arms, beggars, hippies. Throughout the show, I explained that this is dance music, please don’t sit down – stand up in the seat or just dance. And by the end of the set, they did! They clapped in all the right places. It was quite emotional.”
Most people might not know what this kind of musical release is like half a world away, but the same could be said of when someone like Billy Joel played in Russia. No one knew the protocol for what a rock show was supposed to be, but once ‘The Piano Man’ blew that door wide open, it laid the groundwork for heavier acts like Metallica and Pantera to introduce moshing to the world.
Even if members of the crowd didn’t understand what they were seeing, that didn’t seem to fucking matter. Music was always supposed to bring people together, and even if the crowd didn’t see what Sting was trying to do, it was much easier for them to respond to the music than the words coming out of his mouth.
