The 1982 show that made Sting feel like a God: “Higher up the ladder”
There’s no real way for someone like Sting to prepare for being one of the biggest rock stars in the world.
Arguably, he didn’t even want to be that big when The Police first formed, but after spending one record after the next arguing over what they wanted their sound to be, it’s no big shock that Sting wanted out of the band to pursue his own solo career. But when you look at the raw numbers that they were pulling in every single time they played, how the hell were they supposed to sustain that kind of power for the rest of their lives?
There were more than a few times where they could have kept going and made the kinds of records that had a few more ‘Roxannes’ on them, but Sting didn’t operate that way. He wanted to make a record that would push him every single time he went into the studio, and while working with a bunch of jazz musicians may have been a stretch for fans around that time, Sting wasn’t about to apologise for changing things up.
He was proud of what he made on Dream of the Blue Turtles, and seeing how Synchronicity featured all of them fighting, he wasn’t going to subject himself to that again. Then again, becoming one of the biggest stadium rock acts of all time and playing to millions of people night after night probably didn’t hurt when they started touring the world in 1983. They had finally reached their peak, and there was no way that anyone could stop them.
Even in the context of other pop stars around that time, there was no one who could have rivalled what ‘Every Breath You Take’ was doing. This was one of the finest pop songs that Sting ever made, and even if he had a bit more of a cynical twist in the lyrics, the fact that everyone could look past that for the sake of the melody was what made millions of people fall in love with the band all over again.
But playing those massive outdoor gigs did have a lot more drawbacks to them as well. For a band that was as tight-knit as The Police were, it’s hard to pull off that same power trio sound in a stadium, and while Sting was also preparing to star in Dune halfway through working on the tour, it almost felt like he had some supernatural powers every single time he plugged in his bass and stepped up to the microphone.
Plenty of singers can get drunk on that kind of attention, but Sting felt that being at that level of stardom was bound to be a little bit dangerous as well, saying, “The higher up the ladder you get, the more deifying it is. You appear at the US festival and there is a quarter of a million people out there and it makes you think you’re God. You raise your hand and they raise their hand. You sing a line and they sing a line.”
That’s a lot of attention to have all at once, but the minute that someone starts taking themselves too seriously at those concerts is usually when things fall apart. Sting had already witnessed more than a few times when musicians were getting too bigheaded for their own good, and he was more than happy to be that musical deity for a few minutes, and that put that persona right back on the shelf once the lights came down.
Because as much as he liked performing, he was a musician first and an entertainer second half the time. He wanted to chase after his inspiration at every opportunity, and he wasn’t going to let a couple of blinding lights and screaming crowds get in the way of him following his bliss whenever he made something new.
