The music Sting called the “golden age” of his life
Sting was never meant to play the same rock and roll forever.
He lived and breathed music in every sense of the word, and even if he could have made a million more Police albums, it wouldn’t have satisfied him nearly enough, as his solo career did when he could flex his muscles. There was so much more room for him to grow with that kind of musical model, but he could always rely on his old collection of records to guide him in the right direction whenever he got stuck.
But looking at the kind of music The Police were playing a lot of the time, some of the more downtempo moments of Sting’s career aren’t something that most would have seen coming. He was a fantastic singer, to be sure, but when listening to the aggression in a song like ‘Next To You’ from their first records, it’s astonishing to think that same songwriter was capable of making a tune as beautiful as ‘Fields of Gold’.
That’s because Sting never looked at music from the perspective of genre. All that mattered was having a good song, and it was up to the rest of the band how they were going to dress it up half the time. It could go in a jazzy direction depending on what Andy Summers was doing, but when working with every one of his favourite players, Sting could go from one genre to another with ease when Dream of the Blue Turtles came out.
A lot of his melodies were far more sophisticated than most people would have realised, but there was also a ton of wiggle room for him to work in as well. Albums like Ten Summoner’s Tales were clearly indebted to the adult contemporary crowd at the time, but the fact that he could pull off playing old folk songs on If On A Winter’s Night was more of a testament to how far he’d come as a musician.
It definitely wasn’t rock and roll, but Sting never found that rock and roll truly satisfied him, either. There were certainly bands that knocked him on his ass when he first heard them like The Beatles, but when going through the music that soundtracked his youth, a lot of the biggest parts of his record collection came from the finest soul musicians in the world.
You have to remember that soul had as firm a grip on the music world as rock at the time, and Sting couldn’t help but go back to those albums when making records like Mercury Falling, saying, “When I was fifteen, sixteen which was the time of my rampant puberty and discovering sex and dancing and going out and drinking, it coincided with the boom in soul music – Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Booker T and the MGs, James Brown – so that music means a great deal for me. If I look back to a golden age in my musical life it’s probably then.”
Now, is Sting ever going to be as soulful as someone like James Brown? Absolutely not. Every musician can only be themselves when working on their classic records, but going through the best Sting songs, the same passion is there whenever he works on his own classic tunes, whether that’s reinterpreting ‘Demolition Man’ or working on softer numbers like ‘If I Ever Lose My Faith In You’.
Even if Sting considered him a musical sponge in some respects and pulling from every part of his bands, there’s something about soul music that does find its way into his hits every now and again. He’s not out here trying to make his own take on The Isley Brothers or even The Doobie Brothers for that matter, but it’s much more interesting for him to try new things than to get stuck in a rut.
