The “openly sexual” artist that made Sting want to be a musician
There’s always been a bit of an erotic angle to all forms of rock and roll.
As much as people like to claim that they are only in it for the music, the kind of back and forth that people have with the audience, every single time they perform in a stadium can easily become dirty if one of the vocalists gets the right idea. While Sting wasn’t exactly looking for any Madonna-level of sexuality when he first started, he knew that there was a seductive quality listening to his favourite artists back in the day.
But beyond being one of the greatest songwriters of his time, it’s not like Sting was looking to be a pretty boy by any stretch. He had gone to school and even become a professor before he started working with The Police, and even when he started making pop hits of his own, he wasn’t afraid to throw in the kind of wild left turns that were bound to please the musos in the audience.
There are much more simplistic tunes in their arsenal like ‘Every Breath You Take’, but everyone in the band was normally happy when they were working with tunes that didn’t seem to have any prospect of being a hit. They knew when a tune sounded like a hit, but listening to a track like ‘Murder By Numbers’ or even the instrumental version of ‘Reggatta de Blanc’ made them look like they were playing only for themselves.
In fact, a lot of their best moments tended not to be from rock and roll at all. Andy Summers knew a lot coming from the jazz world, and his chords, along with Sting’s ear for melody, made for the most sophisticated pop songs ever made. There was still that punk-rock spirit of “anything goes” if they had the right song to work with, but Sting felt that it wasn’t until seeing Jimi Hendrix that he saw how captive a frontman could be.
Because for a long time, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley were the archetypes for what “rock and rollers” looked like. Both of them had the kind of swagger that everyone thought of when they saw a rockstar, but whereas Presley shocked everyone by daring to move his pelvis a little bit, Hendrix took everything great about music and put it under one roof when he sang tunes like ‘Hey Joe’ and ‘Purple Haze’ back in the day.
And seeing Hendrix play on television proved to be pivotal for Sting when he first saw him, saying, “The Jimi Hendrix Experience appeared on Top of the Pops in December 1966 and changed everything. Hendrix had transformed ‘Hey Joe’ and propelled it by the elegant ferocity of his guitar playing. His vocal was as sulky and offhand as it was passionate and openly sexual, and as the three-piece stormed through the three-minute song, I imagined everyone in the country in front of their tells sitting bolt upright in their chairs.”
The Police were never going to be as known for their sexual prowess when they played live as Hendrix did, but a lot of the seductiveness of Hendrix didn’t come from anything vulgar that he said in his tunes. He was clearly in an intimate relationship with his guitar whenever he played, and it was much more entertaining seeing him either abuse or make love to his instrument whenever the time called for it.
It was probably not the kind of performance that anyone’s grandmother would have liked to see back in the day, but it wasn’t outright off-putting, either. People had simply never seen this kind of performance before, and it was a lot easier for people to see what could be done now that Hendrix had opened up every single door of possibility.
