BRAND ICON STING

Message in a Bottle

“Every Breath You Take” by Sting is the most-played pop song on the radio thanks to his battle to save the Amazon rainforest. One species of frog has even been named after him. It was Sting who introduced Madonna to Guy Ritchie and christened their son Rocco. His foundation`s website hardly contains a single mention of the fact that he is its president. His mixture of common decency and rock`n`roll energy is, in this case, unique. So is his love for tantric sex that he espouses in the media.

Brandomania, August 2008

Two years ago, right at about this time of year, a music superstar performed at the Petrovaradin fortress. The tickets sold out in hours, the space in front of EXIT`s main stage was packed to bursting even though the festival hadn’t even started, and the domestic audience was forced to come to terms with international pro standards in terms of quality of live performance, sound and concert duration. There were many who were disappointed that Sting (yes, that was him!) had done his job completely professionally – faultlessly from a musical point of view – with an understandable lordlike distance, with a performance that was entirely reasonable in terms of duration … Some thought he should have filled the playlist with hits by the band that had launched him into musical superstardom – never dreaming that the English veterans would get back together again for a marathon tour just a year later.

SUPER BAND

So, 24 years after their break-up, the fans of this unforgettable reformed trio from London will once again have a chance to hear their old favourites – the once ultra-revolutionary Police. The venue is Ušće and the date is 20th June 2008. The band`s Reunion Tour kicked off on 28th May last year in Vancouver and has managed to break two records so far, in terms of profit and attendance. Halfway through the tour, seven months in, ticket sales were counted and it turned out that The Police had managed to sell 2.2 million tickets! Billboard magazine, the world music industry’s bible, called The Police Reunion Tour the “tour of the year”. It goes without saying that the tour was carefully conceived and perfectly planned from a technical point of view, so for their concert at Ušće the band is bringing 30 lorries full of equipment, two lorries with special generators, while a team of technicians and engineers are coming to Belgrade in a fleet of seven buses. Their stage is also huge, at almost sixty metres in width and around twenty metres high.

It’s true, we didn’t last long, but only because we cared for music so passionately. We used to argue a lot, and we still do. However, we get along much better these days. We’ve all grown up since then, become serious men and learned some tactics, so everything is fine now.

Since the very beginning, The Police have been considered a unique band. They are able to turn already impressive studio sound into something supernatural at their concerts. By combining controlled energy with seductive melody, Sting, Steward Copeland (on drums) and Andy Summers (guitar) played instinctively, improvising like a jazz trio with the wild energy of a rock band, which was the blend that gained them the status of the defining musicians of their era. They started making their mark at a time when punk fever was sweeping the musical scene in the late Seventies. Every member came from a different musical world: Summers played with The Animals, Soft Machine and Kevin Ayers. Copeland was a member of Curved Air and performed solo as Clark Kent for a short time, while Sting played with various jazz fusion bands. The band have reaffirmed their virtuosity on countless occasions, throwing their own ingredients into various, complex reggae and groove arrangements. With Summers energetic and innovative on the guitar, Copeland`s deceptively complex mixture of rhythms, and Sting`s even bass and euphoric vocals, The Police were unquestionably the bravest representatives of the genre known back then as the “New Wave”. Albums like “Outlandos d’Amour” (1978), “Reggatta de Blanc” (1979) and “Zenyatta Mondatta” (1980), hits like “Roxanne” and “Message In A Bottle”, and the first Grammy awards were just a prelude to their double platinum album “Ghost In The Machine” (1981) and “Synchronicity” (1983), their most highly-acclaimed album that brought them three Grammies and the mega hit “Every Breath You Take”. This can arguably be called the most popular ballad of the Golden Eighties, as up to 2005, it had been aired on radio a remarkable eight million times!