32 years ago...TODAY!

[rhoeckel]

1977: The Police performed their first concert as a threesome since being joined by Andy Summers at a show at Rebecca's in Birmingham.

"Rebecca's is a small nightclub/discotheque in the centre of Birmingham. Driving into town we are heartened to see many fly posters on the walls, suggesting that the promoters have done enough to pull in a crowd for what in our minds is a crucial Rubicon. We will either cross it successfully or our fragile enterprise will be swept downstream in a chaos of despondency and abandoned dreams. We know that everything is at stake tonight and we badly need a boost for our morale. Andy walks onstage knowing that should we fail, the band that he's risked his reputation for will almost certainly fold. Stewart and I peer out of the dressing room at the growing crowd in the club with the grim thousand-yard stares of the condemned.

"We walk onstage, the lights come up, and out of sheer desperation, panic, and I suppose character we somehow manage to kick off the shackles of self-doubt and despondency and within the first eight bars of the first tune begin to play with the unrelenting power of a ten-ton hammer. Stewart and I are pumping eight to the bar like a churning turbine in an engine room, while Andy releases broadside after broadside of shimmering guitar riffs. And my voice is soaring over it all like a raucous, predatory bird. The crowd, at first tentative, begins to go crazy. There is total mayhem, as if the audience is complicit in our need to make this one a great gig. We walk off after three encores, destroying the drums as we wade through the audience on the way to the dressing room, and knowing at last something rare has been uncovered here, that the deeper we dig the greater the prize. I know, perhaps for the first time, that I have found a flagship for my songs. We will prevail. It will take time, but now I'm certain of it..."

© Excerpt from 'Broken Music' by Sting


The Police at Rebecca's...
Andy Summers from "One Train Later"...

"On the day Elvis dies we do a gig at Rebecca's in Birmingham. The prevailing style is easily described. It's very fast, very loud, and features heavily garbled shouting noises usually accompanied by large mouthfuls of spit. We go onstage in the small, dark club and whip through our entire set, accomplishing all the above values, and are done in about twelve minutes. We are supposed to play for an hour. I look over at Sting and Stewart in near disbelief: we have just played fifteen songs in twelve minutes as if going for a new land-speed record. Maybe this is the way Dizzy and Charlie Parker felt back in the forties when they started playing bebop tunes at breakneck speed so that the whites couldn't dance to it. I would laugh, but it's pitiful; even the audience is looking at us drop-jawed. If nothing else, at least we're the fastest band around. We are so intent on being viewed as punk that we miss the music entirely; the idea seems to be that if you are seen as authentic, then you will be successful - content is secondary. It's a suspect stance, and it can't be sustained for long. We are a band, but to me it feels like one in name only."

[njperry]

Happy Rebeccaversary to the Police.

Thanks for posting the info and quotes from the books. Now we need to see if Stewart discusses it in Strange Things Happen.

[smax]

thanks for reproducing the quotes there......

funny how andy's memories were predominantly that the gig was very fast and not musical ("we miss the music entirely")..... and gordo says the same ("unrelenting power of a ten-ton hammer") BUT also sees something in andy's playing which andy doesn't seem to recognise, something in andys playing which clearly stands apart from the rest of the bands on the scene and henri's playing...

[exit0]

and 26 years ago...TODAY! The Police play Shea Stadium and Gordo calls it quits.

[TheEqualizer]

Niiiice post, Rudiger. And Exit0 too!

[stevel]

Really interesting read side by side.

Great post.

Many thanks Rudiger.

[Throb]

Interesting.
I never thought of it as this six year span before.
I remember the day Elvis died. Summer of '77, I think I was probably in a movie theater watching Star Wars yet again.
Little did I know that day there was this band over in England that would soon change my life.........

[DirtyMartini]

32 years ago today, I was really young.

[Divemistress of the Dark]

Ha! yeah, me too. We were on a family vacation, near where I live now but didn't then, and I remember coming in from the resort swimming pool to hear the news about The King.

Wow. Ya know....it does put some things in perspective.

[luddite lady]

Thanks for the quotes. It's interesting to read about the concert from the two different points of view.

Thirty-two years ago today I was pouting because my two older brothers went camping for the first time and didn't take me, their bratty little sister, along. I remember listening to all the Elvis songs and general sadness on the radio and only feeling worse. My brothers were forced to listen to Elvis on the car radio on the long drive up to the camp site. To this day, both of them instantly think of camping when they hear Elvis Presley.

The way my children took in the experience of Michael Jackson's recent death reminded me a great deal of how I related to Elvis Presley's passing back in '77.

DM. where did you find the picture for that funk-a-doodle avatar? My guess is the photo appears next to the word geekalicious in the Krypton Illustrated Dictionary.

[zilboy]

I was in 6th grade. They changed my life 3 years later.

[TheEqualizer]

32 years ago I was in Catholic school getting whacked with a ruler for having one of my shoelaces undone. The nun who was my teacher used to go CRAZY when one of her students would have an untied shoelace. Them were different times.

[Mrs. Gradenko]

and 26 years ago...TODAY! The Police play Shea Stadium and Gordo calls it quits.

Wasn’t that '86? I could have sworn it was the year before I was born.

Ahem.. I just woke up.

[Throb]

[quote="TheEqualizer"]32 years ago I was in Catholic school getting whacked with a ruler for having one of my shoelaces undone. The nun who was my teacher used to go CRAZY when one of her students would have an untied shoelace. Them were different times.[/quote]
Funny, sounds like the Catholic school Mrs. Throb was in. She'd get her hand whacked for writing left handed, which surely was a sign of the devil! Or for not using her saint's name.
Yeah I would say times have changed a bit........

[TheEqualizer]

[quote="Throb"][quote="TheEqualizer"]32 years ago I was in Catholic school getting whacked with a ruler for having one of my shoelaces undone. The nun who was my teacher used to go CRAZY when one of her students would have an untied shoelace. Them were different times.[/quote]
Funny, sounds like the Catholic school Mrs. Throb was in. She'd get her hand whacked for writing left handed, which surely was a sign of the devil! Or for not using her saint's name.
Yeah I would say times have changed a bit........[/quote]

Ha! People don't believe me when I tell them its quite common in the Philippines for lefties to be forced to write with their right for that reason.