Sting Seemed Distracted When The Police Played Bonaroo
by Fil Manley
posted June 20, 2007
I was going to write about The Police show at Bonnaroo with the other shows from the second day, but after talking to some folks who saw them, and hearing my own opinions about the show reflected by them, I decided that they deserve their own article.
The police went on the main (What) stage at 9 p.m. on Saturday. They were scheduled to play from 9 until 11:30 p.m., which is rather long for a band like The Police. Everyone was anticipating the show - even a lot of dyed-in-the-wool Tool fans, who were mainly there to see Tool, were excited about The Police.
Despite that, I took out the cameras and went with the other photographers to photograph The Police for the first two songs.
It’s hard to understand the enormity of the stage on which they played. It’s essentially a large black box, perhaps four stories tall, maybe 300 feet long, with large video screens on both sides, and the phenomenal Bonnaroo lighting which makes shooting pictures there such a pleasure. The photo pit is a gravel area which separates the crowd from the stage. It’s a strip of land about 20 feet wide, occupied only by photographers and security people.
Then, there he was, Sting, the British icon, the man who drove The Police to superstardom and the man who wrote most of the songs by them which we all know and love.
It was a strange experience being 15 feet from Sting with an enormous camera in my hands, shooting and shooting, hoping to get a few good shots out of a couple of hundred.
They opened with ‘Message in a Bottle’ to the mob of thrilled, dirty people. Drummer Stewart Copeland was his normal ebullient self and his pleasure at being there was apparent in his drumming and in his mannerisms. Andy Summers' deadpan expression didn’t seem to affect his guitar playing, which was spot on.
Their old energy is undiminished and translated well into some extended and rearranged versions of their studio songs. They played well and they played completely through most of what would be considered their "greatest hits."
There were a couple of problems. I’m sure that a lot of the more hardcore fans didn’t care, but it was obvious to a lot of people that Sting seemed to be distracted. He played as if he had somewhere else he wanted to be and as if he were a little bit bored by the whole thing.
At one point, he looked out at the audience and said, “I’m so glad to be at Bonnaroo, Tennessee.” People looked at each other in puzzlement. It didn’t make a lot of sense.
He also said, ‘It’s so nice to see all these Tennesseans here.”
Out of the 80,000 plus people who were there, I doubt if more than 10% of them were actually from Tennessee. There were people there from Alaska, Hawaii, Brazil, China… all over the world.
Sting capped off this distracted attitude by quitting 45 minutes early. The band was scheduled to play from 9 to 11:30. They quit playing at 10:45, much to the disappointment of thousands of fans who had endured intolerable heat and choking dust for two days to come see them play.
I talked with a lot of reporters in the press tent afterward and the consensus seemed to be the same. Sting was there in body, but his mind was at least partially somewhere else. I don’t know any human being could be distracted in the face of almost a hundred thousand people who worked so hard to be there and listen, but he was.
I'm so sick of STING!!!
Bob