KEY POINTS:
As music fans descend on Mt. Smart Stadium for the Big Day Out this
afternoon, The Police is shipping its travelling show north after
playing last night in Wellington, the band's first gig in New Zealand
in 27 years.
It was a short, by-the-numbers show, full of the band's trademark
hits, Message
in a Bottle, Walking on the Moon and Every Breath You
Take among them.
It was three aging stars on stage showing they can
still play pretty well even if it is pretty clear that they're still
not totally comfortable in each other's company.
What struck me was that despite the band's fantastic back catalogue of
music, the gig was pretty flat, lacking energy and a connection with
the audience. There was only one moment, during the song King of Pain,
with its thumping bass line and Sting's still decent voice all over it,
where I felt like I was at a world class stadium rock concert.
Maybe the problem was with the staging. Despite the curtain of LED
lighting, it was pretty dull. There were these weird poles obscuring
the video screen that rose and fell occasionally and carried lights.
All they did was occasionally cut Sting in half on the big display
behind him. I was surprised at how little use of the band's archive of
video was plundered and the graphic design was fairly insipid.
But then, we've been spoilt in the last couple of years with some
fantastically staged rock shows. There was U2 with its Vertigo tour in
late 2006, this Wired story looks at the superb staging of it.
Vertigo wasn't quite the audio-visual extravaganza of Zoo TV from the early nineties, but I was amazed how U2 managed to do epic and intimate on the same stage, bringing the crowd up and down with them.
The Police on the other hand were flat-lining.
Last year we had Roger Waters' technically stunning shows at Albany
Stadium, complete with 360 degree quadraphonic sound and an amazing
video display that blended one long narrative in time with the music,
the band use a click track to keep everything synced up, which leaves
little room for extended jam sessions but adds up to an impressive
show to watch and listen to.
I could hear the Spitfire circling the stadium in Dark Side of the Moon's early seventies-era slice of techno On the Run. Here's more on the technology behind quadraphonic sound.
I didn't get to last year's Rolling Stones concert but I'm told it
was fantastically staged, with a good dose of impressive technology.
Maybe Sting and company should have paid a visit to this guy Mark Fisher, the talented British architect who has designed stages for all the bands listed above, including Pink Floyd's innovative The Wall concerts in the early eighties, U2's Zoo TV and the Rolling Stones' Bridges to Babylon tour.
After all, The Police are
grossing in excess of $200 million
for this odd reunion tour, which will probably be their last (guitarist Andy Summers will be a pensioner next year). You think they
could have given a bit more budget with a view to going out with a
bang.
Fans of The Police, like the person standing beside me last night,
will say that the band doesn't go in for all that pretentious
nonsense, they're sound is raw and stripped-down. That's well and fine
if you're playing the King's Arms. The Police didn't project last
night in more ways than one.
And who says technology can't enhance an intimate show? Just check out
Peter Gabriel's DVD of the Secret World tour he did in the early nineties, it's a work of art.