Sting keeps fans on their toes – and feet – at first of five Massey Hall shows...

Sting brought a power trio to Massey Hall on Friday night to launch an impressive run of five shows at the celebrated venue but it wasn’t the power trio you might have expected.

The British singer-bassist, who first broke through back in the late ‘70s as the commanding frontman of New Wave act The Police with guitarist Andy Summers and drummer Stewart Copeland at his side, is currently playing with longtime guitarist Dominic Miller – “he’s been with me for 35 years,” said Sting – and drummer Chris Maas on this stripped-down trek he’s calling the Sting 3.0 Tour.

The roadtrip sees the age-defying 72-year-old playing multiple nights in theatres of each city he visits and Sting was sure to mention on Friday night that he first played Massey Hall back in 1980 – “44 years ago” – not to mention the Horseshoe and the Edge before that.

“Who was there?” the singer asked of the various Toronto shows.

When the crowd screamed in the affirmative, Sting playfully chided: “You’re all liars!”

The idea this time out seems to be to loosen things up a bit with some jams and solos, changing song tempos and some unexpected songs in the middle of the hour-and-50-minute show that had lots of audience participation.

That’s where Miller, who Sting called “the archivist,” came in as his guitar led off a couple of surprise tunes including Why Should I Cry For You?, which is about Sting’s father with whom he had a difficult relationship.

With just the three musicians, along with some graphics and lights on stage but not much else, the focus really was on Sting as he began the show with The Police classic Message in A Bottle.

The vocals were a little too upfront off the top but by the second tune, If I Ever Lose My Faith In You, the mix had been fixed.

Hit after hit followed, both of solo and The Police variety, like Englishman in New York, Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, Fields of Gold, All This Time, Driven To Tears, Can’t Stand Losing You, Walking On The Moon, So Lonely, King of Pain, Every Breath You Take, and the first encore song, Roxanne.

But there was almost more power in the “quiet and thoughtful” moments like the gorgeous Shape of My Heart, powered by Miller’s guitar, the Arabic-influenced Desert Rose with Sting subtly getting in some dance moves behind his bass – hips really don’t lie – and the show ending Fragile with the Hall of Famer on acoustic guitar.

Despite his yoga-toned body, Sting proved himself to be human too, sitting down on a stool for a few songs – Never Coming Home and Mad About You.

He also introduced a new single, I Wrote Your Name upon My Heart, that he described as both “romantic and noisy.”

The Sting 3.0 Tour was scheduled to return to Massey Hall Saturday and Sunday nights before taking a break Monday and then returning Tuesday and Wednesday.

(c) The Toronto Sun by Jane Stevenson

Sting keeps the faith during the first of five nights at Toronto’s Massey Hall…

Early in his show at Massey Hall on Friday, Sting, the rock star, pretended to make small talk about his countryside home near Stonehenge in England. Mentioning his house, he paused and reconsidered. “It’s more of a castle, really,” he said, sounding as posh as Grey Poupon.

The concert banter was performative – he said the same things in Detroit earlier in the week and he’ll no doubt repeat them during his five-concert stand in Toronto. He’s an actor, literally, with a history on film and, in Toronto, on the boards at the Princess of Wales Theatre for his musical, The Last Ship.

Pointing out Sting’s thespian past is not meant as a criticism. There are no small roles, only small intentions, and there is no reason to believe that Sting’s attempt to bond with his adoring audience was anything less than sincere. It just doesn’t seem to come naturally to the former Police frontman, a milkman’s son born Gordon Sumner.

“If I should ever lose my faith in you, there’d be nothing left – nothing,” he said, pointing to the crowd right before a solo hit from 1993. His theatre tour of Police songs and solo material is called Sting 3.0, named for the rock-trio format (with drummer Chris Maas and long-time guitarist Dominic Miller) and for the musical update on a significant pop songbook. The visit to Toronto is the lone Canadian tour stop.

The musicianship was high-end; the renditions of familiar material were tasteful, lean and grooved with an adult audience in mind. Police hits originally little more than riffs with lyrics were elegantly transformed. Reggae was rocked, jazz was fused and calypso call-and-response moments were numerous. Miller’s vintage Stratocaster was an arpeggio machine, new song I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart) stomped like Bo Diddley and the crowd swayed and bopped at the appropriate moments.

The set list leaned on songs about loneliness, longing and other psychic despairs – Sting’s stock-in-trade topics. “I hope that someone gets my, I hope that someone gets my, I hope that someone gets my …”

Message in a Bottle was the opening number. Never Coming Home, Driven to Tears and So Lonely would come later, the material varying in degrees of tempo and hopefulness. Sting’s destiny to be the king of pain was self-determined – and lucrative. In 2022, he sold his back catalogue to Universal Music in a deal thought to be worth up to US$300-million.

If Sting’s bank account is in fine condition, so is his throat. Though the 72-year-old rounded down the vocal lines of King of Pain, for example, he sounded like 1978 on Roxanne. As for the Newcastle native’s distinctive Jamaican accent while singing, it is still a thing: “I’m an ‘Englishmahn’ in New York.”

With his weathered 1960s Fender Precision bass and a headset microphone, Sting prowled the stage looking not only hale but hearty. (If I had his biceps, I’d wear a t-shirt too.) He was generous with his bandmates: During one guitar solo, Sting stayed so far to the right that he might have been closer to Yonge Street than centre stage.

Going off script to reminisce about his history with the city that broke the Police in North America, he mentioned the band’s sold-out Massey Hall debut in 1980. “I was 27,” he sighed. When scattered audience members clapped to indicate they had attended a pair of sparsely attended gigs at the Horseshoe Tavern in 1978, Sting wasn’t buying it: “No you weren’t. Nobody was there. Liars!”

His fans instantly recognized the modest solo hit Englishman in New York. In response, Sting reverted back to his former life as a school teacher. “Very good, pupils,” he told them.

In her review of the Police album Reggatta de Blanc for Rolling Stone in 1979, Debra Rae Cohen described Sting’s “spliff-and-swagger” reggae vocals as sounding “bloodless and condescending, checking off rather than embodying emotions.” The Yale-educated critic went on to accuse the Police for its “high-handed, crafty superciliousness,” while dismissing the band’s “elite detachment” as just another pose.

Cohen was not alone in making those types of observations. Forty-five years later, Sting onstage presents as a fussy artist whose emotional coolness is an endearing trait. He wants to say something lyrically and he wants to get his performances right, and if Sting doesn’t have the warmth and lovability of, say, Paul McCartney, his shows of appreciation for his Massey Hall audience were many.

A two-tune encore set spotlighted the artist’s range, beginning with the red-lit infectious energy of Roxanne and closing with Fragile, with Sting on a stool plucking at a nylon string guitar and singing about tears, rain and human frailty. He said he wanted to leave us with something quiet and thoughtful.

(c) The Globe and Mail by Brad Wheeler

‘Surprise is the essence of music’: Sting still has a few tricks up his sleeve in five-show Toronto stint…

One amazing evening down ... four to go.

Rock superstar Sting returned to the familiar and intimate surroundings of Massey Hall Friday night for the first of five concerts in six nights at Toronto’s Grand Old Lady, which — if not unprecedented for the venue — certainly is rare.

With his longtime guitarist Dominic Miller and recently recruited Mumford & Sons touring drummer Christophe Maas in tow — perhaps reminding the 2,600-capacity audience in part of his first career with the Police, also a trio — Sting (a.k.a. Gordon Sumner) performed a scintillating set of familiar group and solo classics with a bit of an agenda in mind.

“I’m very happy,” the multiple Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and bassist told the Star in an exclusive pre-show interview.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in Toronto, with all different kinds of combos: The Police, other bands, a play (“The Last Ship”) quite recently three or four years ago, so I’ve been here a lot, but I hope the audience is surprised by whatever I turn up with.

“I think this is a bit of a surprise,” he said about the show. “I know that people have been pre-warned but it sounds surprising — the three of us up there. I can see people’s faces saying, ‘Wow! This is not what we expected’ — and I hope, in a good way. For me, surprise is the essence of music, always.”

Well, he lived up to that promise with the first number, “Message In A Bottle,” the beloved Police chart-topper that the artist usually reserves for an encore, and it didn’t take him long to get the crowd engaged.

Dressed in a T-shirt and slacks while looking fit, trim and undeniably youthful for a guy about to turn 73 in a dozen days, a confident, relaxed and charismatic Sting quickly involved the audience in a call-and-response to the familiar line, “Sending out an S.O.S.” and by then, they were putty in his hands.

But that’s what his songs do: drawing on an almost inimitable catalogue of alluring melodies, hook-crammed choruses and relatable lyrics that date back to the Post Punk/New Wave era of the late ‘70s, Sting has transformed himself into the ultimate party guest, providing household numbers that everyone in his purview know and to which they joyfully sing along.

He also is a genius with non-lexical vocables, inserting such easily repeatable cues like “yo yo yo” at the end of the reggae-tinged “Walking On The Moon” or “wha-oh-ohs” to perk up the ending of “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” that encourage participation but don’t tax the brain, and he employed them to full effect and the delight of his audience on several numbers Friday night.

But he’s also not interested in simply being a jukebox, as he explained pre-concert.

“My job every night is to play songs that I may have written 40 years ago with the same curiosity and passion — and looking for incremental changes that I can make, so I’m not remaking a record as if it’s a museum artifact,” Sting said.

“It’s not that — it’s a living, breathing organism and I’m looking for those little changes. My musicians have to be doing the same thing — like a jazz musician would treat a song: play the head, and then you’re searching for something else. It could be quite small,” he continued.

“Dominic could find it some nights, Christoph another and me, so we’re always looking for those little things so the song can evolve.

“That’s important.”

Some of the songs he chose to perform were stretched out — “Driven To Tears” received an enthusiastic workout that involved a lengthy and inventive Miller guitar solo and some tempo changes — and some of the more elaborate arrangements of “An Englishman In New York” and “Desert Rose” were stripped of their ornate arrangements, although nothing was lost in the delivery or the translation.

It was a risk that the maestro wanted to take in a trio setup he called “a dangerous format.”

“There’s no safety net. You can’t hide. You make a mistake and it’s fully out there,” Sting chuckled shortly after sound check. “But the amount of air around each instrument, space, clarity — is really wonderful for musicians who want a challenge.

“All three of us want to work harder. There’s nowhere to escape to, but we’re all up for the challenge of it and it’s exciting to reduce the songs to their bare bones. They’re still sturdy enough to stand up. And in many ways, I ask the audience to fill in what’s missing in their imaginations, or enjoy the sparsity of the sound. It’s powerful.

“I don’t think anything is robbed from them by this treatment. I think, if anything, the structure is sacrosanct. It still works,” he said.

It certainly did Friday night, and Miller — who is rarely as exposed in Sting’s numerous band configuration as he is in a trio — was something of a revelation. He would occasionally mimic Police guitarist Andy Summers in a chord here or there to offer tribute during the group numbers, and was something of an acrobat during songs like “Mad About You” and “All This Time.”

There was also a moment in the show where he teased the memory of his boss with the intro to “Wrapped Around Your Finger.”

“Dominic’s been with me for 35 years,” he told the crowd. “I call him ‘The Archivist,’ in that he remembers every song that I’ve ever written. He remembers the parts and the chords and I don’t. I forget them. So, he reminds me of the songs I’ve written.”

With a visual backdrop of spotlights and fog and a screen that occasionally functioned as a Cinescope of sorts, Sting was at the top of his game with his distinctive voice. There were times when he sustained a note for 10 or 15 seconds that was almost a marvel to behold. He also introduced a new song into the mix — “I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart),” which he said in the interview may lead to an album along similar lines.

“It’s a very direct rock track, although it’s more sophisticated than it seems, at first,” he explained. “But I wanted to put it out as a little flagship. Every night I’m listening to what we’re doing and looking for inspiration for further songs. So yeah, I’d love to make an album like that.”

With such expected run-throughs of megahits like “Roxanne,” “Fragile” and “Every Breath You Take” receiving a new coat of paint, the assembly played along and was wildly receptive to the new arrangements — some of them subtle — but the cheering and standing with cellphones poised and recording underscored their enthusiasm for a well-performed, 105-minute, 20-song set.

For Sting, who returns Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday (Sept. 25) to the Massey Hall stage, this was his first return to the venue since the significant renovations a few years ago.

And he liked what he saw.

“Massey Hall is somewhere I have great fondness for,” said Sting a few hours before showtime. “I know the history of the place. I know who’s played here before me. It’s part of my own history. So, I’m very surprised at how much work they’ve done here. It’s pretty funky. It’s still somewhat august as an institution, but this is very posh.”

(c) Toronto Star by Nick Krewen