Sting performs at Massey Hall in Toronto on Sept. 20, 2024.Lu Chau/Supplied
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 been at 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 schoolteacher. “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 of “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.