The Police Reunion Tour Rocks Vancouver

Everyone knows Sting can sustain a boner for two days straight, but can he rock for a two-hour concert twenty-three years after his hay-day? You bet your ass.

June 1, 2007

By Laura Gosselin
Bodog Nation Contributing Writer

If this were a page, it would be stained with beer and smeared with a touch of Bengay. The two don't go together, I know. However, at The Police kick-off tour in Vancouver, British Columbia, booze and heat-rub seemed like a natural combination.

Old Men Can Rock, Old Fans... Not So Much

Before you boo, jeer, or eye-roll, let me clarify that my beer/Bengay analogy has nothing to do with the impeccable vocals (and biceps) of the immaculate Sting, or Stewart Copeland, or the amazing riffs of Andy Summers.

This was strictly about my turning thirty in precisely 100 days. I should write a novel. I should play the stock market. I should water my plants. There should be a bun in my oven. The clock is officially ticking. I'm sending out an SOS…

Nothing could articulate these feelings more than going to a Police concert, where, for the first time in my life, teenagers, converse shoes, pot smoke and crowd surfers were replaced by thousands and thousands of parents. It was like a high school reunion for the class of 1983.

Everyone in my section stayed seated (except for the woman in front of me… so it goes). When one rebel Peter Pan got rowdy, he was met with overall aversion. Sir, act appropriately was the tone of the mutually silent. Yes, there was an intense level of sedateness in the air. Looking around, I had a tragic revelation. I was not ready for thirty.

The Police during their opening number, "Message in a Bottle".

I put away two beers during the opening band, Fiction Plane. Their noticeably Police-esque ska sound highlighted especially by the song "Two Sisters" probably had something to do with the voice of front man and bassist Joe Sumner, Sting's son. When The Police took the stage, the lethargy of the crowd was replaced by genuine interest. Singer/bass player Sting (a.k.a Gordon Sumner), guitarist Andy Summers and drummer Stewart Copeland started with "Message in a Bottle" and followed with "Synchronicity", "Spirits in the Material World" and "Walking on the Moon".

While Sting was rocking, "Don't Stand So Close to Me", the woman next to me was shoving pizza in her mouth. The balding guy in front gripped a bag of popcorn, like he had confused The Police Reunion Rock Concert with a Shrek the Third matinee.

Lou Ann was happy to pour sippy cup beer.

Is this what happens with age? Instead of rocking at a concert, you stuff your face?  I felt old. I needed another beer fast, and thank God, Lou Ann the friendly beer girl was happy to pour me a $10 cup of foam. Lou Ann handed me a lidded beer with a hole in the top... basically, a beer sippy cup. I was sensing something here—some sort of threshold I was crossing, but my buzz was strong and so I shook it off. 

My husband had a similar "turning 30" crises a few years back. He dealt with these feelings by trying to out-run the cops during a routine traffic stop two weeks before his 30th. It ended badly; cops surrounded us with guns drawn. Good times.

Sippy cup beer: the sign of the Apocalypse.

What would I do to rebel against the forces of nature? Would I flash my boobies during "Roxanne"? Would I get rip-roaring drunk and start a mosh-pit during "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic"? Would anyone be with me? I looked to my left. The woman beside me had started in on a plate of nachos. My guess was, probably not.

By the looks of things, Stewart Copeland smelt the Bengay. He jumped from his drum set and ran around the stage, pointing to sections of the stands in an attempt to provoke audience participation. And it worked. At each finger point, waves of people stood and cheered. He was drunk with power and I was jealous of him. I was halfway there: drunk but... no power. At that moment, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned.

Innocently dancing before the smackdown.

"Are you finding it as hard to see as we are?" a red-faced, fleshy man screamed. I looked in front of me and saw the object of his anger—a woman in the row ahead of me had suddenly come down with… the dance fever.

"Hey!" he yelled. "HEY!" louder. She turned and he yelled, "Sit down! None of us can see back here!"

She looked hurt and sadly sank into her seat.

Something was wrong here. Was the audience ever as rebellious as their rock-star idols before them? Between songs, a woman rows ahead of us held up a $50 Police t-shirt (yes, that’s what they were going for) for her friend to admire. And for some reason, I couldn’t in a million years picture her wearing it. It was the kind of shirt you would find at an alternative rock store, too gritty for this hair sprayed soccer mom. 

Sting taught the crowd lessons in anarchy. (AP Images)

Before "Murder by Numbers" Sting said into the microphone, "In 1983 the Reverend, and I use the term 'Reverend' loosely, Jimmy Swaggart decided that the next song was written by the devil himself… no, we wrote this song."

The audience roared with approval, though little did Sting know out of his earshot, fans were chastising one another for dancing to his music.

However, when Summers began to play famous reggae strums of "Roxanne", the stadium filled with a surge of energy and the lights turned red. At last, people rose from their seats. They sang back, "Roxanne Ohhhh!"

Oh Roxanne, you bring us to our knees.  

Copeland Thinks the Concert was Lame

After Wednesday's final Vancouver performance, drummer Stewart Copeland took to his website and critiqued the trio's performance—and he wasn't the kindest critic.

"This is unbelievably lame." (AP Images)

"This is unbelievably lame," Copeland wrote of Wednesday's show. "We are the mighty Police and we are totally at sea."

Copeland went on to claim that he did not hear Andy Summers' opening riff to "Message In a Bottle," and Sting in turn misheard Copeland's drum intro. "...So we are half a bar out of sync with each other. Andy is in Idaho."

According to Copeland, Sting also got his footwork wrong as he leapt into the air to signal the end to of "Synchronicity II."

"The mighty Sting momentarily looks like a petulant pansy instead of the god of rock," Copeland said.

"And so it goes, for song after song," he wrote, with tunes such as "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" and "Don't Stand So Close To Me" that were, according to Copland, reduced to ruin.

According to Copeland, the show that rocked Vancouver was crap.

"It usually takes about four or five shows in a tour before you get to the disaster gig. But we're The Police so we are a little ahead of schedule," he reported.

Copeland was also very candid in January 2007 interview about the band's much-publicized break-up. What could bring these guys to break-up a force that was at the pinnacle of its success? Myth, rumor and legend dictate a trio of egos were in the way. However, according to Copeland, the force of The Police was a power beyond them:

"The break up of the Police was overblown in terms of the amount of drama that people would imagine would accompany such a break-up. But no, it was really calm. We had all agreed that we needed to melt down the golden cage and throttle the golden goose so we could move on with our lives. Meanwhile the corporation of the police, the good ship "Roxanne" dominated our lives and we couldn't move forward. We had all this money, all this attention and all this wealth we were generating for ourselves and for others, but it was really just a cage we were in."

Gone, it seems, is the rock god ego of a quarter century ago. And here it is replaced with a self-deprecating drummer who is actually being much harder on his own band then any reviewer out there. While in retrospect the concert did have its bumpy moments, it was still an epic show. A show that will be described to our grandchildren while we sit on the porch of an old folks home listening to "So Lonely" while tapping our arthritic toes to the beat.