Sting at the Lanxess Arena - A critic is seriously mistaken...

A drum roll announces the star of the evening. Springy and sinewy, Sting enters the stage at the Cologne Arena, not an ounce of fat on his body, his white hair shaved short. The 74-year-old looks like his own yoga teacher, 24 years his junior, enviable. You'd bet the science-fiction swim trunks David Lynch once put him in for his "Dune" film adaptation would still fit him perfectly.

More importantly, he still has an excellent voice, and when he tests the upper limits of his register on "A Thousand Years," it's met with roaring applause. First, though, he shouts an enthusiastic "Cologne" into his headset microphone, which he needs so he can play his lovingly scrapped bass guitar this evening and still move freely.

The superstar is performing his "Sting 3.0" tour – silly name, great concept – with a minimal lineup, a power trio with his longtime guitarist Dominic Miller and drummer Chris Maas. Before the show, similarly explosive trios echoed through the hall: Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Sting's original band, The Police, was itself a similar group. "Sting 3.0" is thus a return to his roots, a welcome one for all. For the singer and bassist, this was probably always the ideal sound, now finally without objection. Starting in Dresden, he toured the globe with this program for a year and a half, and now he's back in Germany.

Cheers in the sold-out crowd Cologne house, and the well-known lines immediately follow: "Just a castaway, an island lost at sea, oh." And I immediately want to send a message in a bottle myself, to be carried across the sea by fans: "Get me out of here! I just don't like him."

Now it's out. But what does taste matter? Stay tuned, we'll get to the music in a minute, I just need to clarify something. So: I believe there are two kinds of taste. One kind refers to personal preferences. For example, that I can't stand Sting and his music, and I can only tolerate The Police at best. The other, less sympathetic kind makes statements with absolute claims: Sting, pah, that's just bad taste.

Perhaps there is only one kind of taste after all, perhaps the second variant merely describes the degree of self-conceit of the person expressing it. As a critic, I still have to maintain the distinction; after all, that's how I pay my rent. After all, Gordon Sumner, who owes his stage name to his habit of appearing as a young jazz musician in a yellow-and-black striped sweater, is the ideal subject to illustrate this difference: Although you can personally sling me over Sting, professionally I'm fully aware that the Northern Englishman is one of the greats, especially one of the great songwriters of our time. Perhaps my meager opinion - that the jazzy, well-off music of the Sting is often rather tasteless - is just a case of projection, of professional nitpicking.

It doesn't take long; suspicion overwhelms me by the third track. "If I ever lose my faith in you," Sting repeats over escalating noise, and the trio, who had just been playing decently, suddenly roars like a post-punk band. And immediately afterward, with "Englishman in New York," they imitate a post-midnight jazz combo in some London basement club. But on the extended chorus ("Oh, I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien"), Chris Maas hits the drums all the more powerfully. The small lineup airs out the songs well, gives them reverberation space, showcases the construction, and tests their flexibility. Even a song that's been played to death like "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" now sounds as fresh and naive as it must have once sounded, way back in 1981.

And my Sting allergy? This concert feels like a hyper-sensitization, each song a small dose on the path to freedom from symptoms. The way Dominic Miller's distorted guitar introduces "Driven to Tears" is reminiscent of the ominous bass triplets in Pink Floyd's "One of These Days" – and perfectly captures the song's angry, desperate mood. Later, Miller lets his guitar roar like an entire oud orchestra on "Desert Rose." Very impressive, as was everything else on this Wednesday evening in Cologne. The otherworldly reggae of "Walking on the Moon" seems weightless and powerful at the same time. And when it flows seamlessly into "So Lonely," the onrushing chorus reverberates in everyone's inner party cellar.

Even during "I Can't Stand Losing You," the seating arrangements had already dissolved; now several concertgoers are milling around the railing in front of the stage pit, screaming their loneliness out. But Sting slows the song down again, slurring "lo-lo-lo-lo" over the improvised dub version, and a deep abyss opens up, all the more satisfying when you can then catapult yourself out of it with renewed chants of "So lonely."

And me? I'm so close to singing along. That's something, and more than that: "King of Pain" finishes me off, exorcises the pain of long-held prejudice. How perfectly Sting strikes the balance between nervous New Wave and relaxed, overarching pop, the kind he would later perfect in "Fields of Gold" ("It's about my house, a castle!" Sting jokes in his Falco-esque Denglisch). The two Stalker mega-hits "Every Breath You Take" and "Roxanne" follow – the third of the bunch, "Don't Stand So Close to Me," was dropped from the setlist at some point during the tour.

It's only for the last song of the evening that Sting finally puts down the bass and switches to a semi-acoustic guitar. "Fragile," oh man, I always found that particularly awful in its ostentatious dismay. And now? Now I'm pulling the plug. Who cares about taste? A fantastic concert. "Fragile" is the feeling of the moment.

(c) Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger by Christian Bos

Sting revisits his glory days in Cologne...

Sting thrilled Cologne with an energetic trio that evoked nostalgic memories with hits by "The Police."

You have to be an excellent musician to rock an entire arena with a trio. But who's to say? "The Police," along with Cream, Nirvana, ZZ Top, and Green Day, are among the most famous power trios in rock history. However, the singer considers a reunion of the band that made Sting famous unlikely, and he's apparently doing just fine without Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland.

He's been touring the world for a year now with "Sting 3.0," the current line-up consisting of his long-time guitarist Dominic Miller and drummer Chris Maas, who performed on Wednesday in the packed Lanxess Arena.

In eleven tracks, a good half of the program, they transform into the legendary new wave band founded in 1977, which initially embraced punk and reggae and then embellished its straightforward yet unvarnished emotional songs with jazz and world music influences.

Starting with "Message in a Bottle" from "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic," "Walking On the Moon," and "So Lonely" to that almost threatening love song, "Every Breath You Take," which almost sounds like a stalker's confession.

The 74-year-old with the muscular T-shirt-clad figure no longer radiates the brute force of historic Police performances, but a headset allows him a much-loved freedom of movement. His voice avoids extreme high notes and otherwise seems ageless.

He has the audience under control at all times, generously leaving some of the work to them. There's almost always a passage where an "E-yo-oh" can be inserted as a sing-along echo. The fact that this doesn't result in simple stadium rock has something to do with Sting's upbringing in jazz.

After all, it was a jazz musician, swing band leader Cab Calloway, who, as the "Hi-De-Ho-Man," elevated vocal interaction with the audience to an art form in the 1930s. This breaking down of the well-known hits was most impressive during the first encore, a particularly jazzy "Roxanne." It was almost an honour to participate as a singer in this fireworks display, carried by Sting's relaxed bass, punctuated by Dominic Miller's sparkling solos.

Jazz was the earliest musical influence of the son of a milkman from the northeast of England. In his immensely successful solo albums of the 1980s, it then provided an unexpected added value: an artistic surplus, poured out by first-class guest musicians on great songs like "An Englishman in New York." The fact that the solo tracks in the trio line-up now sound as if he had recorded them with The Police is a special attraction of this concert.

What musical territories has the musician explored over the past four decades, collecting Grammys and honorary doctorates? It's been a long time since we've been closer to the "King of Pain" of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Even the only new song, the single "I Wrote Your Name," composed with Dominic Miller, emphasizes this simplicity with its few chords. The emotional directness of the songs was illustrated by an appropriately minimalist animation in the background.

Sting also kept his announcements in Cologne as brief as possible, which is regrettable compared to previous performances on this tour. "The next song is about my house," was all he had to say about the ravishingly elegiac "Fields of Gold."

That sounded a little different a few days ago in Singapore: "If you come to Stonehenge," he addressed the audience, "walk down the hill a few miles and knock on my door for a cup of tea."

(c) Kölnische Rundschau by Daniel Kothenschulte

Sting at the Cologne Arena: "Hello, sing with me, please!"...

Cologne. The former Police man performed in a purist trio in front of a sold-out crowd. And after a slow start, it finally worked out – luckily!

He was never the type for rock poses. While others smashed their guitars, Sting preferred to read Heisenberg. A working-class kid from Wallsend who sang his way from the shipyard into the world of metaphysics. And when he whistles today - and yes, he does on "If It's Love" - even that sounds like a well-considered thought experiment. "If you like working, you whistle - that's happiness," says Sting. And happiness, for him, always has something to do with insight.

Insight number 1 on this Wednesday evening in Cologne's Lanxess Arena in front of a sold-out crowd: Even a megastar like Sting can start a concert the way people always used to (at least when they were fourteen and playing in front of 20 friends at the youth club next door with their cool new band): No frills here, no dark, looming synth sounds here, no fog. None of that. Just a guitarist, a drummer, and a bassist, the three of them taking the stage and, yes - this might be the only "show bombshell" - launching a number that's unparalleled: "Message in a Bottle." Stripped down to the bare minimum, it couldn't be more purist.

And Sting himself, insight number 2: He seems completely at ease, completely defined in his style (jeans and T-shirt) and body. If the MTV Music Awards had a category for "Most Wiry," Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, aka Sting (he once performed in a yellow and black striped sweater, and a colleague pointed at the sweater and exclaimed, "Gordon has a stinger!"), he would win that trophy. Constantly. Most likely. At least in the over-70s category (he just turned 74).

But precisely because this intellectual metaphysician among pop-rockers comes across as so incredibly self-disciplined, the opening numbers—"I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart)" or "If I Ever Lose My Faith in You"—seem so incredibly prudish and so incredibly rehearsed from a tape. A TV camera mounted on a track in the pit, moving back and forth, reinforces the feeling: This is a professional band playing in the style of a TV recording.

And since Sting isn't really known for long orgies of speech that might somehow lighten the mood, the beginning of the show is rather dull in terms of atmosphere. It's only with "Englishman in New York" that the concert tie loosens a little, the reggae offbeat winding around the chair legs of the approximately 16,000 spectators like a slightly tipsy Jamaican boa conch. A few minutes later, before "Fields of Gold," Sting even whispers into the microphone: "This song is about my house. A castle." Finally, he sings "You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky / As we walk in fields of gold." There's no way a pin will drop tonight. But if one had dropped, you would have heard it. Absolutely.

Insight number 3: In general, the god of bass playing is preoccupied with the topic of "home." In a recent interview with a renowned music magazine, he explained that he's always had this feeling: of not really belonging anywhere. It hasn't changed. And he continues: "My home is where I have a book. Where my wife is, where my children are. Where there are paintings. So I have a home, but I feel rootless." The song "Never Coming Home" gets under your skin. Deep. Very deep.

And Sting, who's really starting to get into the groove now, digs further and further into the abyss of his own self. The audience notices. Numerous fans can no longer stay in their seats; they rush forward, demanding a piece of this self. "Hello, sing with me, please!" Sting calls out to them. Finally, they sing together, "I can't, I can't, I can't stand losing / I can't, I can't, I can't stand losing."

What follows is one of the most beautiful songs on the planet: "Shape of My Heart," the beat of "Walking on the Moon," to which it's hard to imagine an astronaut dancing on the moon, and the number to which you've squeezed your last dance reserves out of yourself at every decent 80s party: "So Lonely." But you never felt lonely or even depressed. Not even tonight: "I always play the starring role / so lonely / so lonely (I feel low)."

Insight number 4: Sting, how lucky!

(c) WAZ by Jörg Klemenz