ROCK: Justin Pearce
THE crowd members looked as if they’d been magically teleported from a teenage party in Rondebosh 10 years ago. They’d aged in the process, but the racial composition and the sense of concocted celebration remained: the sparklers and cigarette lighters (authentic concert behaviour as seen on TV), the desperate attempts to get a Mexican wave going (they managed in the end).
The act on stage, however, was real. Sting, quite simply, can sing, and those cheekbones have been on enough posters to ensure an overwhelming sense of reality now that they — and their owner — have finally got here.
The sound engineers magically ensured that Sting and his band survived the eggshell acoustics of the Good Hope Centre — if they can be more than adequate in that venue, they should be stunning anywhere else.
Where the performance didn’t work, it was an indication that Sting hasn’t quite managed to marry the roles of Eighties rock megastar and Nineties ethereal sensitive crooner-with-Cole’s-Notes. It’s one thing to do this on record, with a thick layer of production to smooth the cracks; it’s another thing entirely when you’re playing to an audience which has just gone ecstatic over Roxanne, and which may not necessarily notice the latter-day Jungian archetypes amid the adrenalin.
Inevitably, there had to be a retrospective side to the concert, if only because South Africa wasn’t on anyone’s itinerary in the days when The Police ruled the charts and the police ruled South Africa. People who’ve been hearing Every Little Thing She Does is Magic in pubs ever since the State of Emergency deserve a chance once in their lives to ee-oh along to the chorus while the magician himself lurches around on stage.
Everyone in the audience must have been at least a teenager when those songs were first recorded, so it’s unlikely that many of them had first discovered Sting after he had his famous attack of blue turtles.
And to be fair, Sting did more than simply haul out his singalong favourites and dust them down. There was a freshness in the arrangements that gave them easily as much energy as the numbers off his last few solo albums.
When people did yell for more, they were prompted by much more than the crowd-bending tactics of someone who had nothing left to say. South Africa’s fledgling international rock promoters have at last landed something that’s still alive.