Wednesday, October 02, 2013

Fortress Around Your Heart



Before Sting went on a deliberate slide into commercially motivated ignominy at the turn of the millennium, the former Police chief was an admittedly genuine singer-songwriter luminary who could awe the general public and uppity critics alike with his brand of cerebral and crafty pop-rock, which was also infused with just the right amount of rock firepower and poppish accessibility. While Gordon Sumner has made a veritable art out of perfecting the nuances of the pop song, he has always remembered to put the raw, visceral edges on display when necessary, especially during onstage action, a trait he seemed to have wilfully and woefully abandoned in his ridiculously elaborate and affected shows from the onset of the new millennium. One memorable instance of how Sting ably harnessed this particularly virtuosic aesthetic was during the 1991 tour in support of then-current album 'The Soul Cages', which saw him and the backing band of musos Vinnie Colaiuta, Dominic Miller and David Sancious in full and often ferociously precise flight. Check out a memorable airing of the wearily autobiographical, relentlessly martial 'Fortress Around Your Heart', one of the more underrated gems in Sting's discography, at an audience-pleasing gig in The Hague.