Album of the Week, February 1, 2025
A benefit show that was initially held only every two to three years, hosted by British comedians whose television heyday was a decade earlier and featuring a clutch of rock musicians playing in acoustic settings, would seem to be an odd source for transformative insight on anything. But when the benefit show is for Amnesty International, the comedians were Monty Python, and the musicians included the likes of Pete Townsend, Eric Clapton, Bob Geldof, Phil Collins, and Sting, literally anything could happen.
Amnesty International loomed large in my 1980s teenagerdom, thanks to their work to bring attention to abuses of human rights such as torture, miscarriages of justice and prisoners of conscience. The way they chose to bring attention was to involve musicians and other celebrities to perform at events designed to raise awareness of the international problem. The Secret Policeman’s Balls were the first of these benefit events, coming 18 years after Amnesty’s founding and two years after the group won the Nobel Peace Prize.
We’ve talked about how the Police’s touring in 1979 and 1980 began to open Sting’s eyes to poverty and injustice on a global scale. When comedian Martin Lewis, who had partnered with Python alum John Cleese to create and produce the Amnesty International benefit shows, invited Sting to participate in a four-night benefit concert series at the Drury Lane theatre in London in September 1981, Sting wasn’t a hard sell. Never mind that he had never performed solo before, ever; he was game not only to play some Police songs live, but also to lead the assembled musicians in the theme song.
These initial performances, later released under the title of The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball (a sequel to the original The Secret Policeman’s Ball from 1979), offer a unique view of Sting as he takes the first steps away from the Police and into solo performing. And he wasn’t alone; both this record and its predecessor are full of unexpected performances and pairings.
The Drury Lane concerts happened just a month after the final recording sessions for Ghost in the Machine, which as we discussed last week were full of challenges and confrontations among the members of the Police. It may very well have been a relief for Sting to perform on his own these nights, even they were his first-ever solo performances. What we know is that he went back to his two oldest, biggest hits with the Police and remade them as solo arrangements that allowed him to take total control.
The record opens with “Roxanne,” here re-imagined as a gentle ballad. Sting accompanies himself on guitar, outlining the chords of the song but otherwise leaving the focus directly on his voice. This performance, coming a few year’s after the song’s 1978 debut, showcases the evolution of his voice. In the original performance it’s an uncannily high tenor, but much of the color is provided by his diction. In this performance the first verse feels a good deal like the performance with the Police, but in the chorus he lengthens syllables for emphasis, and going into the bridge he lowers his volume considerably, pulling the listener in closer. In the final chorus he replaces the fade-out of the record with a descending chord, adding a syllable and singing to “Roxanna.” It’s an effective performance and presages the way he would treat the song for years to come.
“Message in a Bottle” gets a similar treatment, but with Sting playing the arpeggiated riff throughout the verse, turning to chords on the chorus beneath an intimate rendering of the chorus that outlines the musical pivot and pulls the listener in even closer. On subsequent choruses he improvises on the melody, moving around the chords and bringing the vocal line higher to emphasize the alienation of the narrator.
Confession time: I have never been a Jeff Beck fan, and my respect for Eric Clapton has gone dramatically downhill in the last ten years. The performances here don’t really shift my opinions that much. “‘Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers” is a meh ballad, and “Farther Up the Road” an OK blues number. When “Crossroads” arrives it’s a relief; Clapton’s retelling of Robert Johnson’s pivotal Delta blues song is iconic enough to survive any number of re-arrangements and retellings, let alone the blues-rock guitar flourishes both men bring to the performance.
Bob Geldof was, at the time of the recording, probably best known as the frontman of the Boomtown Rats, whose 1979 hit “I Don’t Like Mondays” is an unlikely single about a school shooting (specifically, the Cleveland Elementary shooting in San Diego). Here the song is given a vocal and piano performance by Geldof and Johnnie Fingers, the Rats’ keyboard player and co-author of the song. After the blues rock of Clapton and Beck, it’s a bracing performance, especially the final verse and chorus as Geldof embraces the madness of shooter Brenda Ann Spencer. (Geldof was among the musicians whose career was radically changed by his work with Amnesty International; in 1984 he responded to television coverage of famine in Ethiopia by writing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” with Ultravox frontman Midge Ure, collaborating with a who’s who of rock and pop musicians to record it under the name of Band Aid, and then organizing the massive sixteen-hour cross-Atlantic all-star benefit concert Live Aid. That “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” also spawned the maudlin charity single “We Are the World” cannot be entirely laid at Geldof’s feet.)
The second side opens with another musician in the process of going solo for the first time. Phil Collins had released his first solo album, Face Value, earlier in 1981, and the lead single “In the Air Tonight” had been a huge hit, reaching #2 on both the UK and US charts and Number One in several European countries, largely on its use of gated reverb on the massive drum solo that arrives at the climax of the song. But this performance is more restrained, with Collins on piano and longtime guitarist Daryl Stuermer playing acoustic. While the performance loses something in drama, it does underscore Collins’ songwriting and vocal abilities on the cusp of what would turn out to be international superstardom in the 1980s. (Famously, Collins played in both the London and New York Live Aid concerts, taking the Concorde across the Atlantic so that he could both perform his own solo material and take the drums with an attempted Led Zeppelin reunion.) Collins’ first album was all over the place musically, and the folk-inspired “The Roof is Leaking” is a less iconic performance, though Collins’ vocal performance tells the story effectively and Stuermer’s banjo adds some welcome texture.
There were two types of artists involved in the concert series; the up-and-comers like Sting and Collins, and the established draws like Clapton and Beck. Folk singer Donovan clearly fell more into the latter category than the former, perhaps even inhabiting his own category: the legacy artist. He had gone to a good deal of effort in the 1960s and 1970s to shed comparisons to Bob Dylan, but here he was in 1981 performing “The Universal Soldier” and “Catch the Wind,” two of his most Dylan-like songs from the earliest days of his career. Perhaps the overall atmosphere of protest and social justice inspired him to return to these tunes; “Catch the Wind” in particular is effective here, with a gentle but steely vocal and understated harmonica.
The concert and the album close with an all-star performance of Dylan’s own “I Shall Be Released,” acting as an informal sort of theme song for the night and resonating with Amnesty’s core mission. The band plays what is credited as Sting’s arrangement of the song, and Sting performs admirably on lead vocals, backed by every performer on the rest of the album and then some (Midge Ure and a large group of singers that includes Sheena Easton join on vocals, Python-adjacent musician Neil Innes on guitar, and a full horn section including Mark Isham). The performance devolves into a full on jam session, particularly in the reprise that follows the applause break at around seven minutes. Oddly, it would not be Sting’s only collaboration with Eric Clapton; we’ll hear more from that odd pairing later.
The Secret Policeman’s Ball concerts were the start of a number of influential threads in 1980s pop music, notably star-studded charity singles and concerts and political activism by artists. As we’ve noted above, this performance led directly to “Band Aid”, Live Aid, and “We Are the World”; it also was Sting’s introduction to both solo performance and activism, both of which would be threads of his career for years to come. Next week we’ll look at another (mostly) solo excursion that he undertook following Ghost in the Machine that picks up another thread of his career.
You can watch the whole program, including both the comedy and the music bits, on YouTube (the video is age-restricted thanks to the comedy so can’t be embedded on my page).
BONUS: The video that was released of the event included a few songs from the 1979 Secret Policeman’s Ball, including what I believe are definitive versions of the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Drowned” (from Quadrophenia), performed solo by Pete Townshend. You can watch that bit here: