Sting & Shaggy: The 44/876 Tour

A great Sting concert was lost in this party...

Imagine Sting: a 67-year-old hunk with sixteen Grammy awards, the frontman of the late The Police, a lot of albums, active since time immemorial, and most of his songs are tinged with melancholy and seriousness. If you have that, then try to explain what prompted this man to make a joint reggae album with Jamaican Shaggy (aka Mr. Boombastic) in 2018.

Of course, reggae has not been far from Sting since the beginning, but that still doesn't make it any easier to understand why he made the album 44/876 at such an age and with Shaggy. In any case, the album was not only born, but it also forged a friendship between the two musicians, and they even went on a joint tour with him. The last stop was Budapest, where, on the occasion of the six-figure lottery's thirtieth birthday. 

The party was hosted at Heroes' Square, not by chance, because it was predictable that there would be a crazy crowd, and this was confirmed on site: despite the pouring rain, not only the square and its surroundings, but also Andrássy út was filled with people on Saturday evening.

The host of the evening was Levente Harsányi, a TV presenter, who fortunately did not overthink his task: he came out around 6, energetically shouted a line about how good it was here, and then introduced Punnany Massif, who was coming as the support band.

I have been trying to avoid Punnany since their Pannónia Festival performance a few years ago – except for the Blind Myself song Testem a vászon, in which Wolfie participated – and unfortunately they did not manage to convince me on Saturday that it would make sense for me to go to their concerts, but that is not their fault.

The band from Pécs did absolutely everything to get the audience going, but they hit walls that were impossible to break through, so after a while they apparently accepted that they were basically just playing for themselves. You could still enjoy what they were doing, but in the meantime they probably felt more or less like Tibi Kiss when Quimby performed in front of Marilyn Manson on the Volt stage a few years ago.

The mood probably wasn't helped by the fact that Levente "Időjós" Harsányi said before the concert that everyone should calm down, that it wouldn't rain anymore,

After the concert it did stop, so most of the next three quarters of an hour of downtime was spent with the event organizers and those standing behind trying to persuade people to put away their umbrellas, because it was very dangerous and it wasn't raining anyway.

The organizers' method was to kindly call people's attention to the latter by walking through the crowd, and to those standing further back, they shouted that

All this went on until Levente Harsányi appeared again, who at around 7:30 encouraged the audience to call in Sting with a light but very strong applause, and then even counted down from ten, so that the whole thing would be really terribly artificial.

Of course, Sting and his band did come – a good ten minutes before the official start, which was quite surprising – and immediately opened with a real classic, Englishman in New York, or more precisely, a slightly modified version of it, where Shaggy sang several choruses, with Jamaican instead of Englishman. 

which worked quite well in certain places. Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, for example, didn't deviate from the common songs at all, nor did Love Is The Seventh Wave, but then came Message in a Bottle and Fields of Gold, which didn't fit in at all.

This would not have been a problem at all, especially since most people probably went to the concert for these hits in the first place, but after a while it became really tiring to see the styles change without any transition. This is where the difference between the two musicians came into play, because

Towards the end, they managed to turn the WTF knob up even more, because first the Shaggy song Hey Sexy Lady, which really didn't fit into the concert at all, was played, and then Roxanne began to the delight of many.

Then there was Desert Rose in the encore, and at the end, a very long Every Breath You Take closed the more than one and a half hour concert.

An important addition is that the rain started to fall again when the Sting concert started, and then it continued to pour until the end, so that people around me gradually disappeared. However, most of the crowd was not scared by the rain, they heroically held out until the end, but with a few exceptions where I was standing, it didn't seem like they were enjoying it all that much.

The organizers deserve special praise, because apart from the beginning of Sting & Shaggy, the concerts sounded good, and apparently they didn't close off half the area unnecessarily, based on what I saw, it was pretty well thought out where everything should go.

It would be harder to form a concrete opinion about the concert. Sting and Shaggy played exactly what they played with us throughout the tour, so you could tell in advance what to expect, but I felt the same way live after listening to the album, namely that

I wouldn't say they threw a bad party, but somehow I still felt that somewhere in all this a great Sting concert was lost, which would definitely have been much better than what we got.

(c) Index by Flachner Balázs