City Recital Hall, September 26
6/10
He really should have had a band. Just bass and drums – like a certain previous trio that benefitted from Andy Summers’ guitar playing. If you’re going to use backing tracks on virtually every song, it seems lame and even cheap not do what the music is telling you, and make it all as real as the guitar playing.
Called The Cracked Lens + A Missing String, the show was a retrospective of Summers’ musical career – before, during and after The Police – and his photography. It was also an elaborate travelogue and faltering stand-up routine – and somehow it wasn’t enough.
The jokey chat could be entertaining, or it could wander up blind alleys and expend itself against a wall. The photography, painstakingly edited and sometimes carefully choreographed to the music, was routinely exceptional. Mostly black-and-white, it revealed a keen eye for making the ordinary extraordinary, or for catching the special moment – whether that was plant life or a Balinese dancer.
The Police were out in greater force than I’d expected, and there was an undeniable fascination in hearing songs so wedded to Sting’s voice and words now rendered as instrumentals. The restrained Tea in the Sahara worked a treat, as did Message in a Bottle in a different way, including Summers’ most vigorous improvising of the night.
An amusing short film shot in Japan showed Summers wandering past a karaoke bar where someone was murdering Every Breath You Take. He went in, took part and was duly recognised. I don’t think it was staged.
Perhaps his finest guitar playing came when he told us about the enormous influence on his 16-year-old self of hearing Thelonious Monk live, and then played Round Midnight. Where countless versions have airbrushed this masterpiece into mere prettiness, Summers let some of Monk’s native dissonance re-enter the frame.
Yet the sound he chose here, as elsewhere – heavily treated; rather organ-like – was a barrier to any emotional immediacy, making the music oddly remote. A snapshot of the show as a whole, really.