Meeting Marcia Hines:

Sting:

Zoomed-in:

Andy:

The Crowd:

The End:

Bloody hell, that was amazing.

They opened with “Message in a Bottle”, ended with “Roxanne”, then completed the encores with the classic finale, “Next to You”. At least 15 other tracks were included beyond that.

The highlights:

• Stewart Copeland’s moment to shine was his percussion-work on “Wrapped Around Your Finger”. Bloody awesome — the guy’s a legend and one of the best rock drummers/percussionists around
• “Hole in My Life” rocked out
• Andy Summers cranked out some blistering solos in the most unlikely of places
• Sting really knows how to work a crowd

What was just the best thing ever was the fact that almost every song had a fresh arrangement that allowed Summers a lot more breathing room than the originals. Copeland’s creativity just consistently blows me away. And Sting had a beard that he grew in Byron Bay.

The whole thing just felt looser and more improvised, even though it was all obviously well-rehearsed. This is exactly what I wanted — a dream come true — these three musicians coming together after 20 years of separate musical development to create something familiar yet still fresh and new. Here’s hoping they record again together…

The setlist, as I recall (some ordering may be messed up):

• “Message in a Bottle”
• “Synchronicity II”
• “Walking on the Moon”
• “Voices Inside My Head/When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around” — the latter in a similar arrangement to the one on Sting’s Bring on the Night album, but it sounded so much better with Andy and Stewart back on board
  
• “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” — the arrangement was somewhere between the original and the ‘86 re-recording
• “Driven to Tears”
• “Hole in My Life”
• “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”
• “Wrapped Around Your Finger”
• “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da”
• “Invisible Sun”
• “Walking in Your Footsteps”
• “Can’t Stand Losing You/Regatta De Blanc”
• “Roxanne” (including glorious red lighting over the crowd)
• Encore I: “King of Pain”, “So Lonely” (with lyrics “Welcome to the Andy Summers/Stewart Copeland show!”), “Every Breath You Take”
• Encore II: “Next to You”

It was essentially their Latin America setlist. At the moment I’m drawing a blank as to whether or not “Truth Hits Everybody” was included or not — I suspect not.

(UPDATE: The setlist above is correct, including the omission of “Truth Hits Everybody”. I have no real issue with this, despite losing one of my favourite songs, because Brisbane also lost out on “Walking in Your Footsteps”, which was another highlight of the Sydney set.)

I missed the support act Fiction Plane — they sounded decent from outside, but no great loss — but I was treated to Fergie singing “My Humps”. Hey, it’s an award-winning song!

My confession: Fergie’s stuff wasn’t that bad when it was UP LOUD. It was her rock medley (featuring covers of McCartney, Led Zep and the Stones, believe it or not) that was the most surreal part of the night, however.

Oh, and I met Marcia Hines while I was there. Photographic evidence coming soon.