Review: The Police and Roger Waters in Toronto

Police guitarist Andy Summers has claimed that the 2007 Police regrouping is not a reunion tour.

Seeing the group on July 23rd at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, it was hard not to agree. I have never experienced three musicians performing together so obviously in their own musical worlds. The fact that they were on the same stage was about all these musicians shared. Well, that and the profits.

Personally, I was hoping for some of the youthful new wave fire that the band demonstrated on their early albums like 1979’s Reggatta de Blanc. Instead the early tunes were de-reggaefied, and the later tunes sounded as if they could have been outtakes from Sting’s bland 1985 solo album Dream of the Blue Turtles.

Familiar tunes like “Roxanne”, “Walking on the Moon” and “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” were reworked into showcases for Sting’s admittedly great voice or Summers’ and Copeland’s chops, just never at the same time. The musicians were so careful enough not to step on each other’s toes that it made for a remarkable safe performance.

The Police of 2007 seem to have little interest in being a rock and roll band. For these three enormous egos to perform acrimoniously, it was obviously necessary to put aside their differences. Too bad that tension was what made the Police’s music interesting in the first place.

Roger Waters at Roger’s Centre on July 14th was an entirely different experience.

From the opening licks of “In the Flesh”, the show was all that Floyd fans could have asked for (besides having the original musicians together on the same stage).

Performing the entire Dark Side of the Moon album without the original players held great potential to disappoint, but the performance didn’t suffer for their absence. The assembled musicians upheld the spirit of the album without trying to follow too closely in their predecessor’s footprints.

Long-time Waters guitarists Snowy White and Andy Fairweather-Low were superb. Earnest Dave Kilminster was competent covering most of Gilmour’s vocals, especially on the Dark Side material, and his playing often echoed Gilmour’s licks within Kilminster’s flashy seventies hard rock style.

Waters himself made the most of his limited vocal range, without pushing past his limitations. This was the last show of the tour, and it showed in the polished performances and the efforts of the performers to leave it all on the stage.

The real star of the evening though, was the state-of-the-art 3600 quadraphonic sound system. It made the performances of songs like “Every Brick in the Wall Pt. III” resonate with all the power of the studio versions. One was tempted to duck when hearing the approaching helicopter effects, and the child choir on the refrain held all the menace and spookiness of the album cut.

These were two distinctly different performances from artists heading in opposite directions. While Roger Waters attempted to look back and re-create the past as faithfully as present circumstances would allow, the Police seemed more intent on transforming their material into mellow, easy listening anthems they assumed reflected their grown-up audience’s current musical tastes. While Waters was able to briefly recapture the magic and immediacy of the past, the Police only made one feel that there was truly no way to get back there again.