The Music Note

Last week I saw Sting play the penultimate date of a six-night residency at the London palladium. The concerts, which had been rescheduled multiple times due to the pandemic, were in support of his 2019 release My Songs – an album featuring reworked versions of Sting’s most popular tracks, both as a solo artist and as part of The Police. Having followed the 2019 setlists for this tour, which mostly mirrored the album’s tracklist, I was initially expecting a similar “greatest hits” style setlist for the London dates. Then last year, Sting released a new studio album titled The Bridge , half of which is now being incorporated into the post-pandemic My Songs tour setlists. Accompanied by Ukrainian cellist Yaroslava Trofimchuk, Sting opened the set with a hauntingly sombre acoustic rendition of his 1985 song ‘Russians’, which has recently been re-released to raise funds for Ukraine charities. His band then joined the stage to launch straight into a blazing ‘Message in a Bottle’, and