A meeting with Sting: The Bells of Dream

The most interesting songs by Sting have a certain tendency towards limerick-like playfulness, to lyrical pun.

A good thirty years ago, in the musically intricate jealousy song “Seven Days”, he wrote something like: “Does it bother me at all?

/ My rival is neanderthal ".

In the following years, when he turned more and more to world music and sang about "Sacred Love" or renaissance songs to the lute, this cabaret trait was missed in him.

Jan Wiele

Editor in the features section.

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Now he's finally back. "I'll see my shrink on an analyst's couch / Hit me with a hammer and I'll say, ouch": That may not be a lot of poetry, but it has situational wit and brings to mind that sympathetic unlucky fellow who can also be found in songs like "I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Crying".

So now this guy is sitting with the psychiatrist. It is about a recurring dream of fear of failure - the analyst considers the message to be easily decipherable: "What we have here is so easy to solve". But the chorus of the song, which is supposed to reveal the solution, remains strangely vague and puzzling: "This is the sound of rushing water / Flooding through my brain / This is the sound of God's own daughter / Calling out your name". Is it in the end a banal dream of urinating - or is it a mythical condensation that makes a woman appear as "God's daughter" when she repeatedly runs towards the dreaming from a river? It stays nice and open, exemplary ambivalence for breakfast.

On a couch in Baden-Baden, the recently turned seventy says modestly that he doesn't see himself as a poet at all. We are deep in the woods in the SWR station, where he gives information about his new album "The Bridge" - but at first he doesn't open up that easily at this meeting. What made him sing seemingly unsingable verses on the album for so long, seen in print? He just wanted to put a lot of thought into it, is the smiley answer. With some questions, Sting immediately switches to autopilot, then says ready-made sentences about bridges that everyone needs, or music as therapy, not just during lockdown time.

So let's try a compliment: The verses in the title track could almost be from Robert Frost, we tell him: “Though some will claim to be inclined / It's a figment or a ghost / The bridge is deep inside the mind / Invisible to most ". He thanks him with a smile, but sticks to the bottom - maybe also because he is often accused of arrogance? - and then reveals that he sometimes uses a rhyming dictionary. Not because he needed it, but simply to exhaust all the possibilities of rhyme.

That leads directly to the best piece of the new record, in which one verse drives the other like in an old ballad: It's called "The Bells of St. Thomas" and starts again with a hammer. This time in the head of a hungover man who wakes up in Antwerp and no longer knows how he got into the apartment of the woman who makes him coffee. "I wake up in Antwerp / In some rich woman's bed / There's a man with a hammer / Inside of my head." Rubens painting of the unbelieving Thomas and a church named after this apostle, whose bells ring for the last judgment: "And the bells on the roof of St. Thomas are calling".

Whether something can be elicited about it from the person who came up with it?

Sting mischievously says that he just loves Antwerp and was inspired by the city and Rubens - the rest was done by the rhyme from which he was drawn: “like a fish”.

An art

that could only lose through authorial interpretation - but a thoroughly delightful one, whose melody, dancing in six-eighth time, eats into memory.

You repeat what you've been through

How a Thomaskirche, which does not even exist in Antwerp, gets there will remain the lyricist's secret - but anyway the whole song itself is laid out as a riddle when it says about the bells of that church: “The bells of St. Thomas / Are aching with doubt / They're cracked and they're broken / Like the earth in a drought / I've searched for their meaning / I just never found out / Whatever they're expecting from us / Or why the bells on the roof of St. Thomas / Are crying ".

The shift and compression of cultural-historical influences, tourist experiences and chains of associations that apparently govern this great song (which the Süddeutsche Zeitung called "Norwegian Wood for religion teachers", which was probably not meant well and just makes it more interesting), provokes Another question that comes to mind when listening to the album “The Bridge”: Is it also the dreamlike resumption or repetition of already existing Sting songs and themes? With “For Her Love”, whose sound motif is strongly reminiscent of “Shape of My Heart”, or with “Waters of Tyne”, which almost bucolically leads back to the region of its origin, as well as to his album “Mercury Falling”, this is almost obvious .

And in fact he says, here in a very serious way, that as an artist, like in therapy, you keep telling your story: you repeat what you've been through in order to come to terms with things.

In this sense, “The Bridge” can also be seen as a bridge into the past: back to the best phase of his solo career in songwriting in the early nineties and therefore as a “classic sting”.

This of course also includes Dominic Miller's guitar additions (especially “Harmony Road”) or the occasional jazz music that breaks out like in the instrumental fusion piece “Captain Bateman's Basement”.

Sting went into the basement, and what he brought up from there is impressive.