Sting looks like a petulant pansy, says drummer

THE singer in the Police jumps like a “petulant pansy,” the drummer is making a “complete hash,” and who knows what the guitarist is doing?

Notes from a bitter critic? Actually, it’s a disarmingly frank concert review from the drummer of the newly-reunited rock trio.

A philosophical Stewart Copeland unleashed his vitriol in a posting on his website this week, a day after the band played its second show in Vancouver, the Canadian city where it began its first world tour in more than 20 years on Monday.

“This is unbelievably lame,” Copeland wrote of Wednesday’s show at the GM Place arena.

“We are totally at sea.”

Most of the 20,000 fans at the venue might not have noticed a series of small flubs, but Copeland, singer/bassist Sting, and guitarist were painfully aware of them.

Copeland started the show off on the wrong foot, literally. He tripped as he took to the stage, and then banged his gong at the wrong time so that “the big pompous opening to the show is a damp squib”.

Fortunately, no fists flew backstage as they did back in the Police’s heyday. The threesome fell into each other’s arms laughing, Copeland said.

“Screw it, it’s only music. What are you gonna do?”