Old friends and noisy neighbours Sting and Paul Simon touring together

WHEN “very noisy” Paul Simon lived upstairs from Sting in New York, a friendship was born. Now a tour like no other is on its way to Australia.

Sting and Paul Simon for Sunday joint tour feature only.

At first glance, the pairing of Sting and Paul Simon seems an odd one.

There’s the folk-inspired pop singer and the punk-influenced new-wave rocker. The American and the Brit. The bookish and diminutive septuagenarian and the still absurdly buff sex symbol who is 62, but could easily pass for two decades younger.

But dig a little deeper and the double-act that will tour Australia early next year seems a perfectly reasonable combination, even an inspired one. Both left behind established acts to forge successful solo careers. Both are musically restless and have long had an interest in world music and other cultures. Each has lived in the other’s country and they spent more than 20 years as neighbours in the same New York building. And both have sold millions of albums and have a catalogue of hits that have provided a soundtrack to several generations.

Sitting backstage at an arena in Orlando, Florida, on the last night of the US leg of their successful On Stage Together Tour, Sting agrees that their long association, mutual respect and common ground is what made their “little experiment” work.

“We lived in the same building for 20 years: Paul lived upstairs — very noisy,” jokes Sting. “We have a lot in common and our curiosity about music is common between us. But if I wanted to be a literary and a literate songwriter, he is the template. From the age of 16 he has influenced me greatly, so to share a stage with him at this point in my life is fantastic.”

Music’s odd couple ... Paul Simon and Sting will tour Australia early next year.

Growing up in England in the 1960s, Sting was naturally aware of his future neighbour’s work as one half of revered duo Simon and Garfunkel and their timeless tunes such as The Boxer, Bridge Over Troubled Water and The Sound of Silence. Simon first became aware of Sting, who is ten years his junior, when the Police began to make waves in the US in the late ‘70s — but the two didn’t meet until they were introduced by Saturday Night Live founder Lorne Michaels. Their friendship grew when they both lived in the same New York apartment block and would seek each other’s opinion when working on new music.

“Paul would ring me up before records were mixed and say ‘this is what I am working on’ and I’d just think ‘he’s f---ing done it again — how am I going to get a look-in?’, says Sting with a chuckle.

Despite their long association, the two had never played together in public until last year, when they were both approached to play at the Robin Hood Foundation benefit.

“We were both asked to perform at this charity function in New York and it was a case of ‘oh you’re doing it too? Let’s just do it together’, recalls Simon. “We were both just going to come out with a guitar so we did two days rehearsal and threw it together and we did Fields Of Gold and The Boxer. And it was interesting — it sort of worked.”

Legends ... Sting and Paul Simon kicked off their "On Stage Together" tour in Houston, Texas. Picture: Kevin Mazur

The audience reaction at seeing the two towering musical figures together was even more enthusiastic.

“It wasn’t announced that we were playing together and then when we came out and started singing together there was an audible gasp,” says Sting. “People were clearly excited about this idea. I thought ‘well, that worked’. We both thought there was some potential there.”

Not long after, Simon sang the songs again at a Sting show in Atlantic City — this time with a full band — and the pair began to see the possibilities and began to nut out the logistics and whether they could make a tour work in terms of schedules, logistics and what each would want to get out of it. They tossed around ideas including individual sets linked by a common set and alternating songs before settling on two mini sets each, with shared songs in between.

And as the tour title suggests, and unlike the Lionel Richie and John Farnham double-header earlier this year, the two really are on stage together for around a third of the 30-odd songs over two and three quarter hours. As an added bonus, each singer brings his own band and the 14 musicians across the two outfits come and go as befits each individual song.

“We weren’t really sure what we were going to get,” admits Sting. “We knew we wanted to do something different and unique and it was Paul’s idea to weave the bands in and out of each other. I thought ‘OK — he sings some of mine, I sing some of his’ but we really had no idea how well it would actually work.”

Simon adds: “We thought that the bands could come in and out and it could be a loose kind of arrangement and the stage was created that way so we didn’t have to change things around and they could enter and exit without it being a big deal. But both the bands are really good players and they just started to falling into playing with each other on their respective tunes on each of our sets so it turned into much more of a collaboration.”

With the form bedded down, next came the decision on the set list and which songs to perform together, no easy task given the wealth of hits from their respective bands and solo careers. The Boxer and Fields Of Gold were in given they started the ball rolling, and each had favourites of the other they wanted to include. Sting has a long been fond of the Simon and Garfunkel song America, which he says reminds him of his first visit to the US, driving across the country in a rented station wagon and “playing in dives and staying in s---ty hotels”. Simon had seen Sting perform his solo song Fragile on just an acoustic guitar — and wanted to perform it himself.

Both relished the chance to revisit songs they had literally performed thousands of times over the years.

“I think it’s interesting that what happens doing the songs in this form kind of recalibrates and recontexualises individual songs,” Sting says. “If he sings one of my songs and I sing one of his there is obviously a comparison or a contrast. We are referencing what we have heard before and so is the audience so it’s constantly being recalibrated. I think the songs are growing because of that.”

Case in point for Simon was the iconic Bridge Over Troubled Water, which, with its towering vocal from Art Garfunkel, is arguably that duo’s signature song — and a monster challenge for anyone else brave enough to take it on.

“Bridge is problematic in a way because you have people’s memory of Art singing that song,” agrees Sting. “That’s one of the most iconic voices in the history of pop music. My job is not to imitate Art, my job is to just sing the notes and the melody and the lyrics in my own style. You know you are being compared with something iconic, so it’s not easy but we pull it off.”

Simon, who wrote the Grammy-winning song specifically for Garfunkel 45 years ago, agrees.

“It’s great — Sting has got one of the great voices in pop music,” he says. “Not that many people can sing that song and make it sound as if it were their song.”

The US leg of the tour finished in March and Australia will be the first overseas country they play next February. In between, Sting’s time will be taken up by his first musical, The Last Ship, which opened last month in Chicago and is due to transfer to Broadway in September. He will be hoping to avoid the fate of his touring partner, whose own original musical, The Capeman, was a monumental flop in 1998, closing after just 68 performances.

“I think he’s fine,” says Simon. “A lot of the mistakes that I made are not even on the horizon. I saw a sketch production that they did at a public theatre in New York and it’s a really good piece of work.”

Sting, who was in the audience for the opening night of The Capeman, leaps to his friend’s defence and says that the desire to create a musical is a natural extension of what they do as songwriters.

“What we both did is something that was very difficult, which is to create an original story,” he says. “Most Broadway musicals are like Beverly Hills Cop: The Musical, or Aladdin or some derivation of Cinderella. To do something new — that’s brave of us.”

“We write three or four minute narratives and to try to extend that narrative into a stage play is something that you just want to do. We got good at the three-minute narrative, so let’s see if we can stretch it. The jury might be out but it’s worth giving it a try. It’s really a lot of fun.”

*Paul Simon and Sting On Stage Together, Brisbane Entertainment Centre, February 3; A Day On The Green, Mt Duneed Estate, Geelong, February 7; Coopers Brewery, Adelaide, February 8; Rod Laver Arena, February 10; Hope Estate Winery, Hunter Valley, February 14; Qantas Credit Union Arena, February 16; An Evening On the Green, Sir James Mitchell Park, Perth, February 21. All tickets on sale July 7. Livenation.com.au

SAMPLE US SET LIST (SUBJECT TO CHANGE)

Simon and Sting:

Brand New Day
Boy in the Bubble
Fields of Gold

Sting:
Every Little Thing She Does is Magic
Englishman in New York
I Hung My Head
Driven To Tears

Simon and Sting:
Love is the Seventh Wave
Mother and Child reunion

Simon:
Crazy Love
Dazzling Blue
50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard
That Was Your Mother

Simon and Sting:
Fragile

Sting:
America
Message in a Bottle
The Hounds of Winter
They Dance Alone
Roxanne
Desert Rose

Simon and Sting:
The Boxer

Simon:
The Obvious Child
Hearts and Bones/Mystery Train/Wheels
Kodachrome/Gone At Last
Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes
You Can Call Me Al

(Encore)
Simon and Sting:
Every Breath You Take
Late in the Evening
Bridge Over Troubled Water

Originally published as Old friends and noisy neighbours Sting and Paul Simon touring together