STING

November 17, 2022
Amsterdam
AFAS Live
HOLLAND

01-01 Message in a Bottle
01-02 Englishman in New York
01-03 Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
01-04 If It's Love
01-05 Loving You
01-06 Rushing Water
01-07 Fields of Gold
01-08 Shape of My Heart
01-09 What Could Have Been
01-10 Roxanne
01-11 Fragile
01-12 Every Breath You Take

Length:
58 minutes.

Line-up:
Sting - vocals, bass, acoustic guitar
Dominic Miller - guitars
Zach Jones - drums
Kevon Webster - keyboards
Shane Sager - harmonica
Melissa Musique - backing vocals
Gene Noble - backing vocals

Remarks:
Sting has serious voice problems during the show because of a bad cold. In the beginning he was expecting that his voice might turn better as the show went on, but it was not! He was clearly suffering. After the first 6 songs he started to drop songs from the planned setlist. He continued with quiet songs only. Songs were performed in different arrangements to save Sting's voice. Roxanne was perfomed in quiet acoustic bossanova-style. Every Breath You Take was performed in another key. The show ended after 58 minutes (for comparison: previous recent Sting shows were about 100 minutes).

During the intro of Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic: "As you can hear I'm a little bit croaky tonight. As the evening goes on, it might come back. Help me out. Thank you".
Before If It's Love: "Well thank you. Well it's not coming back yet, but it will. It will. I promise. I'm delighted to be back in The Netherlands. I think we were here last March right in this building. It was the night I got Covid. Haha. I don't have Covid now. I was tested this morning. I'm completely free of it. I just have a bad cold. We are gonna get through this. On the guitar mister Dominic Miller [..]".
During the intro of Rushing Water: "So here is what I'm gonna do. Keep playing I don't mind. I'm gonna sing the melody in a different way. See if I can do this. Because I can't sing the high notes. I'm gonna change the melody as we go. Good luck".
Before Fields Of Gold: "OK, by the end of the night I'm gonna sound like Barry White. I was gonna do If I Ever Lose My Faith In You but that is too high. Let's do Fields Of Gold".
Before Roxanne: "So here is what I'm going to do. Can I have my guitar, Danny? Acoustic guitar. Just have to do things differently. There you go. I'm going to sing the original version of Roxanne. Because it wasn't written for a [??] voice at all. It was written as a kind of bossanova. You help me, Dominic. Wrote it in a little hotel room in Paris in 1976. It was a very cheap hotel behind Gare Saint Lazare. We shared the hotel with ladies of the night. Before that I was a school teacher and led a pretty shelled life. Never seen this kind of [xx] before. So I went to my room. Took out my guitar [..]"
Before Fragile: "I wanna sing Fragile now. I want to dedicate it to the people of the Ukraine. I also want to dedicate it to the young women of Iran, who are stuggling to express themselves in a way they want to and have every right to. This is called Fragile".
Before Every Breath You Take: "I don't think my voice is coming back. Let's do Every Breath You Take in a quiet way. Then we get back together later in the [??]. Nice and quiet. Dominic kindly offered to change the key".
Halfway through Every Breath You Take: "So, OK. Here is what we do. Obviously this is not the show you wanted. Nor I did. We will do this again very soon. If you don't want to hold on to your ticket, we'll give you the money back. Figure it out and we'll get back. I'll be in full voice. Better than ever. Thank you for being so understanding. Beautiful audience".
Sting ended the show by saying: "We'll make an announcement very soon. Thanks for being so understanding. I love you".

Recording location:
Recorded from the balcony (row 1; seat xx; Dominic's side of the stage). Microphone was mounted to the balcony railing (which resulted in a nice clean recording!).

Lineage:
MM-MCSM-4 cardioids microphone > iRiver H120 (flashed with Rockbox; recording level: 19,5 dB) > USB > PC > Cool Edit Pro 2.1 > WAV > Trader's Little Helper 2.7.0 (Build 172) > FLAC (level 8)

Cool Edit Pro was used for tracking, fade in/ out, some hard limiting and normalization.


Recorded, edited and seeded by steerpike
November 2022