If we told you that Sting was touring in a trio again, you could get the wrong idea. But no, the singer-bassist, who rose to fame in the ’70s and ’80s with the new wave trio the Police, has not agreed to a reunion of that band.
But with the Sting 3.0 Tour, which plays the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles for five nights starting Nov. 12, Sting has come as close to that sound as he’s been since the Police reunited for a run of shows in 2007 and 2008.
“I’ve been playing with lots of different kinds of lineups, you know, large and small,” Sting says on a recent video call. “But this is the first time I’ve been back to the trio format in a good many years.
“I did it to surprise myself,” he says. “I think surprise is the one element in music that’s essential, to surprise the audience.
“We’d been playing in Europe, and we didn’t really tell people what they were going to see,” Sting says of the return to a three-piece combo with longtime guitarist Dominic Miller and drummer Chris Maas.
“I could see it from their faces that they were very surprised there’s only three of us up there, and how much noise we were making,” he continues. “Well, I say noise – musical noise.”
The Police released five studio albums between 1978 to 1983, becoming one of the biggest bands in the world. But Sting, the main songwriter in the group, wanted to expand beyond the tight new wave rock of that band. So in 1986, the band split up for two decades until its one reunion tour.
Still, Sting has always included Police songs in his solo sets, and on the Sting 3.0 Tour that practice has continued. Many sets open with Police songs such as “Message In a Bottle” and “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic,” and usually end with favorites such as “I’ll Be Watching You” and “Roxanne.”
All told, the tour delivers eight or nine Police tracks interspersed with solo hits such as “If I Ever Lose My Faith In You,” “Englishman in New York,” and Sting’s traditional show-closer “Fragile.”
The return to a trio creates both opportunities and challenges, Sting says of what he’s experienced so far on tour.
“It does give you a great deal of harmonic freedom and clarity and space,” he says. “All of us are enjoying that space and the ability to turn on a dime. Things don’t need to be over-arranged.
“That’s an exciting prospect for me,” Sting says. “Also to reduce the songs down to their basic structure. It’s affirming that they’re sturdy enough to withstand that and actually benefit from where you can hear the counterpoint in the composition, you can hear the vocals, you can hear the guitar lines and the bass.
“It’s a wonderful sort of tightrope walk, really,” he says. “I have to work harder. We all have to work harder. But I’ve never been afraid of that. It’s exciting.”
Even though he’s played most of these songs regularly throughout his solo career, the stripped-down versions required him to relearn some things about them.
“I have to do more as the bass player,” Sting says. “I can’t sort of just sit back. I’m in the engine room the whole time, and I’m singing. But it’s fun.”
With this smaller band – when Sting played the Hollywood Bowl in October 2023 he had eight musicians with him – he chose to play multiple nights at smaller venues on most of the dates. When the Sting 3.0 Tour was announced in March, there were two nights at the Wiltern. Since then, three more nights were added due to demand for tickets for the theater shows.
“We’re playing the Wiltern in L.A. and it’s a venue I played many, many times,” Sting says. “The scale of the theater allows you to be more intimate than an arena or a stadium. But it also gives the opportunity to be a little more experimental. The intimacy allows you to bring the audience into your problem-solving, into the creation of something more than in a stadium where it’s very pedantic.
“A theater is much more to and fro, you know, between the audience and the performer,” he says. “So that’s my favorite kind of venue. I enjoy playing the big places as well, but it’s a different mind at work. And I’ve always wanted to keep that music stretched, or keep it active, so that I can play small places and benefit from it.”
Guitarist Dominic Miller has been Sting’s right-hand man in almost all of his bands for more than three decades. Drummer Chris Maas, who has played with artists such as Mumford & Sons and Maggie Rogers, is a newcomer to Sting’s world.
“Dominic’s been at my right hand for 35 years now, man and boy,” Sting says. “He knows the material better than I do in many ways. You just have to name a song and Dominic has sort of photographic memory. He remembers it all. I have to work hard to remember the song but he seems to have it at his fingertips.
“So it’s a fantastic asset, as well as (him) being a brilliant musician on every level,” he says. “Chris Maas is somebody we met a couple of years ago on a TV show. Our normal drummer couldn’t make it and I really liked him. Very dynamic and very fresh.”
Before Sting 3.0 Tour began, Sting, Miller and Maas went into the studio to cut a new single, “I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart),” which they’ve played most nights on tour.
“I just wanted to reflect what we would sound like, the kind of vibe we would have,” Sting says of the new tune. “It’s a simple, romantic, noisy love song. That’s not all we can do, but again, it’s a surprise. People didn’t expect that kind of tenor from us, you know.”
At 73, Sting has been a road warrior in recent years. He’s on track to play more than 100 shows for the third year in a row, and the Wiltern shows represent his third different venue in Los Angeles and Orange counties this year, following headlining slots at BeachLife Festival in Redondo Beach in May, and Ohana Festival in Dana Point in September, the latter date as a fill-in after Neil Young had to cancel his appearance.
“I have a home in Malibu, so I feel somewhat at home in Southern California,” Sting says of the frequency of his performances here. “I worry about the fires; you know, it’s tough. But as a musical audience, they’re great, very appreciative.”
And much larger than when the Police first pulled into Los Angeles for their first shows there in March 1979.
“We drove across the country playing little clubs and various cities to Sunset Boulevard,” Sting says. “We got there late, very late one night, and I said, ‘Stop the van.’ We stopped the van. They said why? I said, ‘I’ve never seen a palm tree in my life.’
“So I got out and I hugged the palm tree.”
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