What with one thing and another, I had rather lost track of what Sting was up to. Still on the lute? Moved on to nose flutes? Thrash metal rereadings of back catalogue? It turns out that he has taken to the road with an orchestra, in a heroic stand against the bitter frugality of these gloomy times. Drummers don’t cost much, and bassists come cheapest of all, but a whole orchestra has to be fed and watered, housed in very nearly sanitary conditions, transported by lorry from one location to the next and, apparently most tiring of all, listened to, as none of them ever stops talking. Sting obviously has ‘people’ to do all this, as he lolls between venues in his carbon-neutral luxury rickshaw, but the expense must be considerable.
I’d love to see one of these shows, though. Even the best pop music can be improved by the presence of a full orchestra wheeling away behind it, as anyone who bought David Gilmour’s Live at Gdansk CD or DVD from a couple of years ago will confirm. I just wish I had been there, getting the full blast of this wondrous music straight in the chops, like a well-aimed skillet.
You need a certain amount of bravery, though, to strut your stuff with a full orchestra, and not just for reasons of cost. Musical fashion has sniffed mightily at such ornaments for most of my adult life. When Eric Clapton played the Albert Hall in the early 1990s with an orchestra, the critics snorted with derision. Surely punk had seen off such nonsense. Never mind that Michael Kamen’s arrangements added new depth and resonance to Clapton’s greatest hits, or that the Albert Hall’s acoustics, so often troubling to the rock audience, shaped and directed the music so beautifully. (It’s one of the most straightforwardly thrilling concerts I have ever seen.) Orchestra equalled hubris. You were damned before you had played a note.
But even the most brutally restrictive fashions ease off eventually. For this one, I think, we can thank the beneficent influence of Elbow. When Guy Garvey’s lot won the Mercury Prize in 2008 with The Seldom Seen Kid, they seemed to open something up in British music, extend what was possible. There’s a grown-upness to their music, and an authenticity that isn’t based, as most rock authenticity is, on the primacy of drums, bass and two guitars. Instead it’s an emotional authenticity. People recognise and warm to it, and an orchestra only seems to add to it. There are some wonderful clips on YouTube of Elbow playing live with the Hallé Orchestra — and a DVD I really need to buy with the BBC Concert Orchestra — and the orchestrally enhanced version of ‘The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver’ takes the top of your head off. I wonder if Sting watched it and thought, bloody hell, I could do that. Hire some cellists quick.
Peter Gabriel, too, has seen the light. Last year’s Scratch My Back saw him tackling other people’s songs (including Elbow’s ‘Mirrorball’) to a full orchestral backing. It really shouldn’t work, but of course it does: his versions of Arcade Fire’s ‘My Body Is a Cage’ and the Magnetic Fields’ ‘The Book of Love’ are brilliantly intense. He even has a go at David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, the ultimate in uncoverable songs, you would have thought, by reason of its perfect singularity: no song before or since has ever sounded anything like it. Gabriel strips out the rock ’n’ roll, slows it right down, adds a hideous sense of impending doom and pulls it off, just about. He appears to have been energised by the experience. As a rule, decades pass and civilisations rise and fall between Peter Gabriel albums, but there is another one out shortly, in which he reinterprets his own old songs with an orchestra. Clearly you can get hooked.
Not that Elbow lather their own studio albums with strings; a touch here, a touch there, for texture rather than anything else. You barely notice them on the latest one, Build a Rocket Boys!, or on the splendid album Guy Garvey and Craig Potter produced last year for fellow Mancunians I Am Kloot. Sky at Night (Shepherd Moon) has a spaciousness at odds with the rather denser style of their earlier albums, but I think it’s wonderful to hear fine songs given room to breathe. The Elbowisation of popular music takes many forms, and they all sound good to me.
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