The odd couple | 23 May 2019

Many is the pop star who has craved gravitas. Only Sting, however, has pursued it by covering John Dowland on an album on which he played the lute. Only Sting has released an album of winter-themed madrigals. Only Sting has written a musical about the closing of the shipyards in Wallsend. He’s the rare pop star who could, should he wish, have a pop at Slavoj Zizek for being just a bit too populist and crowdpleasing. All of which makes his current activities — an album and a tour with Shaggy, the reggae star who’s the reduced-for-quick-sale ready meal of the genre, and a man who is to gravitas as Chris Grayling is to competence — rather astonishing.

That they paired ‘It Wasn’t Me’ and ‘Every Breath You Take’ late in the show was surely not just about these being their best-known songs. Both are about jealousy and spying, but whereas ‘It Wasn’t Me’ is a Carry On film of a song (Shaggy’s persona is that of a Jamaican Sid James) in which our hero is caught ‘banging on the bathroom floor’ by a girlfriend who ‘even caught me on camera’, ‘Every Breath You Take’ is a sly and unsettling lyric about jealousy and control, paired with a taut, coiled melody. It’s the best song Bryan Ferry never wrote.

Side by side, the two tracks suggest that while to Shaggy everything is a joke, to Sting nothing is a joke. Perhaps, though, he’s had enough of being pop’s Mr Po-Faced. He headed back towards more straightforward pop on the 2016 album 57th & 9th, and the album with Shaggy — 44/876 — took him back to the UK top ten last year for the first time since 2003.