Giuseppe Cappello A storytelling between poetry and narrative about Sting

The Chromatisms of Tyne

The iron of the rails nails the gloomy grey of the sky to the town of Tyne
The rusted hissing of the points
The brakes creak on the last mile of the run
They get off with the black marks of the coal on their cheeks
The powder of the toil on the miners’ faces
The dark cosmetics of the night slowly wraps up the streets
In the pub, among the smoke, the beers and the slang,
a voice and the iron of the four strings
They nail the night to the laws of the sky
Harmonies which weave the dances of the planets in the firmament
In the flesh of the mists and the coal, of the iron and the rain,
the gleam of the blues runs through the souls

Transfiguration of a Northern Gleam

Iron on iron the pulse of the town
He is sat on the bench of the river
A gleam of a sunset of the North touches him
The magic of the idea in the soul
Goes down for the sculptures of the fingertips
Along the iron the chisel of sound
Through the four strings the warp
Auroral chromatisms from the North Sea

The Indigenous Night of Intimacy

Guitar comes up from a restless anonymity
The anonymity of milk and mists
Of iron and coal
Of an intimacy which knows about its public value
And bass enters and boosts
In rhythm of miners’ pickaxe
It boosts in rhythm of miners’ pickaxe
Upbeat the iron metallurgy of percussions
The pulsation of bass drum determination and question
It struts on the even beats
In the odd step of hope and dispair
The intimacy which knows about its public value hopes and dispairs
Because it knows that world could not collect
The singing
Has inside a light of brightness and conflagration
Brightness in the world
Conflagration in a soul only
Bring on the night with its dark blanket
Dress of an instant of fate
The slumber enraptures the hertzes of dream in the indigenous night of intimacy

The Scratching Magic of the Yellow Rose

Among the asphalt and the iron of Newcastle a flower came up
A yellow rose
The Northumberland rain wetted the asphalt and the iron of Newcastle
And a flower came up
A yellow rose
Today the stabs of a trumpet rain and wet the harmonies of the American Blacks
And there where the rain dances with the sweat his voice comes up
Among the sky and the mud
the scratching magic of the yellow rose continues

A Saxon Sleep for Her Tonight

(between Sting music and my newborn daughter Beatrice)

The frame of a harp
Copper cuts in the dark
Fingertips, rays of a star
The shuttle of the descending Celtic melody
Brandenburg weaves from the violins
Inlays of a cosmic echo
Resolving in well-tempered coal
Fiber of Northumberland’s throat
Sabres of sound without end
A Saxon sleep for her tonight

The Saxon Breakfast

(between Sting music and my newborn daughter Beatrice)

At dawn the star returns
Wool wraps around you
And milk nourishes you
The crying from the iris
Is gathered by druid hands
And the fingertips of bards
Revolutions of the ladle and on the crotta
In the cauldron the magic potion of sound
Wraps around you
And feeds a dreamlike peace

Pictures at a Composition

(between Sting music and my newborn daughter Beatrice)

In the digital laser the CD spins
A palette for painting imagination
The bristle dips into polyphony
And rises to spread color in the vision
In polychromy the horizons of English hills stretch out
The Shires down the whirlpool of the five o’clock bottle
In the vortex of color the whiteness of your milk
Poly-germinal homeomeria in your limbs
Chromatisms in which the dance of colors is reborn
Heavenly polyphony around my soul

The Mind’s Meander

It’s true my friend of the Tyne
Roses have thorns
And shining waters mud
Cancer lurks deep in the sweetest bud
But there’s a meander in the mind
Where thought cleanses itself of all finitude
Secret and instantaneous
Blessed
When in time I lost the infinite
In the eternal there I inherited it

Dream of a Mead Sumner Night

(Sting Live in Lucca 29/07/2019)

When darkness falls over Lucca and wraps the town like its walls still intact, a set of red light beams turns on the stage of Piazza Napoleone and introduces, already in color, the protagonist of the musical evening and his companion who set the tone for this awesome musical life. Sting comes on stage, and Roxanne with him! A forty-year shiver runs through every fan gathered in the square to listen once more to the masterpieces of a unique career, and it goes down to shake that glow which is our soul beyond time. Sting holds the G minor of this song dedicated to a prostitute in his arms and unfolds it through his guitar. Probably it is just in the form in which the song was born in a hotel in front of a Paris brothel. That brothel from which a twenty-year-old man wanted to snatch his beloved prostitute and give her a life where she would no longer have to put on the red light. Sting sings… Roxanne / You don’t have to put on the red light / Those days are over / You don’t have to sell your body to the night. A voice without signs of aging, but with the aroma built along time — the grains of a vintage wine — mesmerizes the square and regenerates the souls of those who have come this far; the prostitute, whom you could meet up to two hundred meters before and look at with discrimination and contempt in the streets near Lucca train station, becomes the queen of this evening. So, through the miracle of palingenesis that only art can perform, the Lucca Summer Festival last evening opens. And it begins to unfold what, in a fairy night, progressively becomes the Lucca Summer Festival.
Roxanne passes the baton to two other musical miracles of Sting’s genius, and the audience, enchanted by the notes of the opening song, regains possession of itself — of what has sedimented in everyone’s soul during the forty-year relationship with this musician; what surfaces from the latency of daily life among the notes of Message in a Bottle and Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic. The mask that everyone has worn on their own existence is taken away, and the sound becomes volume in the movements and dance with which everyone surrenders to music. Everyone sings, and this singing is led by Sting’s own voice. The real hosts of the evening on stage are Sting’s bass and voice, and the power and elegance in Josh Freese’s drumsticks.
Of course, by Sting’s side is always his thirty-year trusted esquire Dominic Miller on guitar, but it’s clear right away that the concert is built on bass, voice, and drums. The Police as a band was born like this: a trio of bass, voice, and drums in an occupied house of the Copeland family in London in 1977. And it’s this that always makes the miracle of Sting’s music. The miracle where any inhibition fades away on this night of notes; the miracle through which everyone — Italian, English, Russian, or Dutch — leaves behind their identifying culture and indulges in nature to be unified beyond any language. One language is music, and in this language, the Maestro Concertante proceeds elegantly and dominantly.
He continues with the notes of If I Ever Lose My Faith in You. In singing, Sting tells us he could lose his faith in progress, in the holy church, in politics, even in science, but there’d be nothing left for him to do if he ever lost faith in his beloved woman. The more the concert goes on, the clearer it becomes that, in the end, Sting’s beloved woman is music. And then, how could you reconcile with yourself today, beyond every God’s death, if not by music? So everyone continues to reconcile through this concert. Even the alien on Fifth Avenue, lost in the central streets of this global market, does so; this global market that an alien anthropologist, looking from the walls of the cosmos, would struggle to understand. He would struggle to understand how, in the cult of money, man has become alien to himself. But now the cult is only for music, and with it any mask, inhibition, even alienation dissolves. Everyone sings and dances following Sting’s voice… oh oh I’m an alien / I’m a legal alien / I’m an Englishman in New York. Around Sting’s voice and in the power and elegance of the rhythm section, now at full speed, we are transported from the 4/4 of Englishman in New York to the 5/4 of Seven Days.
Everyone, with the music, retakes their volume, their movements, their background vibration… their freedom! Freedom that lands in the atmosphere of peace and enchantment of Fields of Gold. It’s a song that everybody knows, and Paul McCartney recently said he would have liked to write it. It’s the song with which the Moses who is on stage today leads his forty-year people on a breathless walk without troubles through the fields of gold and barley, the fields of golden barley. After this walk, the match among the hearts, clubs, spades, and swords of Shape of My Heart begins — the twin song of Fields of Gold. Sting recorded them in his Lake House Estate in Wiltshire; the dwelling in which he recorded what perhaps is, together with The Soul Cages and The Dream of the Blue Turtles, the flagship album of his solo production — Ten Summoner’s Tales.
There’s a little bit of proud Italian familiarity in thinking that to write and record The Soul Cages, a concept album dedicated to the figure of his father and, in general, to the land where the gems shining in this concert have their roots, the musician from Newcastle chose, in 1990, the seclusion of the Tuscan dwelling of Migliarino. A few kilometers from the place of this concert, in the pine forest of San Rossore overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea at the mouth of the Serchio, just as the English singer’s house of origin overlooked the pine forest of iron and labor of the shipyard at the mouth of the Tyne.
Meanwhile, the match among spades, clubs, swords, and hearts continues in the name of music, and the singer tells us that beyond any calculation, the mask he wears is one. Even in the complex life of a person who must manage his persona on a planetary scale, the concert confirms this at every step. We see Sting through the spades of TV, through the Web 2.0 clubs of social media, the swords vibrating in the competition of global trade… but when you want to know where the heart of this ace beats… you can be sure that his intimate essence pulses and renews itself in music. That essence which makes a rich and famous sixty-seven-year-old man still angry for music and stage-ready as when he was a humble, anonymous boy starting at the very beginning in the pubs of Newcastle. The notes of the everlasting So Lonely, in which the audience recognizes and sings in unison their whole story of love with music, tell us a story; So Lonely tells us how heavy it must be carrying inside the seed of a universal talent in the anonymity and loneliness of someone who wanders like a ghost. A ghost passing through lives to which destiny has reserved labor, anonymity, and loneliness. Someone who wanders with a universal talent among these existences and fears that even his talent may remain anonymous and lonely. Against all odds, Sting makes it and takes “all the lonely people” with him on a walk on the moon.
The notes of Walking on the Moon open on stage to tell again about that, on this night, the Apollo 11 metallurgy is entirely among the bass strings and drums; under the wise guidance of a rustproof voice. A guide that calls on the audience in that collective choir which The Police raised up to the moon… Yooooooooooooooooooooooooo! At first, Sting calls on the right side of the square… Yoooooooooooooooooooo! Then on the left side of the square… Yooooooooooooooooooooooo! …finally all together… Yoooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! In music, the quintessence of man truly rises up to the starry sky and everyone rediscovers their only belonging… the co-belonging to the republic of cosmos! The co-belonging of beings who only in music find the answer to their fragility.
It’s the end of the concert… Sting comes out again for the encore, holds the guitar, and in the notes of Fragile, when everyone is almost bare of superstructures, goes straight to the heart of what we should always keep in our heart and mind… the awareness of how fragile we are and that the only answer to this is in the feeling of our co-belonging both to the house of the city and to that of nature. In the house of the polis and in that of physis! It is what remains and renews in the dream of a midsummer night which has been this concert.

The Empty Chair

Yes I believe in that empty chair
I know that October will come
Breeze of dust from across the Channel
Of milk
Of iron and coal
I still see the flesh in that image today
Some days it is strong
Some days it is weak
But a thirty years prayer is his soul
And it will finally take flesh at the canteen
Yes everyday I have alone the meal of delay
The bread and water of hope against every hope
But I always leave that empty chair abreast
I know that October wind will come
Breeze of overseas powders
Of milk
Of iron and coal
I still see the flesh in that image today
I keep his place at the table
And I believe
Until the symposium of substantiation
The bread and wine of a winter wind

The Water of Tao

Let fall a day
My friend of the Tyne
Your gaze in the mirror of Tiber
As I
Lifetime I left my gaze
In the mirror of the Tyne waters
You’ll see your sound from the teacher’s desk
As I listen to
From the stage your thought
In the kaleidoscopic ripple of the water of Tao