Week of May 30, 2007, Issue #606
MUSIC
Little Sting prepares for big gig
ROSS MOROZ / ross@vueweekly.com
It is probably worth getting out of the way without too much ado, so here goes: yes, Joe Sumner—the lead singer of Fiction Plane, who play two Edmonton shows this weekend, including a spot opening up for the motherfucking Police at Commonwealth Stadium on Saturday—is the son of Sting. Yes, that Sting (whose passport reads Gordon Sumner, for those who were wondering).
And yeah, the younger Sumner knows you’ve never heard of him, and he knows that a great portion of the expected 60 000-strong crowd at Commonwealth won’t have heard of him either—or, if they have, it will be merely as, well “Sting’s kid.” But unlike a lot of rock star progeny, Sumner insists he actually doesn’t mind discussing his megastar father or the extra attention it has focused on his burgeoning power trio.
“It is the only interesting thing about our band, after all,” he deadpans, speaking to Vue from his London home just before hopping a plane across the pond to meet up with dear old dad at the tour’s opening gig in Vancouver. He’s kidding, of course, but Sumner should give his band a little bit more credit. Since forming a little more than seven years ago in London as Santa’s Boyfriend (which is the best name for a band I’ve heard in a very long time), the band has released three critically-acclaimed EPs and toured Europe and North America extensively and without extravagance—and, most decidedly, without any help from dad.
“There was a conscious decision not to call that favour in—I was just totally dead against it for many years,” Sumner stresses. “We just wanted to tour—in 2003 we toured the whole of North America for, like, 10 months straight. We decided that if we were going to get more famous, it was because we had earned it. Now we’re ready, and this opportunity came up, so we decided to take it.”
Of course, Sumner is well aware of the fact that, while Fiction Plane were relative unknowns during their bombing-across-the-continent-in-a-van days, with the massive attention being paid to the Police’s reunion tour (and with the general consensus among fans that, no matter how competent a band Fiction Plane happen to be, their presence on this tour has more to do with nepotism than musical prowess), there is an entirely different kind of pressure that goes along with playing in front of massive arena crowds who’ve paid $200 a pop than there is bashing out tunes to a dozen drunks in some pub.
“If you kind of go in as complete unknowns, you just have to give it your best shot and be positive and be like ‘yeah! Rock ‘n’ roll! Wicked’ and, you know, have a good time,” Sumner admits. “There’s definitely much more pressure if people are, like, [adopting, for some reason, a mock west-coast American accent] ‘well, I heard the single but they can’t play it live at all.’
“If I was being lazy, I would say I prefer to come into a gig as an unknown quantity, because it’s kind of nice to be the underdog—it’s comfortable,” he continues. “But in terms of, like, what I want to do, what we want to do as a band, the second situation is totally preferable. We want to be the best band we can be, and to do that you have to face up to the pressure. We’re really proud of the record we’ve made, and we’re going to try to live up to that in person.”
That record—the just-released Left Side of the Brain, the group’s first full-length LP—is a surprisingly mature effort, with melodic and catchy tunes that recall, well, the Police, both because of Sumner’s unabashedly Sting-esque vocals and the music’s reggae-rock influence. Sumner, though, makes no apologies for the album’s inherent and ostentatious Police-iness.
“I always liked bands like the Specials and Madness, but I always avoided playing that kind of music because the combination of my voice and the sort of reggae thing it would kind of sound like the Police, but with this album I kind of got to the point where I was like ‘okay, I’m just going to do whatever it is that I do—if it sounds like someone, at least that’s something,’” he explains. “Yeah, some of the songs are a little reggae-influenced, and it sounds a little Police-y, but you know what, I’m going to let it go, because it sounds great. I wasn’t going to try to avoid something just because of who my dad is.”
He also isn’t worried about being dismissed by the gargantuan Commonwealth Stadium crowd (by far the largest of the tour) because of his famous lineage. Hoping that the corporate rock machine has done its job and promoted the shit out of his new record, Sumner thinks there might even be a few Fiction Plane fans in attendance.
“I think possibly some of the people there will know who we are, and maybe they’ll even know our single, so it will be a completely different kind of pressure,” he says. “We’re totally ready for the massiveness of the gig, we’ve been working hard and we know what to expect, so we’re going to do a good job and entertain everybody.” V
Fiction Plane
Fri, Jun 1 (8 pm)
With Down North
Starlite Room, $10
Sat, Jun 2 (6:45 pm)
With the Police, Sloan
Commonwealth Stadium, $60 - $425