This is how the 9/11 attack changed Sting’s plans

At the age of 20 he hums the bolero, “that they are nothing”, that Alfredo Le Pera wrote to Don Carlos Gardel, I was walking, a September 10, 2001, in Tuscany, at the home of Sting. I landed with other colleagues from the press, most of us were “prisoners”, as the journalist called us Antonio Franco, whom we worked for Jesus Polanco, than from other fellow media, to attend as a class the live recording of the new album / video or video / disc (then the formats were overlapping) of Sting, baptized One Such a Night.

And so it was, everything was in just one night, although the plan was from the first moment to record two, to choose the best takes, but the attack against the World Trade Center prevented the recording of the second night. And he also aborted the launch campaign for that recording, and everything planned for that fall.

Sting bought Il Palagio Estate in 1997 with his wife, the actress and film producer, Trudie Styler. 350 hectares of vineyards to bottle Chianti, planted in the 16th century near the village of Figline Incisa Valdarno. This reader and the chronicler could rent the house if they saved a little, which honors Sting and his financiers and leaves us with illusions. ([email protected] +39 055 9502652).The estate announces five guest houses, among olive groves and vineyards with which it bottles vintages baptized as some of its compositions, Roxanne, When we dance O Sister Moon. All of them signed by Sting in a price range between 20 and 40 euros.

That night of September 10, 2001, already cool in Tuscany, none of us were surprised by the repertoire. It was more about snooping around the farm -None of us stayed there but in Florence – taste his oil, see if we saw him before (which we didn’t see). 19 successes, with the collaboration of the Algerian Cheb Mami -the bass player likes to mix his hits with contributions from world musicians, listen with the Beninese Shirazee its Englishman in New York -, and an unreleased song, Dienda, written by the sensational jazz pianist Kenny Kirkland, already deceased.

If you wear a few years and in 1986 you were at the concert that Sting gave with Branford Marsalis at the Palacio de los Deportes de la Comunidad (12/13/1985), on the tour in which he recorded the double album Bring On The Night, you will remember Kirkland’s monumental piano solo in Bring On The Night/When The World is Running Down. Kirkland passed away a few years ago and jazz lost one of its figures.

After the concert, everyone returned by bus to Florence, a return that was endless, the carabinieri kept us on a road with torches due to a traffic accident. The next morning, on the 11th, we hummed choruses and managed hangovers, but none of us knew anything about the attack until we made landfall in Madrid. There was no internet. On mobile phones, the video was not running yet.

The telephones were used to call, at most they vibrated, the sms messages consisted of a paste and there were even people who carried a pager like the doctors on their belts. Nobody imagined then that a phone would be today a smartphone and that despite being intelligent, he would have the habit of hanging up the call when he felt like it.

Between Barajas and the offices, mine at 32 Gran Vía, six floors below Cadena SER, the taxi radio was our companion. It’s hard to imagine today. At around 3:30 p.m., before the television in the office of Ignacio QuintanaAt the time, General Director of Progresa, we witnessed the collapse of the two towers in perplexity, with the door open, with the companions leaning out in cathodic perplexity. I could not tell anyone since last night I had been in Sting’s house, nobody cared, and little could I imagine then that 20 years later I would be moved by the version of Walking on the Moon de Aloe Black and Roseaux as it has done this summer.

If you want to watch the video, and look for familiar faces, a guy in a striped shirt – you have to be flat to wear a striped shirt in front of Sting! – is this chronicler. Or maybe it’s not me but the one who was before the attack, because they say that the world changed just 12 hours later. But I keep very much alive in that little music box in which the memory keeps each and every one of the days in which you get goose bumps, the chorus with which we tuck him in … “I’ll be watching you ( every single Day) (every world you say), (every game you play), (every night you stay) I’ll be watching you ”.

Follow the topics that interest you