Eva: NATURE AND MUSIC. A REAL (COMPLETE) EXPERIENCE.

I still remember the day I picked up the phone and listened to my friend Sonia’s voice: 

- “Hi honey, have you heard the news? Sting is going to give a concert in Hoyos del Espino".

- "Are you kidding me?" I answered.

- "Of course not. It’s absolutely true. I’m going to buy tickets for me and some friends in Madrid. Would you like to come with us?”, she asked.

At first I was speechless but then I said, “Sure, I’ll come with you.”

Oh my goodness, Sting in Hoyos! It sounded so incredible! A music icon worldwide was going to drop by in a small village with a population of less than 400 inhabitants in the Sierra de Gredos. But like most things in life, there was an explanation.

The "natural" venue in Gredos

The Junta de Castilla y Leon opened the season with that concert called “Musicians in Nature”, a way to raise awareness of the respect for natural areas and also to promote them and what a better choice than Sting, a renowned activist and the philanthropist founder of the Rain Forest Foundation.

After the controversy generated among environmental movements, the initial location within the Regional Park of the Sierra de Gredos had been transferred to its limits, on a vast esplanade surrounded by pine forests and mountains.

Some months later I was able to arrange my schedule for the day of the event so I was absolutely delighted. And our musical date arrived. We organized ourselves in several cars and started our trip to the charming and lovely village.

On arrival we found a crowded place, cars and buses concentrated in tiny streets and in a jam-packed car-park. The atmosphere was electrifying and festive, and we bumped into many familiar faces. We heard people say that the star had arrived by helicopter just in time to see England’s defeat against Portugal in the World Cup.

Gordon Matthew Thomas, Sting’s real name, appeared on stage with his guitar playing the chords of the legendary “Message in a bottle” before proceeding with “Synchronicity”. He was alternating songs from his mythical band The Police with others from his solo career. “If you love somebody set them free”, “Every breath you take”, “Englishman in New York”, “Shape of my heart”, “Fields of gold”, “Walking on the moon” or “Roxanne” were, to name a few, part of his repertoire.

Truly unforgettable was the way back to town walking along a path lit by the soft moonlight and the perfectly aligned lanterns of volunteers while everybody was singing camp songs.

Songs evoke moments and I don’t know the reason why my heart has chosen “Fragile” to fill it with memories of that warm night of July. So every time I listen to this beautiful song I can’t help feeling transported to that time and I can almost sense the heat and the intense smell of pine and nature.

The magic of the moment and the music as well as the heat of that night, wrapped in a canopy of stars, made that evening memorable and surely it will remain in the minds of those who shared an experience that provided us with an incomparable setting and the infinite music of an awesome artist with a capital "A".

Dear Eva, it's great to see that, after almost one and a half long years, you have made up your mind to write a post for the blog, so congrats and a big, big thank you!

Well, it's amazing how vividly you can remember an event that took place back in July 2006, so it must obviously have made an impression on you, and understandably so, since Sting is undoubtedly a fantastic artist. I am very fond of both his solo career as indeed of his glorious years with The Police, one of my fave bands of the late 70s / early 80s.

What can I say about Eva's choice, Fragile, to me one of the finest songs of Sting's second album as a solo artist, "Nothing like the Sun", a vinyl record which I treasure to this date. A really moving intimate song which actually is inspired by the sad controversial story of an American engineer murdered by the then US-supported "Contras" in Nicaragua in 1987:

If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one

Drying in the color of the evening sun

Tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away

But something in our minds will always stay

Perhaps this final act was meant

To clinch a lifetime's argument

That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could

For all those born beneath an angry star

Lest we forget how fragile we are

On and on the rain will fall

Like tears from a star, like tears from a star

On and on the rain will say

How fragile we are, how fragile we are

Beautiful lyrics, aren't they? This is the lovely, somewhat minimalist original videoclip which Sting made for the song, where he - rather oddly I dare say - plays an acoustic (Spanish?) guitar:

Eva may not know that some time later Sting recorded the complete album in Spanish (and Portuguese too), under the name of "Nada como el Sol". Even if I never thought much of the Spanish cover of Fragilidad (honestly, I can't help but find the translation kind of weird at times), I've decided to embed this clip below for the sake of the evocative, well-known photographs used in the black & white montage, which suitably reminds us, these days more than ever, that "nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could" ("Nada se logra con violencia ni se logrará", Sting sings in his funny Spanish accent) ...