For the last two decades, Sting has been writing, composing, performing, and producing songs that have left their mark on the hearts, souls, and music collections of fans worldwide. Most of us have witnessed his seamless, musical metamorphosis from English ’80s rock about synchronicity and being wrapped around fingers, to his reggae/calypso visit to New York, to his ’90s new age sounds telling us to set free the people that we love. Now Sting marks the onset of a brand new day with another transformation.

In the fall of 1999, Sting, known for being technologically absent, joined forces with computer giant Compaq in a sponsorship alliance to promote — and produce — the 15-month, international tour for his latest album, Brand New Day. Each faction of this alliance could be considered mega-players in their industries just by the sheer magnitude of recognition and success:

a) In his 20-year career, Sting has garnered a dozen Grammys, four Brit Awards, recorded ten solo albums, as well as eight legendary records with The Police. In addition, Sting has acted in 15 films and made countless contributions to various recordings. His support for human rights, Amnesty International, and The Rainforest Foundation mirrors his dedication to music in its universal outreach.

b) Compaq Computer Corporation, a Fortune Global 100 company, is the second largest computer company in the world and the largest global supplier of computer systems.

One might fully expect that a combination of these two immense, possibly opposed philosophies would end in a train wreck. Nothing could be further from that expectation. Today, the two have become a single entity that is accomplished in three realms: music, promotion, and the Internet.

"I am pleased," said Sting a year ago when the announcement of Compaq’s sponsorship of his tour was made, "to be involved with a company of Compaq’s stature and look forward to a long and fruitful association." And the fruit is heavy on the tree.

Sting’s first exploit into the cyber world has yielded applause from both sides of the fence. The music fans are glad to have an immediate and well thought-out place to access "All Things Sting," and the computer-savvy are wowed by the subtle and technological grace of the site. Boasting over 5,500 hits a day, the site has garnered high praise for the written and visual content, graphics, and overall design and layout. It seems that there might finally be a true harmony between two distinct approaches: the artistry of Sting and the technology of Compaq.

MODE Weekly recently interviewed one of the dealmakers of this merger of man and machine, Pam Coltharp, Manager of Global Sponsorship Strategy for Compaq. It is a lofty title for such a down-to-earth businessperson. In her role of "negotiating the deal," Coltharp has day-to-day dealings with Sting’s team for sponsorship of the Brand New Day tour. "I’m responsible for the upkeep of the website and the advertising of the tour," says the woman also responsible for cutting this (somewhere between $7 and $20 million) deal. She’s ill at ease with accepting any credit for Compaq’s stock taking an upswing on the announcement of the Sting/Compaq tour promotion, but is pleased with the success, nonetheless.

This past Sunday, Sting’s Brand New Day tour landed in Compaq’s hometown, Houston, Texas, where MODE Weekly’s correspondent Bob Ruggiero, of the Houston Press, was invited backstage. Clearly engineered as "no small affair" a backstage pre-concert technology tour culminated at a Compaq V.I.P. tent where Sting makes several comments about the sponsorship with Compaq. But if there was anyone else backstage with Sting that has rock star status, it was Compaq CEO Michael Capellas. He made a surprise appearance in front of the more than 150 assembled Compaq executives and workers munching down on the fajita buffet and open bar (with the good liquor) at the Houston show. Warm and smiling, Capellas had every head in the tent turning as he made his way from table to table shaking hands and signing autographs on the September 4 issue of Business Week, of which he is the cover boy. Greeting the reader dressed in denim and slinging a guitar, "Compaq’s Rockin’ Boss" relates the attempts to turn the recent misfortunes of the company around.

"I think Sting just adds so much excitement. We’re just trying to drive the innovation and bring the cool attitude back to Compaq," Capellas said when buttonholed by MODE for a quick quote. "Sting is so creative and such an innovator, he just fits in with everything that we do."

Compaq made a very smart business move, because, at the time, the company seemed to be suffering from intense competition. Consumers were making choices painful to Compaq profits. But Compaq has demonstrated that they can offer better choices.

Even on the introduction screen of the sting.compaq.com website, the logo fades in with a choice to go the "high road" for users with high bandwidth (56k) capabilities, or the "low road" for those Flintstones on AOL with low bandwidth. The animation is a visual perk, but not at all necessary to enjoy the site’s wares. Both roads lead down the same path. But it seems Compaq has adopted a "multiple-options" approach for more than just the website. They’ve lent technology and its ease of use to the tour for work, for play, and for everything in between.

All aspects of the entertainment, touring, recording, and music production business have been enhanced with the use of Compaq computers. Production managers use portable computers on the road to manage schedules, budgets, crew and guest lists, expenses, Internet access, and general business management functions. Compaq Armada laptops and Compaq Deskpro’s are being utilized to perform business and tour management functions.

For producing music on the tour, Compaq portables are used to compose, arrange, print notation, and record musical compositions. Formerly an almost exclusive task of the Apple Macintosh platform, Compaq seems to have won the hearts of even the diehard MAC fans on the Brand New Day tour, as almost every hand touches a Compaq in day-to-day operations.

The website’s "high road" initializes the de facto standard of online animation: Macromedia Flash programming. An intro page offers calligraphic quatrains of song lyrics from the Brand New Day CD. Then the recognizable pulsation of Sting’s hit "Desert Rose" begins acapella as the site takes shape. It cascades with expanding and crisscrossing images and lyrics, presents crisp, creatively-framed portraits and scenes from the Brand New Day tour, and supplies links that move in and out of frames with animation that’s caramel smooth.

Each of the six major web links on the home page unfolds gently as the cursor passes over it, giving the site an organic quality. Links shift coolly around the site with minimal download time and offer great details. Click on the dash within a circle at the bottom right for even more shape shifting and info. Users will find tour information, bios on Sting and other members of the tour, quasi-transcripts of live performances on talk shows, options to download music and clips, a place to chat about, read, and post Sting fanfare, a Sting store, and even a place called "Songline" which walks users through every step of making their very own Sting video. What makes up the snips of film and audio to choose from when creating a video is called Digital Sampling. It’s used throughout the website as well as the tour itself.

Sampling is the process used to record a "sound" and apply it to buttons on a website or notes as they are played on a keyboard or played back by a sequencer. The sequencer makes it possible to record as a sound file any sound or instrument and then later play it through a keyboard, which Danny Quatrochi, Sting’s Instrument Technician, mans during the concert, hitting and clicking preprogrammed sequences as the show progresses. Manager of Corporate Events and Communications Services (and amateur musician) Brad Perkins likens it to "an electronic piano roll" adding that its comparable to a timeline on video editing, and allows you to cut and paste a melody much like you would normally a block of text. "And you can get your timing very tight — down to 1/28 or a quarter note," says Perkins. "Anything you need to supplement the live band playing." Note and event sequences can be edited, specific instrument sound qualities can be applied to notes, and changes in tempo and pitch can be affected. Other parameters such as key changes, instrument patches, note volume, keystroke intensity (velocity) and aftertouch (sustain), note duration, and the MIDI instrument source can also be controlled. The completed sequence can be saved to either application specific or general MIDI specifications format. This allows musicians to play the song file back in performance, or share files with collaborative musicians.

When it’s suggested that having such a stiff, pre-programmed backing track hardly encourages live rock and roll spontaneity during a show, Perkins feels that the benefits outweigh any criticism. "There a lot of validity to that, and with a good sample, you can reproduce an instrument [very closely] electronically. But is it truly the same sound as someone up there playing a horn? Probably not exactly." He offers economics as the ultimate debate stopper, noting that the cost of carrying a eight-or-nine piece horn section on tour makes the decision to go synthesized easier, and the trade-off is that the musician has more definitive of a control over the creative process.

Regardless of the way the music happens, fans love every moment of the concert and say so online.

"Technology is a wonderful and valuable marketing tool. We are getting great feedback," says Coltharp. A good percentage of users get onto the website just to try and win the coveted iPAQ handheld PC. Quite a good percentage wanted to win it. "The demand greatly overshadowed our supply," says Eileen Quinn, Public Relations Manager for Compaq. Which was true for the Tour staff as well, "Everyone wanted one and we just underestimated the demand," added Coltharp. Besides the inoperative "Click here to win a free iPAQ!" button on the website, there seems to be few other flaws with the site. "We haven’t had any major glitches to speak of," says Coltharp, knocking on wood. "The feedback that we’ve gotten from Sting and his team is that they didn’t expect it to be this easy."

"The Compaq equipment is very solid. It hasn’t glitched once," says Sting’s Lighting and Production Designer, Nick Sholem. At first glance, Sholem looks and sounds like a roadie from This is Spinal Tap. A thick accent, gregarious manners, and Austin Powers mouse pad leave little question as to his homeland as he describes from his perch in the sound area amidst thousands of dials and monstrous looking keyboards how the Compaq lighting equipment works.

"The whole WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) system was put together here in Houston and then brought up to New York. We plugged it in and away we went for two-and-a-half weeks of programming. It was so easy. We walked in a 9 o’clock, turned it on, worked, and walked away at 5 o’clock for dinner," says Sholem.

But as the carefully pre-programmed lighting cues — involving hundreds of bulbs and intricate maneuverings — progress through the show, what happens if something onstage and Sting’s words, actions, or timing throws it all out of whack?

"Sting has caught us a couple of times," Sholem laughs. "One night, he made a mistake and went to the wrong song. But all it meant was that we had to jump in, grab the right [controls], and I was just a cue or two behind. So it looked a little messy onstage. But to be honest — that’s his fault!"

The high-end technology is everywhere on this tour and on the website. Often, there’s too much available on the website and the old must make way for
the new. To rummage through the virtual toy chest in the attic, check out the "Archive" link. There you’ll find all the stuff they had to move off of the shelf to put up newer stuff, but it’s still good stuff. Play a game, read and see how the tour went in another city, and even take a survey about the site. The thought that went into this website is most nearly opposite of that of the usual, commerce-to-death, click-n-submit, unimaginative e-junk that much of the WWW has littering it. sting.compaq.com is an excellent example of harmony between unlikely spirits.

And these spirits are supported by some of the most amazing hardware and software around. Warning: more tech talk ahead.

Quatrochi uses a Compaq Armada 1750 portable computer with 400 MHz Pentium, 256 meg RAM, 10 Gb hard drive, DVD drive, internal ZIP drive, Adaptec SCSI-PCMCIA interface, an Emagic Unitor MIDI interface, Windows 98, and Emagic Logic sequencing/audio production software to sequence Sting’s compositions. Danny also uses an Armada 3500 as a live performance back-up and personal computer for Internet access.

"This is the first time that we’re using Compaq, and I don’t know that it can do anything that other computers can’t," Quatrochi says. "But the PCs have come a long way. Everything used to be done pretty much only on Mac. Kipper [Sting keyboard player Mark Eldridge] did a lot of the sequencing that we’re using. And in [most] cases, we’re using the same ones that were on the record."

Kipper uses virtually the same setup as Quatrochi excepting for a mythically named Mark of the Unicorn MIDI interface to sequence his parts and create his own compositions.

But Compaq’s equipment isn’t only onstage — they’ve also provided much of the band and road crew with their own laptop computers to contact their families on the Internet. "It takes away some of the pain of the road so they can stay in touch," says Perkins. "They’re even using the I-Phone now to call their families in England and Scotland. They could normally never afford to spend an hour on a [standard] phone!" Sting personally appreciates the laptop Compaq supplied him to play, in anonymity of course, the online chess he loves so well.

Although it might seem to some that Sting and Compaq are bonded in an inorganic, cold tryst, Coltharp wants to assure that it’s not personalized. "We are not sponsoring Sting, the individual," says Coltharp. "We are sponsoring Sting, the tour."

With the tremendous success of this tour promotion and a website that acts as a virtual backstage pass, MODE Weekly posed the question whether Compaq would promote another tour. "It’s definitely possible," said Coltharp, but says that nothing is being discussed specifically. She reiterates that "technology is a wonderful marketing tool," but, essentially, not every move will be as magical as the sting.compaq.com promotion. Sting was selected because of his ability to transcend language and cultural barriers. Not many personalities have that gift.

Looking trim in a sleeveless T-shirt, The Stingster himself mounts the small, private stage hours before the Houston show starts and stares out into the assembled throng — many hopeful for an autograph, holding out a CD and a marker.

"My association with Compaq is now almost a year old, and I have to say it’s been a very pleasant association," he says, albeit a bit canned. "Although I know that when you ally a rock star with a corporation, it’s full of danger. I could get arrested, and the company stocks can go down!" Chuckles erupt from the masses. "But my album has done extremely well, and I’m very proud to be associated with Compaq and met lots of very nice people. Thanks for the ride. It’s been great. Enjoy the show."

And with that, the man who longed for prostitutes named Roxanne and had dreams of blue turtles was gone. Sting had buzzed off, but the frenzy of Compaq guys and gals would have a story to tell at the office the next morning.

MODE’S QUESTION:
"We know that your Internet site "sting.compaq.com" has been successful in increasing awareness for both parties, but how has the integration onslaught of Compaq equipment, technology, and people impacted this tour versus previous ones? And most importantly, has this relationship changed your perception and willingness to embrace Compaq technology, especially after the tour ends?"

And as far as the relationship between us, this symbiotic thing between Compaq and this tour, is that we have both learned things. They have learned how I use computers and I have learned what they have available and I’m sure there will be some blending of those ideas in the future, which will be beneficial to both parties.

On the whole it’s been really nice and I’ve met some nice people. I am proud to have been associated with Compaq and I hope that they are proud to have been associated with me.

It’s been real nice"