I recently stumbled upon this little gem: a bootleg of Sting’s Unplugged performance at MTV studios, in March of 1991 — back when MTV actually had music on the channel.
Sting was touring to support his latest release at the time, The Soul Cages. He plays four songs from that underrated CD, but the highlights of the session are outstanding versions of “”Fragile,” “Tea in The Sahara,” which segues into “Walking On The Moon,” an excellent cover of Bill Wither’s “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and my favorite song of the set, “Message in a Bottle.”
Although a cover image is included in the archive, I didn’t think the publicity image of a Synchronicity era Sting made sense, so I came up with my own cover based on images from The Soul Cages CD.
Share and enjoy.
Awesome! Thanks for posting this! Yeah i agree that The Soul Cages was *way* underrated. It’s got some great songs. That vocalist in the background on this track you’ve got is a percussionist called Vinx. Evidently, Sting met him one day when he ducked into a bar in Southern California to get out of the rain. This guy Vinx was there singing and playing the djembe! He made a couple of really excellent solo albums if you can find them.
You’re welcome. I’ll have to look for Vinx’s solo work, Sounds like I’d like it.
I noticed the link to the original post I found no longer works. That’s been fixed to another page that links to the full bootleg.