Dominic Miller Closes Belgrade's Belef Festival
The guitarist known for decades with Sting opened alone on acoustic guitar, then brought his band on for covers of the Beatles, ABBA and the Bee Gees.
Near the end of the concert at the Terazije Theatre, Dominic Miller lowered his voice and admitted something that probably no one in the room expected from a man known for two decades of work alongside Sting: as a teenager growing up in London, his idol was not a British or American guitarist, but a Yugoslav musician.
I watched him play. He was a rock star, he was a fantastic musician!
He said this from the stage about Kornelije Kovac (1942 to 2022), adding that he hoped to return to Belgrade soon. That brief, almost offhand moment said more about the evening than any promotional announcement that preceded it.
That performance, on the evening of September 22, closed the 33rd Belgrade Summer Festival (Belef) in a full house at the Terazije Theatre, an event the city and the Tanjug news agency had listed for 8 p.m. The festival is organized by the Belgrade Festival Center under the patronage of the City of Belgrade and its Secretariat of Culture, and Miller arrived in Belgrade as part of his “Vagabond” tour. He built the concert around a logic rarely seen at the close of a major festival: he started out completely alone.
Outside a narrow circle of guitar enthusiasts, the name Dominic Miller is usually mentioned only as a footnote to Sting, with whom he has toured and written songs for more than twenty years, and with whom he co-wrote “Shape of My Heart,” “La Belle Dame Sans Regrets” and “Saint Agnes and the Burning Train.” That partnership is the reason the festival booked him, but the set he played showed that the label “Sting’s guitarist” is as narrow as it is inaccurate.
The first part of the concert, just acoustic guitar and nothing else, was a performance without a net: Miller played the Beatles alone, “Norwegian Wood,” “And I Love Her,” “Something” and “Eleanor Rigby,” remarking that the songs were “stunning, like Johann Sebastian Bach’s music,” a comparison that says more about how he hears melody than it does about the Beatles themselves. Only on “A Day in the Life” did he bring the rest of the band onstage: bassist Nikola Fisman, keyboardist Mike Lindup, a longtime member of Level 42, and drummer Ziv Ravitz. From that point the concert changed register, moving from a solo recital into a relaxed, almost jazz set with plenty of room for the musicians to play off each other. That shift, from one man and a guitar into a full band, was the real dramatic arc of the evening, more than any single song.
What followed was as much an acknowledgment of his own biography as a tribute to his hosts. The band played an instrumental version of “Shape of My Heart,” the song Miller wrote with Sting that is better known than his own name, while Lindup took the microphone and sang “Something About You,” a hit for his own band Level 42, giving the guest performer a moment in the spotlight of someone else’s show. Near the end came a run of covers: ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All” sliding into Sting’s “Fragile,” in a set that ran nearly two hours, and an encore in which a jazzed up version of the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive” collided with a passage from Vlatko Stefanovski’s “Gypsy Song.” The Macedonian guitarist’s name did not turn up by accident in this context, at the close of a Belgrade festival, any more than Kovac’s had two hours earlier: two references that sketch out something that could loosely be called the personal, post-Yugoslav frame of reference of a man who grew up in London on his own.
The audience rewarded the solo section with a long round of applause, and sent the band off after the encore with an ovation strong enough, in Miller’s own words, to make him want to come back to the city soon. What sets this concert apart from a typical festival closing night is not virtuosity, which no one questions in Miller’s case, but how little he leaned on it. An hour and a half before the band came on, before “Shape of My Heart” and before the ABBA cover, the guitarist sat alone on the stage of a full theatre and played the Beatles as though he were in his living room. Belef closed with a performance that never tried to be an event, and that is exactly why it was one.
