This relatively intimate night at Kentish Town Forum – the first of four scaled down shows across London this week – was something of a homecoming for Sting.

Sting lived in nearby Highgate (“upper Kentish Town”) in the 90s, he told us, before leaving for a “small house in the countryside… well actually it was more of a castle.” He then movingly dispatched the song inspired by those surroundings, “Fields of Gold,” a ballad so good that Paul McCartney once claimed it was the one song he wished he’d written. It was what we’ve come to expect from Sting: some knowing self-regard with the receipts to back it up.

But this wasn’t a night for indulgence. This version of the man born Gordon Sumner – billed as Sting 3.0 – saw him in back-to-basics crowdpleasing mode. There was no grandstanding on w

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