Music industry insiders are hinting that following the commercial and artistic success of his 2006 album of Elizabethan lute music Sting is planning a  three hour concept album using hollowed animal bones found at Neanderthal burial sites. Delaying the project is his campaign to reconnect with his fans. Any here today gone tomorrow boy band is willing to drive half an hour down the road to visit the local children’s hospital. An artist of Sting’s wisdom and longevity knows that you have to do more than that to keep a special place in your admirers’ hearts.

Would JLS fly to Tashkent in Uzbekistan because a doting father wanted to give his favourite daughter a special present? No way! Whiny, liberal, anti-Uzbek newspapers like the Daily Mail are feigning indignation because the daddy in question is Islam Karimov. He’s mainly famous outside Uzbekistan on account of his reputation for having his enemies boiled alive.

According to the Mail Sting trousered £2 million for performing to Gulnara Karimova at the National Opera House and while it’s true that tickets went for £1400 anyone who was not able to find forty five times the average local monthly salary was able to watch the show on a big screen outside.

In a statement the singer demonstrated some knowledge of local issues: “‘I am well aware of the Uzbek president’s appalling reputation in the field of human rights as well as the environment. I made the decision to play there in spite of that.“

As well as political assassination these issues include the killing of several hundred anti-poverty demonstrators; the use of children as slave labour on cotton plantations and the draining of 80% of the Aral Sea.

To be fair it’s not just Sting who has performed in Tashkent. It seems to be a pension plan for singers who haven’t recorded anything decent in thirty years. Rod Stewart went there too as part of the regime’s bread and circus policy.

Two rhetorical questions just won’t go away. Is there a worse torture than a two hour Sting concert? Can anyone ever take Sting seriously the next time he opens his mouth about the environment, human rights or tantric sex?

For our younger reader who won’t get the reference in the title the video is a very fine piece of early British electronica.