Sting – Fields Of Gold

Barley around Lake House, smallpipes at the verse end

The third single from Ten Summoner’s Tales comes from the same house as the sessions. Lake House sits among barley fields in Wiltshire, and Sting has tied Fields of Gold to that view: a walk through the meadows, a love song that keeps the landscape in the lyric, west wind, jealous sun, children running as the light drops. A&M released it on 7 June 1993. It reached No. 16 in the UK that summer and No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100. In Canada it climbed to No. 2.

The recording is the Lake House band again, co-produced with Hugh Padgham, mixed at The Townhouse, mastered at Masterdisk in New York. Dominic Miller’s guitar carries the harmony. Brendan Power plays the harmonica solo. Kathryn Tickell, from Northumberland, plays Northumbrian smallpipes at the end of verses one and three. That reed does not belong to a standard London pop date, and it is why the track does not flatten into a ballad you have already heard. The tempo stays slow. A quiet drum pattern and organ sit under the voice. Nothing in the arrangement is loud.

Kevin Godley directed the video, shot over about a week with motion-control cameras. Sting appears as a gold silhouette walking a dark British village: a red telephone box, a pillar box, the street outside him empty while the world inside the silhouette is bright and full of people. The video is clever. The 1993 record is the pipes, the harmonica and the barley.