Fogel’s Patience Helps Police Reform

Next Adventure president Arthur Fogel said it took nearly a couple of years of patient negotiating before The Police agreed to re-form for a world tour.

"I spent a lot of time talking to their various managers and business managers, and the band members obviously had to agree to it as well. It took a collaborative effort to make it happen," he told Pollstar.

The last year or so has seen many reunions and returns including Genesis, Take That, and George Michael – with Boyzone, The Spice Girls and a Paul Weller-less The Jam threatening to do the same. So it’s no surprise to read that someone’s trying to put The Humpty Dumptys back together again.

But Fogel, president of The Next Adventure and chairman of Live Nation Music, believes The Police tour is the unique event.

"They were a huge band everywhere in the world when they decided to shut it down," he explained. "They were global icons who went out at their peak and a lot of people have spent a lot of time talking about a comeback, without anyone really believing that it would ever happen.

"That’s all part of the excitement and – along with the Grammy performance and the press that it got – it’s all creating a tremendous buzz."

The first eight U.S. shows to go on sale shifted all 170,000 tickets in a few hours. Since then, additional dates have sold out at the 15,000-capacity Seattle KeyArena, the 18,000-capacity Pepsi Center in Denver and the 48,000-capacity McAfee Coliseum in Oakland, Calif.

At press time, tickets for the show at 53,000-capacity Giants Stadium in New Jersey had just been put on sale.

Fogel is expecting the European tour to get the same response.

John Giddings of Solo, Fogel’s European tour coordinator, was finalising and confirming the shows at press time. There will be 20-30 shows in a mixture of stadiums and arenas, starting at the end of August and running through mid-October.

The full itinerary was expected to be made public during the week ending March 5th.