Unplugged Cop

The Vancouver Police Museum is a designated heritage site built in 1932 to house the Coroner’s Court and the City Analyst’s Laboratory.  Over the years the Museum has hosted many tours, but none quite like Colin Godbout’s tour of hit songs by Sting and The Police.  Godbout’s musical tour de force moves from absurdist punk anthems, including De Doo Doo Doo, Message in a Bottle, and Walking on the Moon, through offbeat love songs, including Roxanne, Every Breath You Take, and If You Love Somebody Set Them Free, to transcendent tunes, including Invisible Sun, Spirits in the Material World, and Love is the Seventh Wave.  You’ll have an arresting experience with Unplugged Cop! 

With 10% of ticket sales given to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society you'll see a great show and support a good cause!

"Godbout is a brilliant guitarist and musical interpreter.  In his hands the guitar becomes a whole rhythm section." 
The Gate: Toronto Entertainment Magazine
"Sink into the spell woven by Godbout’s technical prowess and emotional intensity."  Edmonton Vue Weekly
“Godbout is a virtuosic musician, adept at complex fretwork and dazzling fingerpicking.”  Georgia Straight

Thu. Sept. 9 – Sun. Sept. 12; Thu. Sept. 16 – Sun. Sept. 19; 7-8 pm nightly @ Vancouver Police Museum, 240 E. Cordova St.
Tickets: $10  Tickets and information: Vancouver Fringe Festival. 
Click to hear Colin's arrangement of Roxanne and Every Breath You Take (hear his string break at the end).

Colin describes the genesis of Unplugged Cop:

About four years ago I was performing songs by Sting and The Police at The Queen Mother Waterside Cafe, with an inspiring view of the Victoria harbor in the background.  My boss, his staff and patrons enjoyed my arrangements of these songs, blending jazz, pop, reggae, and raga, and featuring exotic time signatures and techniques, such as tapping chords percussively and tapping the soundboard of the guitar.  A few years ago I had enough arrangements to make a show of it.  When the Vancouver Fringe Festival office informed me last winter that the Vancouver Police Museum was interested in hosting a show related to the Museum I saw an opportunity to debut my Police performance. 

Aside from music I also enjoy dancing, and I plan to forego my usual seated posture during the opening medley of Unplugged Cop and dance to capture the spirit of songs like Walking on the Moon, which Sting wrote while jumping, drinking, and singing 'walking in the room' in a hotel.  I also plan to sport an authentic English bobby hat I picked up in Calgary (it's from Northumbria, where Sting studied), for Unplugged Cop is more than a concert; it's a musical portrait in which I assume the persona of a white guy burdened with first world angst while dancing to third world rhythms and singing of one world (not three).  It's a stretch for me - on second thought, not too much of a stretch. 

Colin defines his relation to theatre as a modern rhapsode:

I trace my roots as a performer to the ancient rhapsode.  This Greek term means song stitcher, and shares with the theatrical genres comedy and tragedy the second syllable ode, Greek for song (so the title of Neitzsche's "rhapsodic" book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, is apropos).  When stitching songs together to tell a story "the rhapsode was not only the forerunner of the actor, but he was himself an actor" (The Theatre of the Greeks).  As a modern rhapsode, I stitch songs in the spirit of those actors whose odes gave birth to theatre.