2/12/2003
Boston Globe
by Steve Morse
Fiction Plane frontman resists flying on dad's name
Joe Sumner is determined not to live in his father's shadow. His dad is rock superstar Sting, but Sumner is making no effort to cash in on it. His band, Fiction Plane, is potentially a next-big-thing act from London, with a contract stipulating that the record label cannot mention Sting's name in any marketing campaign.
That won't stop the media from talking about it, but Sumner (whose dad's real name is Gordon Sumner) doesn't seem fazed.
''We've tried to do this all by ourselves as much as we can,'' he says of Fiction Plane's progress, which can be seen up close tonight when the band opens for the Juliana Theory at the Roxy (and then returns to open for Paul Weller at the Orpheum Theatre on Feb. 22).
So dad is not pulling any strings to help out? ''I hope he's not,'' the 26-year-old says with conviction.
Tonight's show will also be a quasi-homecoming for Sumner, who lived in Boston for a couple of years in the late '90s. ''I lived in Jamaica Plain and Mission Hill. Nice areas, really cool,'' he says. ''Boston is one of my favorite cities. I still get lost in it, but I know it well enough.''
Sumner spent most of his youth in London but came to Boston to attend the Cambridge School of Weston and to play music in the summer at the Charles River Creative Arts Program in Dover. ''It was a creative arts camp, so everyone there was a musician or performer of some sort,'' he says.
When he returned to London, he hooked up with bassist Dan Brown (whom he had known since middle school) and guitarist Seton Daunt to form a band. They first called themselves Santa's Boyfriend, then Fiction Plane, which releases its debut album, ''Everything Will Never Be OK,'' on March 11. The album is worth waiting for. Produced by David Kahne (Sublime, Earshot, Sugar Ray), it has a Brit-rock energy in the tradition of Oasis and the Kinks, along with some grunge-style guitar bursts by Sumner.
Although Sumner's voice sounds like a heavier version of his father's, he ducks any comparisons. ''I was more worried about being compared to Nirvana's Kurt Cobain,'' he says, ''because we copied him really badly in the initial years.''
Sumner, who is Fiction Plane's chief songwriter, penned the title track, which pokes fun at the cynicism he acquired when he studied environmental sciences at Richmond College in London. ''In environmental sciences, there are all these problems, and in every solution you find a bit more of a problem somewhere else, so everyone gets very negative about it,'' he says. ''But the point of the song is that there will always be some problems, but you just have to accept and deal with them and try to be happy anyway.''
Sumner definitely has his finger on the pulse of societal alienation. In the tune ''Hate,'' which sounds like pumped-up Radiohead, he sings, ''Yeah, we hate things, we hate people.'' It's his way of saying that ''people may believe in education and family and marriage and all these ideas, but they don't want to actually deal with the nitty-gritty of what people are like. I feel that way anyway. I don't know if modern society has always been like that, but I feel that people kind of want to get away from each other.''
The singer also protests militarism in ''Soldier Machismo'' and, in a rare acknowledgment of his privileged upbringing, warns a potential girlfriend in the song ''Cigarette'' not to ''touch me because my daddy's rich'' or to ''think that I'm just easy money.'' It's hard-edged pop with a brain.
''It's one of those records that people will want to tell other people about because it's smart,'' says Jock Elliott, marketing director for MCA Records, which is putting it out. ''Right now, we just want to get the band out there performing to give people a sense of discovery.''
''We'll take it as it comes,'' Sumner says of Fiction Plane's future in the business. ''Maybe we won't like it. Maybe we will love it. Maybe we'll all become megalomaniacs. I just don't know. All I know is that we took our time and wrote a lot of songs, so we're ready in that respect.''
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