Sometime ago, Anne Robinson wrote:

VH1 ran a piece tonite called "Inside: The Arsenio Hall Show" (interesting to see the number of artists that became huge who got their big break on his show....but I digress). At one point in the interview Arsenio said "You don't have to be black to get my attention, you just have to be good, and it don't get no gooder than Sting!". At which point they cut to a clip of our man performing Purple Haze. Arsenio went on to say "I am a HUGE Sting fan....if Sting had wanted to do a puppet show I'd have let him" and went on to discuss Sting's admiration of Jimmy Hendrix.

"Ass-smoochio Hall," as Howard Stern would call him. I videotaped that particular broadcast (02/07/91) of the Arsenio Hall show, and dubbed the interview/performance(s) to cassette for posterity. It resides on a TDK SA90 with a number of other "televised" performances I recorded between February and September of 1991 (INXS; REM; Joe Jackson; The DiVinyls). The show opened with "All This Time": Arsenio interviewed (if you could call it such) Sting for a couple of segments, mentioning his recent 40th birthday, and then concluded with the "Purple Haze" performance. Not as exciting of a late night appearance as The Tonight Show with Marilu Henner was.