Month: January 2025

Album of the Week, January 18, 2025

It had to be recorded quickly, and it couldn’t be recorded in England. Both essential points of how the Police’s third album came to be were symptoms of their burgeoning success, which had exploded ever since Reggatta de Blanc and “Message in a Bottle.” They were now touring constantly, reaching out to and building up the fan base, not just in the US and the UK but worldwide, so the recording for this album was recorded in four weeks while they were on their second ever big tour. Stewart Copeland specifically recalls finishing the album at 4a.m. the day they were to head out on the road for their next tour.

And the recording location? It couldn’t be recorded in England for tax reasons, because the Police were now making serious money. So they brought producer Nigel Gray, who had also done their first two albums, to Wisseloord Studio in Hilversum, Netherlands to do the sessions.

There was another key difference with these sessions too. Where Reggatta de Blanc included songs composed by the band and some credited solely to Stewart Copeland, here there are only two from Copeland and one (his first) by Andy Summers. Sting’s songwriting had strengthened and sharpened and he was writing more and more material—a trend that would continue through the rest of the band’s recordings. And he was writing material that was informed by what the band saw on tour—especially the extremes of wealth and poverty in the countries they toured.

That sharp writing begins with “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” Opening with an unfamiliar sound on Police albums, a bass synth, followed by a skeletal guitar hook, the song proper begins with a stark vamp between two notes in the bass with an ominous dub reggae rhythm in the guitar and drums above. Sting’s melody, deliberately simple, tells one of his most controversial lyrics, the story of a schoolteacher who has an affair with one of his young students. Sting has always described this as pure fiction, an exercise in imagination; one imagines that such stories were unfortunately commonplace in the school where he taught before beginning his life with the Police. There’s so much that changes in this song from the first two Police albums. Gone is the unfocused punk feel, all but the barest hint of the reggae influence, the group improvisation. In their place is impressively minimalist songwriting that gets into your memory circuits and a sense of true menace. There’s more power in the first 30 seconds of “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” than in an entire side of Outlandos D’Amour.

“Driven to Tears” is the track where you most directly hear the impact of the Police, and Sting’s, new broader worldview. Opening with a driving beat in the bass and drums, he addresses the listener directly: “How can you say that you’re not responsible? What does it have to do with me? What is my reaction; what should it be/confronted by this latest atrocity?” The chorus is punctuated with open, ringing chords from Andy Summers and a relentless bass line that arpeggiates down a diminished minor chord. The impact of all the touring the Police had done is apparent in the performance; this is a tight ensemble, but when they let loose, as Andy Summers does on the bridge with a searing eight-bar solo, they really rip. The tune closes without bringing hope; the circling bass line remains grim throughout.

The hope, such as it is, arrives in the next track. “When the World is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around” shows that the Police were paying attention to the rules of good album construction, loading the first side of Zenyatta Mondatta with their three strongest songs of the album. It’s arguably the strongest start to an album they had done yet. And “When the World…” is a killer. Built on a simple ascending modal scale that Sting makes funky through the use of leading tones, Copeland’s relentless drumming and Summers’ textural guitar underpin Sting’s cheery song of post-apocalyptic survival, where he has an endless supply of canned food and only one VHS tape to keep him company. The break keeps the same funky beat and but adds double tapping on the bass and a slowly simmering single note on the guitar. Never let it be said the Police were too uptight to work a groove, the song seems to insist.

“Canary in a Coalmine” is a return to a more comic approach to songwriting, painting a wry portrait of a socialite who can’t survive outside the rarified air of her wealth. Featuring the immortal couplet “You say you want to spend the winter in Firenze / You’re so afraid to catch a dose of influenza,” the song catches the band at their most upbeat, with the guitar and bass trading licks throughout. A ringing set of piano notes, smeared out by an echo, add an almost Beatlesesque touch to the brief bridge. The light touch is brief; for the next song, “Voices Inside My Head,” we’re back with another bass driven groove as the band explores a pure funk jam. The solo instrument here is really Copeland’s drums, as he explores different fills under the relentless scratch and throb of the guitar and drums. In the outro, the groove remains but the guitar’s itchy texture is peeled back, leaving a barer dub heartbeat.

“Bombs Away” is the sole Copeland songwriting credit on the album, and his trademark sardonic wit is on full display with the story of an incompetent general and corrupt president who both dream of the charms of a “guerilla girl.” Andy Summers is taken off the leash for a blistering solo and multiple overdubbed descant lines over the last chorus.

The easiest song for a bus full of teenagers to sing along to! “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” opens the second side of the album with an instantly iconic guitar riff that falls back to a repeated rhythm on the supertonic, over a a walking bass line and some of Sting’s finest rhyming dictionary writing. The song, though slight, may be one of the best examples of their pop songwriting genius: a full intro sound, stripped back to minimal instrumentation over a repetitive verse, augmented with full harmony vocals on the pre-chorus, and an insanely catchy singalong chorus. Sting has claimed that this was his attempt to pay tribute to early rock and roll like “Da Doo Ron Ron”; then again, he’s also claimed the lyrics are about the use of simplistic words by politicians to manipulate and deceive. I say it’s about dancing, and the pure joy of three insanely skilled musicians playing together at the top of their craft.

The same can’t be said for “Behind My Camel”; indeed, both Sting and Stewart Copeland disliked Andy Summers’ debut solo compositional contribution that they refused to play on it. (Copeland believes the name of the song was both a tribute by Summers to the Middle Eastern inspired guitar riff and because, in his words, “You know what you find behind a camel, right? A monumental pile of sh*t.”) The best aspect of the song is its brevity; at just two minutes and 53 seconds, it seems to last far longer.

Fortunately, “Man in a Suitcase” proves a successful return to the pop-reggae blend of “Canary in a Coalmine,” with a tune that figured heavily in the tour for Zenyatta but was never played live since. It’s a slight lyric, but one that has taken a near-permanent residence in my mind as I’ve had to travel more often. The couplet “Whole world’s my oyster/the hotel room’s my prison cell” resonates way more than it should. The band sounds as though they could play the song in their sleep. It’s a fun, and ultimately disposable, listen.

“Shadows in the Rain” sounds unclear as to what it wants to be: another minor key funk jam? A song about slowly losing one’s mind in hallucinations? The band seems to play it both ways at once, with shambolic outcomes. But there are still pleasures to be had here. Summers’ guitar, though low in the mix, does some sick things around the edges of the tune. And Copeland’s metronome-precise drumming is a masterclass in subtlety, as he drops a beat here, adds an extra splash of cymbal there. The only weak part of the jam might be Sting’s improvised vocals over the outro, which are half-baked and distracting. But that bass line! A heartbeat, a footfall, a rhythmic rock.

The band closes with a tightly knit Copeland instrumental, “The Other Way of Stopping,” that is a portrait of the group at their collective best. All the colors of Copeland’s drum kit are on display here in service of a simple melody that Sting and Summers play, first in unison and then diverging, with Sting’s bass climbing and diving on the chorus. When Summers’ guitar begins to overdub more and more lines into a guitar chorus at the end, it’s like a manifold path unfolding, and he gets the last word here as the band exercises the other way of stopping, which I think was meant by Copeland as a joke about running off a cliff but here plays more as a transformation.

The band seems to have enjoyed the material on the album but has voiced regret regarding the hurried recording sessions, and went as far as to re-record both “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” years later; the former was included on the band’s first greatest hits compilation, Every Breath You Take: The Singles but the latter was cut for running time and didn’t receive a release until 2000. But, a few weaker songs aside, Zenyatta remains a high point in the band’s discography and one of the last times that they would be a true triumvirate. When they returned to a studio five months later to begin recording their next album, the power dynamics had shifted. We’ll talk about that one next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: The video of “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” has to be seen to believed. The band cheerily plays the song in the snow as Copeland films them with his ever-present Super8 video camera. The thin pretense of syncing the action with the song is quickly abandoned, as Copeland yanks the neck of Sting’s bass down to unblock his face, then pushes it up to block Sting’s; at one point all three of them are playing the guitar at once. At their best, this was a band that knew how to leverage goofiness in support of their music, for which there’s a lot to be said.

Album of the Week, January 4, 2025

The story of good music is frequently the story of the collision between different ways of performing and hearing music. Cécile McLorin Salvant mashed the sounds of Irish lamentation with British art pop music over a jazz background. Alice Coltrane intersected Indian devotional music with free jazz. Duke Ellington collided Tchaikovsky and big band. And the musicians we’ll be listening to for the next little bit intersected punk rock with reggae and jazz, in differing amounts, and created something entirely new.

Gordon Sumner was born in 1951 in Northumberland, England, the eldest child of a hairdresser and a milkman who used to be a fitter at an engineering works, in the shadow of Wallsend Shipyards. He attended University of Warwick at Coventry but found he preferred playing and writing music, so left after a term. He worked a series of odd jobs, eventually getting certified as a teacher, and taught at a prep school for two years. During this period he played jazz in the evenings and weekends with a series of bands including the Phoenix Jazzmen, where a yellow and black striped sweater earned him the nickname “Sting,” and Last Exit, a jazz fusion band.

He was a bassist, singer and songwriter during this period and was actively writing songs, many of which would be recycled for material in his later projects. Last Exit moved to London in 1977 to try to make it big, but ended up breaking up, with half the band heading back to Newcastle. Sting’s co-founder in Last Exit, keyboardist Gerry Richardson, became music director for the band of a Trinidadian-born singer/songwriter named Billy Ocean. And Sting joined a new project with drummer Stewart Copeland and guitarist Henry (or Henri) Padovani; they called the band The Police, inspired by the American Copeland, whose father was an intelligence operative for the CIA. Copeland had been playing in a progressive rock band called Curved Air; he had met Padovani after a Curved Air gig and invited him to join the band.

The new trio recorded a single, “Fall Out,” that got some press (Mick Jagger wrote the review in Sounds magazine). About the same time, musician Mike Howlett invited Sting to join a project called Strontium 90, and Sting brought Copeland along. In the band they met guitarist Andy Summers, ten years older than Sting and Copeland, who had played with Eric Burdon and the Animals and psychedelic artist Kevin Ayers. Sting was growing dissatisfied with Padovani’s limited playing, and invited Summers to join the Police as their fourth member; ultimately Summers issued an ultimatum that if he was to stay, Padovani had to go, and the Police were a trio again. Desperate for cash, the trio bleached their hair blond for a Wrigley’s gum commercial.

They got signed to A&M Records and recorded an album, taking advantage of Sting’s hot songwriting streak that produced songs like “Can’t Stand Losing You,” “So Lonely,” and “Roxanne.” Outlandos D’Amour hit the upper reaches of both the US and UK charts, and after an exhausting tour the band headed back to the studio, with lots of time but fewer songs prepared. The result was Reggatta de Blanc, which I always translated as a kid as “the white boat race” but which apparently actually meant “white people reggae.”

(This is what it’s like to write about The Police. There’s so much backstory that you end up writing five or six paragraphs before you even get to the music.)

Fortunately for the longevity of the band, the very first song on the album was an all time classic. Sting says he came up with “Message in a Bottle” on tour, and that Andy Summers added the hook, that incredible arpeggio that underpins the song. The actual recording, while it sounds simple, is built of overdubs, with both Summers and Copeland layering their parts. Over it Sting sings one of the great melodies of his career. There’s not much reggae in this song, except in Sting’s voice, which at this phase of his career is notable for the altitude his tenor could reach and the slight echo of a Jamaican patois around the edges. Sting had acknowledged listening to Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” in writing “So Lonely,” but he must have been listening to more to pick up that depth of an accent in his singing voice. (Elvis Costello notoriously once said, “Somebody should clip Sting round the head and tell him to stop singing in that ridiculous Jamaican accent.”)

But even with all these factors going on, the fundamental genius of the song is built into it from the start. Those swirling arpeggios at the outset are echoed in Sting’s vocal line, which drops from the fifth of the minor scale down to the third and back, with variations on the fourth and second of the scale. But Sting stays floating above the tonic until the chorus, where he hammers it three times before popping back up to the third and back down (“I’ll send an SOS to the world”). And he repeats the next phrase three times, all on the tonic (“I hope that someone gets my…”), while the chords change underneath. And then we realize that we’ve actually been suspending above the fifth of the scale for the chorus, and when he drops to “message in a bottle” it’s only a half step down but it feels as though the bottom of the world has dropped out from under you. The arrangement on the record reinforces this, with the guitar ceasing its arpeggiation and only Sting’s bass reinforcing the pounding loneliness. Stewart Copeland adds to the feeling of drift here; playing a driving beat through the majority of the song, he gives a syncopated fill on the high hat on the chorus that reinforces the feeling of loneliness and alienation. Finally, there’s the coda, the “sending out an SOS” on repeat, over Andy Summers’ weeping guitar line. There are relatively few perfect pop songs, and the Police led off side 1 with one of them. It was their first song to go to Number One on the UK chart.

How do you follow a masterpiece? If you’re the Police, often with an instrumental. “Reggatta de Blanc” shows a couple of key Police traits: the virtuosity of all three players, the degree to which Jamaican music was occupying their collective imaginations, and the joy that they apparently found in playing music with each other. With a sustained note on the guitar and Copeland beating double time on the hi-hat, Sting counts the band off and Copeland immediately lets loose with one of his virtuosic drum fills, this time crackling on the rim of the snare. Sting plays a bouncy arpeggio that rocks back and forth between the two opening chords and Andy Summers plays fills until the trio locks into a rock beat, playing a series of chords over an insistent eight-note ground on the tonic in the bass. This is where the vocals come in, and they’re pure filler, a set of “cha!”s and what can only be described as a vocal exercise: “Eeyo, eeyo, eeyo-yo.” It’s fun, almost cinematic in the moods it delivers, and utterly inconsequential. Setlist.fm says that the band played it live 42 times between 1979 and 1982, but almost twice as many times in the years before they broke up in medley with “Can’t Stand Losing You.” That version was in the setlists when they did their 2007-2008 reunion tour, and both Sting and Stewart Copeland played the medley on their solo tours in the past year.

If “Reggatta de Blanc” became an unlikely live staple, “It’s Alright for You” appears to have been the opposite, a filler track only played live once by the band. Written by Copeland with words by Sting, the song is aggressive and driving but the lyrics seem to be mostly throwaway, with some unfortunate period notes in the verses (the “limp wrist tight fist contract no twist” verse in particular makes this a challenging karaoke choice).

“Bring on the Night,” by contrast, has enjoyed a long life for a song not even written for the band. Like many of Sting’s songs, on paper it sounds hopelessly pretentious. Written while Sting was in Last Exit, the song was originally titled “Carrion Prince,” a reference to the Ted Hughes poem “King of Carrion” (though I didn’t know it when I was first listening, at the same time that I was falling down a Ted Hughes rabbit hole), and was apparently written with Pontius Pilate in mind. (Worse yet: Sting later read The Executioner’s Song, and, feeling that “Bring on the Night” was a fit to Gary Gilmore’s death wish, now says “I sing it with him in mind.”) You don’t have to know any of that to enjoy the song; in fact, you might be better off not knowing. In the version on the album it’s a reggae-inflected romp, with Summers and Sting exchanging phrases and ideas throughout on their respective instruments. We’ll hear this song again. The next song, “Deathwish” — not so much. This wisp of a song, credited to all three members of the band, hasn’t been played live by anyone since 1981. It’s got a striking intro, played with open fifths in a syncopated beat, but the lyrics are blah. It doesn’t have a real chorus, just an instrumental riff. It’s in and out so you can get on to the next song.

And the next song is worth it. “Walking on the Moon” was the band’s second Number One in the UK. It continues the subdued mood of the chorus from “Message in a Bottle” and stretches it out in an eerie, echoey track that is simple, subversively melodic, unexpectedly modal. The backbone of the track is the bass line, which is just six notes in syncopation: subtonic (x2), tonic, mediant, supertonic, subtonic. A ringing chord from Andy Summers punctuates the riff after the tonic is played. Stewart Copeland plays some of the finest work of his career, giving a weightless feeling with his snare work and, especially, the shift into a triple meter for a full sixteen measures after the last chorus. The track is in a minor key but feels somehow upbeat, as though one is traveling meters with each step. Sting has said he knew he had made it as a songwriter when he heard an intern in the hospital where his first child was born whistling “Walking on the Moon” as he walked by in the hallway. When I first heard dub, years later, I understood the musical point of departure for the song.

If Copeland was in the land of the sublime on the previous track, he swings to the ridiculous on this next song, opining “The other ones are complete bulls**t.” He has sole writing credit on “On Any Other Day,” and it sounds more like his later solo work than a Police track. I can’t find a mention of a single live performance on Setlist, which is a pity because the song is bratty fun with its story of a middle aged man who hits one minor obstacle after another on his birthday. Unfortunately, the obstacle Copeland picks for the last line of the chorus, “My fine young son has turned out gay,” hasn’t aged especially well.

“The Bed’s Too Big Without You” was the last single released from the album, getting a release as an extra 45 included in a collection, Six Pack, that also includes the Police’s first five singles (excluding “Fall Out”). It’s the most steretypically “reggae” of the tracks on the album and is deceptively simple, given its tragic history (Sting is said to have written it in memory of his first girlfriend, who supposedly committed suicide in the distraught aftermath of their breakup). The mono mix of the song, which is more like a full re-recording and which is only available on the Message in a Box compilation, is even more stripped down; the sixteen bars before the last chorus, just bass and drums, are as minimal as this band ever got.

“Contact” is another Stewart Copeland track that doesn’t appear to have ever been played live. It’s fine but nothing memorable. The same cannot be said for his last songwriting credit on the album, “Does Everyone Stare,” which opens with a piano figure that he supposedly wrote in college and has a moment of pure serendipity after the first chorus, a swelling operatic tenor moment that, according to Copeland, came from a radio broadcast that happened to be picked up by the poor wiring of his home recording studio when he was recording the demo. It also has some of the funniest writing on the album (“I never noticed the size of my feet/till I kicked you in the shins”) as well as some of the deepest self-pity (“Last of all I’m sorry ‘cause you never asked for this/I can see I’m not your type, and my shots will always miss”). It was a perfect song for a thirteen-year-old me.

The last song, “No Time This Time,” was written by Sting as a b-side for “So Lonely,” and was added to fill out the album’s running time. It sounds more like Outlandos D’Amour, with a rushed vocal performance and a strong punk flavor. The band performed it live a handful of times, but it probably deserved more; it has a huge energy and is eminently singable.

The Police were one of the rare bands where the second album was stronger than the first, and they would continue to build this trajectory with the follow-up. But at the time they were still doing various side projects, and next week we’ll listen to the most unusual of the projects from this period.

You can listen to this week’s album here: