Month: January 2025

Eberhard Schoener, Video-Magic

Album of the Week, January 11, 2025

In the 1980s, before streaming services and the Internet, if you were a fan of an artist you often traded cassettes of that artist’s rarities—b-sides, bootleg recordings from live concerts, and maybe obscure appearances the artist made on other peoples’ albums. Today’s album falls solidly in the last category. I first heard the seriously off-kilter songs on today’s album thanks to a compilation tape made by my friend Catherine, and I was thrilled some years ago (10? 15?) when I found a copy of some of the works on vinyl.

Eberhard Schoener, born in 1938 in Stuttgart, Germany, began his career as a classical violinist and conductor, but turned to new ways of making music in the 1970s. He was one of the early adopters of the Moog synthesizer, and also incorporated Indonesian elements in his music. But the oddest career development came when he invited his friend Andy Summers, who he knew from progressive rock circles, to join the recording of his new album, Flashback. Andy’s group, The Police, was still hungry for gigs and they all went along, appearing on several songs on the album. Later that year Sting and Summers participated in another Schoener recording, Video-Magic.

Manager Miles Copeland, however, thought the work didn’t fit the Police’s image, and it was quietly suppressed. Schoener, however, knew he had gold, and a series of reissues kept the material alive, most combining tracks from Video-Magic with songs from Flashback and the prior album Trance-Formation to make a sort of “greatest hits” compilation, which was issued with various covers and titles. Confusingly, one of the titles it was issued under in 1981 was Video-Magic; it’s this compilation that we’re looking at today.

“Trans-Am” was the lead off track on Flashback and also plays that role here. An oceanic swell of what at first seems to be pure noise and is then revealed to be a passing airplane is underpinned by a brass fanfare with heavy reverb. The lead is played on a high synthesizer line, and Sting scats his way through the vocal introduction as Stewart Copeland builds a huge drum cascade below him. The lyrics aren’t exactly Police quality: “here am I/so high/in the sky…” and the tune quickly segues into “Why Don’t You Answer” with the sound of a dialing rotary phone. This second track may be the musical standout: with no progressive rock pretensions, the backing track plays as pure “Neue Deutsche Welle” (and wouldn’t have been out of place on my radio show about that New Wave variant). Sting sings a harmony-tracked chorus pleading “why don’t you answer” that wouldn’t have been out of place on a later Police album. Unfortunately the song is more of an idea than a fully developed composition; the lyrics peter out and we’re left with a mood piece.

“Natural High” is our first Video-Magic tune proper, and it’s really something. Some Andy Summers guitar work at the beginning, playing against an organ line, a high synthesizer line, some in the pocket drumming of a kind we rarely get to hear in the Police (possibly because it’s not Stewart; he didn’t participate in the Video-Magic sessions), and then Sting’s vocal. When Sting’s vocal enters you are reminded of two things: his younger tenor voice was really high, and it had limits. Schoener’s melody pushes that voice up to the limit from the very first phrase: “Who needs the sky / just watch me fly / I’m on a natural high.” I haven’t ever heard Schoener speak, but for me the text setting here is a reminder that he is not a native speaker; why else would the word “the” be set as the high point of a phrase, on a high E flat an octave above middle C? Something I spent time learning as I began figuring out how to apply my own singing voice was that Sting’s rock’n’roll tenor was applied differently than a classical voice, and you can really hear it here, in the pinched high vocals of the upper end. But a lot of the rest of the vocal line is quite high too, and there the vocal production is unstrained, open and well supported. The middle section develops a really nice groove against a more innovative drum pattern. But it’s that chorus that keeps coming back as if to say, “yes, you weren’t imagining it, this is ridiculous.”

“Signs of Emotion” is the sole track from Trance-Formation here, and features Andy Summers on guitar in a bluesy, lovely opening statement over a string-like synthesizer; for a second it’s almost in Mark Knopfler territory. Then Schoener’s synths take over for a short bridge, giving a purely electronic swell of sound in response to the opening statement. When Summers returns, his accompaniment is augmented by pipe organ with distant choral voices behind.

The title song from Flashback opens with a trumpet fanfare on the synth and a wordless melody from Sting that’s once again in the high upper range of his voice. Schoener appears to have really enjoyed pushing Sting to the upper limits and this track is no exception. Here Schoener has deployed a Beatlesesque array of sounds beneath Sting: strings, horns, celeste-like keys, and then a squelchy bass lead, all with Stewart Copeland’s relentless drumming and some textural guitar work. The lyrics that enter in the second verse are a reprise (flashback?) to “Flashback.” The track ends with an actual brass fanfare.

“Octagon” is a different sound world with a slightly funky edge. Sting (playing with an orchestral percussion section) gives us the funk and duets with Summers who brings some of the rock and roll. Sting gets an extended bass duet with Schoener on the Hammond B3 next, and you get to hear some of his chops but he seems content to just push the work forward. Which is a good move. “Octagon” is the longest work on the album and, while Schoener keeps it varied, it’s a bit much as it gets into the sixth minute.

The next two works are more like chamber music than orchestral works. “San Francisco Waitress,” scored for Fender Rhodes electric piano, alto saxophone, and tenor vocalist, sets to music a short story in the form of a newspaper article. This is Sting, actually having fun for a change, to the extent of ending a song with a dad joke. The track itself is easily my favorite on the album. Not too overdone — the only part that is in dubious taste is when Sting and saxophonist Olaf Kübler both reach for the same high note at the same time, with slightly different conclusions about its exact location, and most everything else is sensitively set. Even the antagonist of the piece, the aggrieved Tom Horsley who takes a waitress to small claims court for breaking a date, is presented sympathetically. It’s genuinely fun. And the wonderful thing is it is all true! The original newspaper article appeared in the New York Times in 1978 under the headline “Vain Hopes Remain Thus for Admirer Who Sued,” and the quotes from Byron and Quintilian were both courtesy of Judge Richard P. Figoni, the judge cited by name in the song.

“Code-Word Elvis,” the story of a sad sack twenty-year-old in the Lonely Hearts column with a rich imaginative life, is set initially to a string quartet with guitar, spare drums, and occasional saxophone. The very best thing about it may be the word painting of the correspondence address “Postbox Elvis, 57938,” which improbably becomes a statement of private triumph for the narrator. As Sting sings the fantasia on the address, a flute joins in to underscore the untethered joy of the narrator’s anticipation: surely his love of racing sport, action movies, and the King will bring him the correspondence he craves. It’s a tightly composed little poem; I’d love to hear more like it.

That’s not what we get with “Powerslide,” a brief instrumental from Flashback in progressive rock mode that closes the compilation. It’s a brisk little bit of synths where the best thing is the bass solo in the bridge and Stewart Copeland’s drumming, and it brings the Police’s tour through the German progressive rock world to a fascinating end.

Not that the Police were done touring; not by a long shot. Following the success of Reggatta de Blanc, they hit the road for a long stretch that strained the connections between the band, but also started to build their songwriting muscles in new and unexpected ways. We’ll check in on the record they made following that journey next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

The Police, Reggatta de Blanc

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: