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: