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: