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. In that light, next week’s album, featuring an early solo appearance by Sting without the rest of the band, seems to fill an interesting gap in their story.
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.