Although Police seem to have always been around and their output appears prolific, this was in fact only their fifth, but final album. Did they save the best for last? You'd need to ask a deep-seated Police fan, (such as my wife Tracy) but going on the statistics it certainly looks that way. If nothing else it generated the best selling single of 1983 with 'Every Breath You Take'.
Let's fixate on that song for a minute. As everyone knows, it's not the lovey-dovey refrain it was mistakenly taken for by many people, some of whom played it at their wedding! It is in fact a creepy, dark, sadistic little ditty about a stalker. Glad we cleared that up.
Perhaps Sting was influenced by his surroundings - he wrote the song whilst sitting at the same desk in Jamaica where Ian Fleming wrote his James Bond books. I'm not saying James Bond was a sadistic stalker, but maybe something in the air gave Sting a bit of a sinister twist in his lyrics. He used the line "Every breath you take and every move you make" but very similar words had been done before from a first person point of view. In 'Every Breath I Take', the 1961 song by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Gene Pitney sang ..
"Oh ah, ev'ry little breath I take
Ev'ry little step I make"
and in 1973's 'D'yer Maker' by Led Zeppelin they came out with
"Every breath I take, oh oh oh oh
Oh, every move I make"
It's pretty well documented that the 3 members of the group had a mutual dislike for each other by the time they made this album, and for most of the tracks they recorded in separate rooms. During the recording of 'Every Breath .. ' Sting and Stewart actually had a punch-up. That sort of adds passion to the music.
I mentioned Stewart Copeland once before - for a while he was drummer for Curved Air and was married to their lead singer Sonja Kristina 1982-1991 (see my review 18 Jun 2020).
Apart from 'Every Breath ..' 3 more singles came from the album, 'Wrapped Around Your Finger', 'Synchronicity II' and 'King of Pain'. In this household though, one of the favourites is 'Tea In The Sahara'. For those looking for meaning, the song and lyrics were based on a book that Sting liked, 'The Sheltering Sky' by Paul Bowles. The first part of the book is called 'Tea In The Sahara' and Stings lyrics closely follow the theme.
After 'Synchronicity' the band members went their separate ways, all following solo projects with varying degrees of success. In June 1986 they did get together to play 3 shows for Amnesty International at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, just a mile or three from where I'm sitting writing this post. The following month in July 1986 they tried to do another album, but Stewart fell off a horse and broke his collarbone so couldn't play the drums and the plan to record fell by the wayside and basically, so did the band.
Thirty years later they appeared together again on the 2007 Grammy Awards and played 'Roxanne', which led to a limited Police Reunion Tour from May 2007 until August 2008, the third highest grossing tour of all time.
Sting has been the most successful of the three, releasing a large catalogue of solo music works, taking acting roles as well as his involvement in human rights and social and political activism. The stories of his dabbling in tantric sex techniques is an article for another day.
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