Arrested development - the brief career of the biggest band in the world

It is New Year’s Eve, 1983. I am with my brother and sister-in-law at Wembley Arena to see a band, universally tagged the biggest in the world by the press, play what would be their last gig on home soil for almost 24 years. It’s also the biggest party of the year: for a start, it’s New Year’s Eve, and it’s also the guitarist’s 41st birthday. The band is at the very top of their game. The album they’re midway through touring is a number one simultaneously in the UK and the US, and one of the biggest sellers around the world that year. It would be regarded as one of the records that defined the 1980s.

Several months previously, the band had sold out New York’s Shea Stadium, in the words of the lead singer, “borrowing it from The Beatles”. Performing to 67,000 people, they could have played to more, such was the demand for tickets, with local news stations warning those without to not even bother turning up. According to a pre-Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant, reporting on the gig for Smash Hits, all day long every car radio in the Greater New York Area was pumping out just one song - theirs, indicative of it becoming the top-selling single in the United States for the whole of 1983.

“Today it seems like The Police are the biggest group in America, just as on another day it might seem like the Rolling Stones or The Who,” Tennant writes. But, he adds, there is a darkness setting in with the trio, then still only six years and five albums into their career. Rumours in the US music press suggest that they’re about to split up. They say that Synchronicity, that record-breaking fifth album, had been made under strained circumstances, with frontman Sting, guitarist Andy Summers and the drummer (and band co-founder) Stewart Copeland barely communicating with each other in the studio.

“We’ve got the biggest album, the biggest single, the biggest video, the biggest concert tour,” Sting tells Tennant ahead of the Shea Stadium show, branding rumours of ructions as “RUBBISH!”. But the then 31-year-old singer says, tellingly: “We’ve realised what our strengths are and what our weaknesses are. In a sense we must get on terribly well to be onstage together. We still work as a group, our records are better than they’ve ever been. Something somewhere works, man, and it’s worth the difficulties, it’s worth the problems.”

A year on, with the Synchronicity tour concluded, it is announced that The Police are going on hiatus. A sixth album is reportedly considered, but in the end that turns out to be that. It would take another 23 years, and a cash-grab one-off ‘reunion’ tour, that the biggest band in the world in 1983 would play together. Sting would release his debut solo album The Dream Of The Blue Turtles in 1985, carving out a career on his own that would make him a brand in his own right – a rainforest-saving (and other good causes), tantric sex-shagging, Karl Jung-following Tuscan vineyard-owning multi-millionaire property magnate.

However, what gets forgotten in pretty much every profile of Sting is the six years that turbocharged his rise, namely The Police, and how they appeared at the tail end of punk, consciously trying to exploit its aesthetic without actually being punks.

Picture: Rocket 88 Books

40 years have elapsed since The Police disbanded (the first time), but the six years in which they produced five albums and a steady stream of properly big hit singles tends to get overlooked when the music press comes to write somewhat hagiographic profiles of the biggest beasts of the rock era. Perhaps that will change with the publication, today of Stewart Copeland’s Police Diaries. Sourced from the drummer’s personal journals, it outlines how, in late 1976, Copeland – the son of a CIA agent and who’d been playing with proto-prog rockers Curved Air until quite recently - decided that punk, then ruffling feathers via the likes of the Sex Pistols, provided a platform for commercial success. 

Calculatingly, too, he concluded that forming a trio would maximise financial efficiency (citing Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience as models). So he set about finding a couple of bandmates: “Blazing on my drums gets me breathing too hard for vocals, so either the guitarist or the bassist had to be the singer. I had a pretty utilitarian view of singing and placed more value on charisma than vocal excellence. Besides, in this new scene it was mostly yelling anyway,” he wrote in one diary entry.

The first to sign up was Corsican guitarist Henry Padovani, a friend of a friend, but lacking vocal skills. That role – after considerable effort trying to track him down - went to a Geordie bass player and former school teacher, then playing in a north-eastern jazz combo called Last Exit, with whom Copeland has been introduced to when Curved Air played Newcastle in September 1976. 

“I had called [Sting] out of the blue and asked if he had any ambition to hit the big time down in London - without his band,” Copeland writes. At first the singer was unconvinced of Copeland’s pitch, but expressed some curiosity: “In two words, ‘keep talking’, our relationship was defined for the next two years. I had to keep talking up our prospects so he could confidently pour his mojo into our combined mission rather than into all of the other options in the big city. I also learned right there that he was a free agent and open to suggestion. Excellent! He got an earful of my grandiose designs and convincing certitude but I was careful not to emphasise the punk thing. It was more about how we could use this new scene to get around the sclerotic music business empires and storm the walls.”

Picture: Stewart Copeland

Eventually Sting would come down to London in December 1976 and join Copeland’s venture (although the move was mainly to allow Sting’s then wife, Frances Tomelty, to pursue an acting career). In early 1977, Copeland and Sting found themselves playing in a short-lived prog-ish foursome called Strontium 90, where they were joined by session guitarist Andy Summers, who was a good ten years older than them, and had previously been in the ’60s outfit Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band. With the nascent idea of a punk trio still in play, Summers was asked if he’d join the other project, leading to Padovani getting the elbow.

The new band would make their live debut at a Birmingham club in August 1977, setting in train an extraordinary, six-year race to the very top. As a trio, they were still unique: most bands at the time had four members at least, but with Copeland’s frenetic drumming, Sting’s vocals (and, let’s not forget, cheekbones) and Summers’ versatility as a guitarist, they appropriated punk just as it was starting to morph into ‘New Wave’, that crystalisation of mid-70s, double denim-clad, pub rock R’n’B.

The Police as a recording entity wouldn’t come into being until the beginning of 1978 when the all-blond trio (dyed for a money-making chewing gum commercial that was never aired) started recording their first album at a tiny studio in Leatherhead, Surrey, with just £1500 borrowed from Copeland’s brother Miles to fund the project.

Outlandos d’Amour would take six months of stop-start recording to make, but before it was finished, an early single was released in the April, Roxanne – a ribald tale about a prostitute…which subsequently earned it a BBC ban. With the record finally in the can, another single was released that August, Can’t Stand Losing You, but as that covered the equally thorny subject of suicide it, too, was banned. 

With the album’s release in October 1978 the band commenced a promotional tour, from which, bizarrely, in the even more sensitive United States Roxanne took off as a single, presumably due to Americans being unable to work out what “put on the red light” was all about. Emboldened, A&M Records re-released it in the UK the following April, scoring a hit. The Police started to take off. Another reissue, of Can’t Stand Losing You, even came close to becoming No.1 in the UK, beaten only by the Boomtown Rats’ I Don’t Like Mondays.

It’s around this time that I came into the picture. I was just too young to be a punk native, but as I turned 11 in 1978 I started to become more independently musically aware. Radio One was playing the likes of The Jam, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury and The Blockheads, Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds. Dire Straits’ pub rock-influenced Sultans Of Swing was a radio hit, and US imports like Blondie and Talking Heads were presenting an alternative view of the term ‘punk’ with their less phlegmatic, New York-savvy take on the genre. For me, pre-MTV and not yet reading the music press (I certainly wouldn’t count Look-In amongst that club), music was something to be consumed aurally. Weirdly, I discovered Genesis around the same time, despite punk nominally coming along to do away with such groups.

In October 1979, a month before I turned 12, The Police released their second album, Regatta de Blanc. Again recorded on a shoestring at producer Nigel Grey’s Surrey Sound in Leatherhead, its title alluded to the band’s “white reggae” interpretation of New Wave (albeit with another somewhat pretentious Francophile title). Like it’s predecessor, it was a three-way effort recorded with little instrumental embellishment – just guitar, bass, drums, vocals and romping songs.

Regatta de Blanc was only the second album I bought with my own money, and it would commence a competitive obsession about The Police that I had with my friends James, Colin and Rob, trying to buy their singles before each other (which reached peak obsession when we all bunked out of school to visit the local high street record shop to buy the fourth album, Ghost In The Machine on the day of its release). Regatta would give the world more singalong singles - Message In A Bottle, Walking On The Moon and The Bed’s Too Big Without You – each built around the relative simplicity of the band’s construct.

That, though, would start to shift with the third album, Zenyatta Mondatta, released another year later. Musically, 1980 was caught between rock and a hard place. Punk had well and truly been and gone, and pop was about to be reinvented again by dance and electronica. New Romantics, all of whom had been into progressive rock in the mid-70s, then punk, were on the verge of turning the synthesiser into a mainstream pop instrument, and not just something used for elongated noodly solos by the likes of Tony Banks and Rick Wakeman. Savvy magpies that they were, The Police added keyboards to their palette, causing some eyes to roll north, given how they’d produced two successful records so far built around guitar, bass, drums and a voice. 

It wasn’t, though, an overt shift: Zenyatta spawned more supremely radio-friendly hits, like Don’t Stand So Close To Me (the somewhat conceited parable of Sting’s experience as a school teacher - “Young teacher/The subject of schoolgirl fantasy...” – and that heinous couplet “He starts to shake and cough, just like the old man in that book by Nabokov”, the first of many occasions when he will go to great lengths to demonstrate how well read he is). Less erudite was De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da, a classic case of pop eating itself in being a song about the how rudimentary pure pop can be.

Sting’s - we assume – tinkering with the formula that had sustained them thus far would reach a new degree of critical discord another year later (yes, the band was still releasing albums annually) with Ghost In The Machine, which thankfully did away with the French titles to make a more strident literary reference, the book by psychologist Arthur Koestler. 

Recorded partly in Montserrat, with the Peter Gabriel/Phil Collins engineer Hugh Padgham (responsible for creating Collins’ ‘gated reverb’ drum sound) marking his debut as assistant to Grey, Ghost took The Police in an at-times darker musical direction, with their sound broadened out by more synths and live brass instruments. It wasn’t without its bright pop - Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic captured the sunny vibe of the island recording environment - but singles like Spirits In The Material World and Invisible Sun, inspired by the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, along with the album’s two closing tracks, Secret Journey and Darkness, sounded a world away from the playful rock that had launched The Police only four years previously.

Via those four albums in as many years, The Police become imperious. Sting, in particular, was everywhere, thanks to the cheekbones that had already made him a staple (but not the staple, hem, hem) of teen poster magazines the world over. But that, then brings us logically to “the biggest album”, Synchronicity.

Comparable with, I suppose, U2’s The Joshua Tree, Michael Jackson’s Thriller or Prince’s Purple Rain, it was the record that saw the band’s 45-degree trajectory reach its zenith – and their demise. On the one hand, it probably was one of the albums that defined the 1980s when it appeared in 1983, but on reflection 40 years later, was also beset with a pretentiousness in which The Police did, somewhat, disappear up their own arses (a feat that would indeed be replicated by U2 and their bastard offspring, Coldplay).

I recently listened to the Hugh Padgham-produced Synchronicity again and was struck by how much they were trying to cram into it sonically, verbally and musically. There’s no doubt that Every Breath You Take is a singularly distinct hit, even after four decades of over-exposure. It is also, still, a source of contention between Sting and Summers, who have had a longstanding dispute over the song’s writing credits, a disagreement the guitarist says is still “very much alive”. 

The dispute centres around Summers’ dampened chord sequence which drives the song. Sting’s original demo didn’t have any guitar at all, which became a source of contention: “Stewart and Sting couldn’t agree on where the drums and bass were going to sit within the song,” the now 81-year-old Summers recently explained to Canadian podcaster Jeremy White, revealing that Every Breath You Take wasn’t even going to make it onto the album. “That song was going in the trash until I played on it, and that’s all there is to it. And I think that’s composition, absolutely.” 

At that point in Synchronicity’s recording, The Police were struggling for material. “The famous story is that Sting just turned to me and said, ‘Well, go on. Go in there and make it your own,’” Summers explained. “I had all this sort of stuff under my fingers. I was The Police stock-artist guitarist, if you like. And I went in and I got that lick almost, it was like one take. Everyone stood up and cheered.” There was further turbulence with the song when the album came to be mixed, with Summers feeling that the mixing engineer had “ruined” the guitar sound.

Internecine grief notwithstanding, Every Breath You Take would go on to become the best-selling single of 1983 and the fifth biggest-selling single of the entire 1980s. But its stormy gestation became totemic of the dynamic within The Police by that point. And Summers’ revelation that they were struggling to fill the album is also telling, given the patchy state of the rest of Synchronicity.

King Of Pain and Wrapped Around My Finger are two of Sting’s finest torch songs. But there are too many misjudgements on the record. Mother – in which Summers largely shouts manically “Every girl I go out with becomes my mother in the end!” should have remained a demo, while Copeland’s Miss Gradenko just goes nowhere. The two title songs – Synchronicity I and Synchronicity II – are a screeching mess. One of the highlights, the jazzy Murder By Numbers didn’t even make it to the original vinyl release, making it worth listening to the end of my cassette version for.

The Police in 1983
Picture: James Milton

Clearly with Synchronicity The Police had started to outstay their welcome, despite the album’s gargantuan success. The promo videos, Sting’s limelight-hogging (whether intentional or not), his pretentious, thesaurus-swallowing lyrics and overtly confessional writing were all starting to grate. Like its four predecessors, Synchronicity had three or four discernible hits, but unlike its predecessors there was a diminishing rate of return on all the rest. That said, its commercial success - perhaps justifiably, if critically disproportionately – warranted its inclusion this year in the Library Of Congress’s United States National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

The Synchronicity tour – on which I saw The Police at Wembley - expanded the band in every dimension: backing singers, huge video screens, enveloping sound, the mad costumes from the videos. Ever the politician, Sting’s rebuttal to Neil Tennant masked the fact that, in all probability, he knew The Police were over. Speaking about the Shea Stadium gig some time ago, he recalled that, during the performance he’d thought “‘This is it, you can’t do any better than this’. That’s the point I decided to stop.”

With the Rolling Stones just marking their 62nd year making records with the release of Hackney Diamonds, and Paul McCartney still actively being Macca, it’s clearly possible for some acts to enjoy longevity. But only just. The Beatles themselves lasted barely a decade, and yet carved a place in music history unsurpassed by anyone else, commercially or creatively. The Police blazed for even less time - five albums over six years. 

37 years after they broke up the dynamic between the trio remains awkward. Summers has hinted at legal action over the Every Breath You Take dispute, while Copeland admitted recently to The Times that he and Sting continue to have a complicated relationship (“We love each other, but we’re not birds of a feather”). But for, probably, a good half of their original three years together they were a terrific band. 

The recently re-released tour film Around The World shows just how good they were, following the group on their 1980-1981 world tour when, according to Summers, they had “just about enough popularity to get booked around the globe”. He’s being cute, of course. Only three years since their formation, they were still full of punkish energy. While they may not be as revered as titans of punk and the New Wave like The Clash, the Pistols or The Jam, their live performances were every bit as frantic - Sting’s stage charisma, Summers’ innovative guitar work, and Copeland’s extraordinary drumming. “We were always a very guerrilla band,” he told Super Deluxe Edition’s Paul Sinclair recently, and he is right - up to a point. His book outlines just how guerrilla they were, but also exposes how ego and overreach led to The Police burning bright for only a short period of time.

Stewart Copeland's Police Diaries is published today by Rocket 88 books