The Police

A sleep trance, a dream dance

A shared romance

Synchronicity

Reaching the summit only to dissolve shortly after. It's not an uncommon script in rock history, and it played out with perfect synchronicity in the case of the Police too. A band that never wanted to repeat itself, despite having every means to do so successfully, and that chose to leave the scene at the peak of its popularity. Never once seriously entertaining the idea of returning. Or perhaps it was precisely the tension, by then stretched to breaking point among the members of the London trio, that produced the final spark — the one that allowed Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers to complete their arc, crowning all their earlier intuitions in their most mature and futuristic work, their most successful and probably the one that has best withstood the test of time. The perfect record, free even of those small fillers or weak spots that had undermined their otherwise remarkable predecessors. Because there isn't a single wasted note on "Synchronicity": from the overwhelming assault of the overture to the closing fade of "Tea In The Sahara". A little over 44 minutes of music that is dynamic, technological, dazzling. Today, just as on that 17th of June 1983, when that kaleidoscope of sounds and colours (just look at the cover) hit record shops the world over. Exactly 41 years ago.

Living apart together (on the cover too)

Listened to again four decades later, "Synchronicity" retains all of its gleaming shell, paired with sounds that are anything but conventional or easy, even in its more melodic moments. It's at once the Police's most commercial and most "art rock" record, by this point having almost entirely abandoned the reggae-rock formula that had made their fortune early on. No more sparring with the Clash, no more Police on my back. Building on the shrewd evolution already achieved on the previous – excellent – "Ghost In The Machine", the Police smooth out their edges even further, with sounds that are softer and rounder but also more layered and complex, in which synthesizers claim ever more ground, starting with the Synclavier and the Oberheim, programmed personally by Sting, while Summers processes his guitars through a Roland GR300 guitar synth and Copeland works the rhythm through sequencers. In the end, the credits would sum up this division of labour simply as "all noises by The Police", but by then there was very little that was truly collective about it. More than their differing sonic backgrounds – the former teacher Sting with his four strings forged in jazz, the American Copeland, ex-Curved Air, closer to the prog that guitarist Summers had also dabbled in – what really drove the three apart was the struggle for control of the band, with the frontman growing ever more impatient with the drummer's objections, and good old Summers by now tired of playing mediator. "At that time Sting and Stewart hated each other, and Andy, while not showing quite as much venom, could be pretty surly – there were both verbal and physical clashes", producer Hugh Padgham would later recall. So, at the very height of the Policemania that had followed them through four exhausting years of touring, in which they had conquered stadiums and America itself, the three had reached breaking point.

Recorded in the Caribbean Eden of the island of Montserrat, inside George Martin's Air Studios, "Synchronicity" is thus the work of three people living apart under the same roof. Literally, too: Sting recorded his parts in the control room alongside Padgham, Summers in the recreation area, and Copeland in the dining room upstairs. Not only that: even the cover reflects this three-way split, with its three horizontal strips of black-and-white photos, each dedicated to one of the musicians and highlighted in different colours on the front and back: Sting in yellow – and in blue on the back cover – below him Copeland in blue, and finally Summers in red (though the combinations shift across the various pressings, both in colour and in the positioning of the three: as many as 36 different versions were printed, or even 93 according to the Goldmine Record Album Price Guide!).

What is consistent, however, is the underlying concept, dictated by Sting: the idea of "synchronicity" theorised by Carl Gustav Jung, according to which certain simultaneous events that appear to be mere coincidences are in fact connected through their meaning. The former Wallsend schoolteacher had filtered it through his reading of a parapsychology book by Arthur Koestler ("The Roots of Coincidence"), the very same author who had already inspired the title of "Ghost In The Machine" (from his work known in English as "The Ghost In The Machine"). Almost a concept album, though one that ranges across very different themes, united perhaps only by a pervasive sense of unease and anxiety about the future.

The tracks

If Ghost In The Machine had already dried out and made more abstract the warm reggae-rock of their early days, "Synchronicity" cools it down even further, wrapped in a chilly, synthetic, technological package in which studio cut-and-paste plays a bigger role than ever before, yet without losing any of the primal power of the Police's sound. So it's a detonating explosion that greets the listener on "Synchronicity I": a genuine whiplash right from the synth intro, driven by Copeland's hammering, neurotic polyrhythms and then embellished by the barrages and arpeggios of a Summers channelling Fripp, while Sting delves into the depths of Jungian psychological theory: “A connecting principle/ Linked to the invisible/ Almost imperceptible/ Something inexpressible/ Science insusceptible”. It's the dazzling opening to a highly experimental A-side that overturns the usual commercial rulebook, which normally calls for a more immediate opener and a few concessions to experimentation tucked away at the end.

The following "Walking In Your Footsteps" drags us along on tribal electronic rhythms, amid Copeland's synth percussion and Summers's subtle guitar flourishes, into a jungle thick with African mist and animal echoes, drawing a mocking parallel between men and dinosaurs ("Hey Mr. Dinosaur, you really couldn't ask for more/ you were God's favourite creature, but you didn't have a future"), with the spectre of looming nuclear catastrophe – the number-one obsession of all new wave – foreshadowing a new extinction ("if we explode the atom bomb").

The funky "O My God" revisits the theme of loneliness amid the crowd so dear to early Sting, now in the guise of a fully-formed pop songwriter. With a bassline that at times recalls Paul McCartney's on "Daytripper", Gordon Sumner traces harmonic progressions superbly propped up by the usual great, clattering drumming and tidal waves of heavily flanged guitar, even allowing himself a dissonant, jazz-flavoured saxophone finale.

Decidedly unusual, and certainly striking, is the paranoid "Mother", written and sung by Summers: a hysterical soliloquy bordering on no wave territory (or even Captain Beefheart), marked by a frantic, insane odd time signature, exhausting Fripp-style guitar work and a Middle Eastern clarinet, with a deranged, anguished vocal shot through with a desperate madness worthy of Norman Bates. A kind of tongue-in-cheek anthem about smothering, oppressive mothers, apparently much like Andy's own: "Every girl I go out with becomes my mother in the end. But I don't need her as a friend. Well I hear my mother calling. Oh mother dear, please listen, don't devour me." It's the most extreme moment on the record, the one in which the Police, with their razor-sharp black humour, take delight in unsettling anyone who ever pigeonholed them as a mere chart band.

The playful Caribbean march of "Miss Gradenko", the product of the increasingly limited compositional space granted to Copeland, is stamped with a flawless pentatonic guitar solo and carries a cheerful mood that faintly recalls their first LP, paired with an anti-totalitarian lyric that blends spy-story intrigue with Soviet-era paranoia, inspired by Orwell's "1984". It's a light appetiser before the fresh, stormy electronic blasts of "Synchronicity II", which closes side one with a merciless psychoanalysis of the average family. Dry, relentless off-beat drums, a pulsing bass, walls of almost noise-rock guitar and a furious vocal tear away the veil covering the hidden tragedies of banality and everyday desolation, telling of the neurotic collapse of a man crushed by family, work and social pressure, while a monster surfaces from a lake: yes, that very same Loch Ness monster ("Many miles away something crawls from the slime/ at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake").

Side B, meanwhile, as mentioned, is effectively the album's own greatest hits collection, even if the songs' themes remain anything but light, often in fact very dark and enigmatic. Even the most famous of them all, Sting's classic of classics, has fuelled its share of misunderstandings: "Every Breath You Take" is a morbid non-love song, or rather, in its author's own words, "the true anthem of the Reagan years", since it tells the story of a stalker so obsessed with the woman he loves that he suffocates her, almost a metaphor for an Orwellian society in which politics controls every activity and stifles the development of free thought. It's THE pop song par excellence, the one that keeps recurring endlessly, embodied again and again in different guises and by different authors. Like "Stand By Me" (whose chord progression it echoes in the verse, an incredibly familiar standard transformed into something else entirely unrecognisable), like "Yesterday", like very few other songs, it manages to already exist in the listener's mind the very first time it's heard, like an archetype, like a deja vu. And to think that even the Police's biggest hit was born in the thick of battle: with Sting and Copeland at one point on the verge of a physical fight, and the producer forced to rework it by overdubbing certain parts. Once again, though, it was Summers who saved the day: when Sting brought the song into the studio in its bare-bones version, just organ and voice, he handed it over to Andy, telling him: "Do whatever you want with it." And Summers came up with the immortal guitar riff, stroking the strings with a rubber eraser to get that wonderfully soft muted sound. As Copeland recalled in a 1997 interview: "Without Andy that song would be nothing." "Every Breath You Take" has also been covered countless times, starting with the 1997 version ("I'll Be Missing You") performed by rapper Puff Daddy and singer Faith Evans in memory of her husband, Notorious B.I.G., who had been murdered shortly before.

The gorgeous "King Of Pain", by contrast, is largely the frontman's own handiwork: introduced by a monotone off-beat keyboard note, it unfolds as a rock song built on minor keys, with an open-ended chorus, the usual, perfect, tension-filled breaks, and a biting six-string solo from Summers. It's a kind of elegy on loneliness and the impossibility of freeing oneself from pain, said to have grown out of the personal crisis Sting went through following the end of his first marriage. A psychological state symbolised by a little black spot on the sun ("There's a little black spot on the sun today") and distilled into lines of pitch-black pessimism: “I have stood here inside before the pouring rain/ with the world turning circles runinng round my brain/ I guess I’m always hoping that you’ll end this reign/ but it’s my destiny to be the king of pain”.

The enveloping electro-reggae of "Wrapped Around Your Finger" is yet another hit single, but behind its sunny hues it conceals another cryptic lyric, dense with literary and mythological references, culminating in a kind of comeuppance and reversal of roles: “Mi consideri il giovane apprendista/ (…) Sono venuto qui solo in cerca di conoscenza/ (…) Ascolterò con attenzione le tue lezioni/ (…) Trasformerò il tuo volto in alabastro/ Quando scoprirai che il tuo servo è il tuo padrone”.

Closing the album in style is the tale of sisters eternally waiting for an Arab prince, over a "Tea In The Sahara". What Copeland has called the "most beautiful Police song" draws on Paul Bowles's novel "The Sheltering Sky" (from which Bertolucci made the film of the same name) and rests on an incredible, minimal guitar part that seems to lose itself in boundless horizons, flooding us with sun and desert sand (it's the "wobbling cloud", an effect invented by Summers), literally vaporising the track, once again paired with a lopsided hi-hat and a broken rhythm.

In the CD version of the album, the ironic "Murder By Numbers" also appears as a closing track, with lyrics that are once again sinister, this time about the murderous mechanics of politics: an entertaining jazz-rock number that finds Summers and Sting, the group's two resident jazz men, conspiring together with one foot in the past and one in the future of them both.

"Synchronicity" would go on to sell 16 million copies, dethroning none other than Thriller by Michael Jackson from the top of the Billboard chart, which up to that point had been the best-selling album of all time. It would also win 3 Grammy Awards in 1984 (Best Rock Performance, Song of the Year and Best Pop Performance). The world tour in support of the album would kick off in the summer of 1983 and wrap up on March 4, 1984 with a final show in Melbourne. After Sting had already made his solo debut with "The Dream Of The Blue Turtles" (1985), and following three shows in support of the Amnesty International tour "A Conspiracy of Hope" in June 1986, the Police would give it another shot in the studio that same July. But it wouldn't work. There was no longer any way to bridge the by-then irreconcilable differences: "I'd reached the point where if I brought 12 songs into the studio, I wanted all 12 on the record - I no longer had any desire to fight for every track," Sting would later admit. And so the three policemen would each go their own way, proving - aside from Sting's excellent solo debut and a few of Copeland's experiments - that only together could their creativity reach its full potential. A shame.

The reissue

Four decades after its release, the Police's “Synchronicity” will be reissued on July 26, 2024 in numerous formats, including a deluxe 6CD box set featuring 55 previously unreleased tracks, among them rare Sting demos, new liner notes, interviews, memorabilia and never-before-seen photographs. A true treasure trove for fans of Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers. The reissue, put together with the band's direct involvement, took three years to complete. The 62-page book included in the box contains new, in-depth liner notes written by renowned music journalist Jason Draper, detailing the making of the Police's masterpiece.

Here are all the available formats:

Limited Edition 6CD Box (also available on digital platforms):

– CD1: the original album, including the B-side “Murder By Numbers”, remastered from the original tapes.

– CD2: 18 tracks featuring all the original 7″/12″ B-sides plus 11 exclusive bonus tracks not included on the album and available on CD for the first time.

– CD3 and CD4: previously unreleased alternate takes of every track on the album.

– CD4: contains unreleased Police songs including an early version of Andy Summers' 1982 track “Goodbye Tomorrow” (which later became “Someone To Talk To”), a demo of “I’m Blind” (later “Brothers on Wheels”) taken from the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola's “Rumblefish” and written by Stewart Copeland, a previously unreleased early version of “Truth Hits Everybody” (from 1978 debut “Outlandos d’Amour”), and rare covers of Eddie Cochran's “Three Steps To Heaven” and Chuck Berry's “Rock and Roll Music”.

– CD5 and CD6: featuring 19 previously unreleased live recordings, taped on September 10, 1983 at the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum, USA.

2CD Box:

featuring the same tracklist included on CD1 and CD2 of the 6CD Box

Limited Edition 4LP Box:

– tracklist of the original album (LP1)

– selection of 7”/12” B-sides + live recordings (LP2

– a selection of alternate takes and unreleased demos (Lp3)

– a selection of unreleased alternate takes and demos from the “Synchronicity” sessions + 6 unreleased tracks (Lp4)

Coloured 2Lp box set:

– tracklist of the original album (Lp1)

– a selection of 7”/12” B-sides + live recordings (Lp2)

Limited Edition Picture Disc Lp:

– Alternate sequence of the original album’s tracklist

The Police “Synchronicity”

Release date: June 17, 1983

Label:  A&M

1. Synchronicity I

2. Walking In Your Footsteps

3. O My God

4. Mother

5. Miss Gradenko

6. Synchronicity II

7. Every Breath You Take

8. King Of Pain

9. Wrapped Around Your Finger

10. Tea In The Sahara

11. Murder By Numbers (bonus track)

(Contributions by Marco Simonetti)

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01/03/2026