Police - A reggae-rock explosion

They can't be called a fully rock band, nor can they be dismissed as a simple pop group, and they were never truly punk. The Police elude easy categorization because, in fact, they always stood outside the usual pigeonholes, largely thanks to the great songs they played - timeless classics that poured out in streams from Sting's pen - performed by musicians of outstanding technical skill and interpretive ability. Thanks to this, they've stayed in the hearts of many, from listeners with simpler tastes to the most attentive rock fans.

Sting, real name Gordon Matthew Sumner, is the son of a milkman and a hairdresser from Newcastle, the English port city. Driven by the need for money and the desire to escape the greyness of a life split between the tax office where he works and the city's teacher-training college, Gordon throws himself into jazz in the local clubs. The yellow-and-black striped sweater he habitually wears on these nights earns him the nickname Sting. His life runs along fairly quietly between the schools where he starts teaching and the jazz-rock band Last Exit, which builds up a certain following in the Newcastle area thanks to his stage presence as bassist and singer, but which never manages to make a mark anywhere else.

Gordon Sumner, the primary school teacher from Newcastle, in England's industrial provinces, would never have imagined climbing every rung of the ladder to superstar paradise had it not been for Stewart Copeland - an American, second son of a CIA official who, having gone into business for himself, dragged his family around the world, from Washington to Cairo, from Amman to Beirut, picking up important friendships along the way, from Nasser to George Bush Sr.

Miles, Stewart's older brother and the future manager of the Police, naturally followed the family on its travels too, but put all that experience and opportunity to roam to use by becoming a rock manager. In that role, in the mid-Seventies, he came into contact with Darryl Way, former member of the progressive band Curved Air, who had achieved a certain degree of fame. When Way, after some shaky experiences with other musicians, decided to reform Curved Air purely out of financial necessity, he took on the young Stewart Copeland as drummer after an initial tour with the original lineup. Copeland thus found himself, out of the blue, in one of the best-known progressive outfits, with whom he recorded two albums: "Airborne" and "Midnight Wire". From that experience, Stewart also came to understand that progressive, in its final stage, was a brakeless machine hurtling off a cliff, where the costs of recording and lavish tours were never worth it - neither artistically (since everything had to be made commercial just to generate enough income to cover costs and pay back the hefty advances received) nor, in the end, financially.

Putting the cosmopolitan, multilingual professional Stewart Copeland together with the provincial, narrow-minded amateur Sting seemed truly impossible, but fate works in strange ways. Copeland's disgust with the world of rock dinosaurs found an outlet in punk, which he suddenly embraced, as if struck down on the road to Damascus. In December 1976 he went to London to visit his brother, who had taken an office right below that of the Sex Pistols, across the street from the 100 Club, and so found himself right in the eye of the storm, left reeling by punk's ideas and musical philosophy. He decided then and there to form a trio. Having met Sting by chance and been deeply struck by him, he phoned him up and insisted he come to London to see what was happening.

Sting, who had just married actress Frances Tomelty and had a newborn son, was on the verge of financial collapse, but he agreed to the venture of packing up and moving to London. Stewart also recruited guitarist Henri Padovani, technically quite modest but full of energy, and in January 1977 the band began rehearsing.

Within less than a month, the Police were playing their first shows, gigging around extensively and starting to build a following. The problem was that the narrow-minded and arrogant Sting didn't really fit in with the punks, at times opening sets with remarks like: "Right. Now we're going to play some punk, which means the lyrics are banal and the music is crap!". However, the energy the trio unleashed onstage silenced the complaints, and their following began to grow. The punk establishment of the Clash and the Sex Pistols tolerated the Police but looked down on them, essentially seeing them as opportunists - which, in a way, was also true: Sting used punk as a springboard to success, Stewart Copeland to reinvent himself with a clean slate. Padovani recalled a notorious brawl with the Damned one night when the Police were due to open for them. As Sting tells it: "There was this kind of inner circle we weren't part of and weren't trying to force our way into. Sure, I wouldn't have minded being part of it, but I wasn't going to lose my cool just because Dave Vanian refused to talk to me one night at the Roxy". None of this discouraged the Police, and in true do-it-yourself fashion, in April '77, paying for just a few hours of studio time, they recorded their first single for their own label, Illegal Records: "Fall Out/Nothing Achieving", two songs written by Copeland, who was the band's main songwriter at the time. The single enjoyed a certain amount of success within the punk scene.

As Sting's compositions grew more harmonically and chordally complex, Padovani found it increasingly hard to keep up, so Copeland once again brought a guitarist into the lineup: Andy Summers. Ten years older than the other three, Summers had an extraordinary professional pedigree behind him, having played since he was a teenager in various celebrated Sixties outfits, such as the Zoot Money's Big Roll Band (idols among the mods) and the Animals; after that, his friend Robert Fripp had brought him into Neil Sedaka's backing band, he'd found himself playing in the original production of the Rocky Horror Show, he'd recorded albums with Kevin Coyne and Soft Machine, he'd been called in by John Lord of Deep Purple to record his compositions for band and orchestra, and by Mike Oldfield to play on the orchestral tour of "Tubular Bells". In short, he was a rock veteran who, faced with the punk earthquake, had realized that what really mattered was bringing music back to its essence, to the rhythm and simplicity of rock & roll; once he met the Police, he asked to join the band, and Copeland welcomed him with open arms.

The four-piece lineup lasts only a few shows, and Padovani, realizing he can no longer keep pace, quits. By mid-1978, with no more compositional limits thanks to the new guitarist's contribution, the trio signs a distribution deal with A&M and, again on their own Illegal label, record their debut LP, titled Outlandos D'Amour, released in November of that year, though the single "Roxanne" had already been out since February.

The Police's debut album is already packed with classics, from "Roxanne" to "Can't Stand Losing You", to "So Lonely", to "Next To You". After the initial bursts of Copeland's songs, with the compositional growth brought by Sting's contribution, the drummer's own immense instrumental skill, and Summers' eclecticism, the Police had embraced punk's more reggae-leaning side, making Jamaican music their own with real personality. There's already a granite-like strength here, built on crisp, enveloping bass lines, on drumming made of dry, explosive hits centered on Copeland's revolutionary use of the hi-hat — unlike anyone before him — as the true fulcrum of his playing, and above all on an immediate, "straight-to-the-heart" songwriting style.

"Next To You" opens the record with a powerful rhythm and a stripped-down, driving Summers solo, sketching out the only truly punk song ever to appear on a Police album. "So Lonely" follows, and it's reggae straight away — though markedly "white" reggae, in a strange and highly personal combination. "Roxanne" is Sting's first great classic. Although it had been out for months, it ran into radio censorship problems: since it's about love for a prostitute, the BBC refused to play it. The song is a mid-tempo reggae-rock number whose hooks lie in its opening, marked by a killer descending bassline and Sting's high-pitched vocal, in the repeated breaks that separate the verses, preceded by double snare hits, and in the chorus, marked instead by Copeland's dry hits and relentlessly rhythmic hi-hat. The Police sound would lean heavily on these devices in the future too, and they appear here for the first time. Already, after just three songs, Sting's gift for immediately gripping songwriting is clear from the very first bars. The same censorship fate as "Roxanne" would befall the album's second single, "Can't Stand Losing You", which deals with abandonment and suicide. This too is essentially white reggae, a style the Police would call "reggatta", which no one but the Clash could pull off with such personality. Here too, the three instruments take turns filling the gaps during the verses, and the chorus is far more rhythmic, lodging itself in your brain on first listen.

Having covered the album's best songs, there's also plenty worth noting in "Hole In My Life", the still-punk "Truth Hits Everybody" — which oddly always seems on the verge of toppling from some precarious balance and features a splendid bridge — and above all "Born In The 50's", a generational anthem howled with rage by Sting and marked by relentless double snare hits and the usual hi-hat. A strange spoken-word monologue by Summers, dedicated to an inflatable doll that comes to a grim end, characterizes his "Be My Girl Sally", which stands out mostly as a curiosity.

In the United States "Roxanne" is played without problems, so the band starts picking up a following and sets off on its first tour across the ocean. Of course, it's not all plain sailing: one night in Syracuse, NY, the audience numbers just four people, but the Police still throw themselves into the show with their usual grit. Sting even goes as far as introducing the audience members to one another, leaving them stunned. Such episodes are far from rare in those days, and the band's habit of playing shows that others wouldn't even dream of tackling will prove invaluable down the line.

After shooting a few commercials thanks to his wife to help make ends meet, Sting lands one of the lead roles in the film "Quadrophenia", based on the Who album of the same name, kicking off a parallel acting career that, albeit with modest results, would continue for several years.

After two more small American tours, the Police headline their first British tour, with the Cramps opening.

In 1979 their second album, Reggatta De Blanc, is released, made up of big and small masterpieces of the most immediate, intense and enjoyable rock. There's still none of the intellectual pretensions that would characterize the band's later phase, and no more of punk's anarchic rebellion — just a recovery of rock & roll's most intense side, its ability to go straight to everyone's heart with simplicity. It's precisely in this immediacy that punk's influence lies; an album like this would never have been conceivable without punk, precisely because it's built on the recovery of simple writing that is nonetheless refined — "classic" in the truest sense. It's also the album where Copeland makes his greatest compositional contribution, with as many as five songs credited to him, either alone or jointly, all thoroughly notable, and where he fully comes into his own, revealing himself as one of the greatest drummers of all time — innovative, never banal, with a towering personality that would go on to spawn legions of imitators. Alongside him, Andy Summers is the ideal partner, tasteful and never out of place, with his unmistakable, heavily effected sound full of flanger and delay, and a refined jazz-derived technique that lets him improve any composition. These two musicians create the true Police sound, which indelibly marks every song and makes them recognizable even before Sting opens his mouth. Add to that the latter's natural frontman charisma, his acidic and distinctive voice, his incredible talent as a writer, and you have the ingredients of a lethal cocktail that explodes everywhere with Reggatta De Blanc.

It opens with one of the greatest songs of all time, "Message In A Bottle", which stuns with the perfection of its arrangements, the simplicity of its ideas, and the way its lyrics find a foothold in everyone's life: a rock gem. The drumming is simply perfect in its innovation, as is Summers' highly distinctive arpeggio and Sting's torn-off bassline. The vocal performance is textbook. "It's Alright For You" is another one of Copeland's usual firecracker tracks, but it's the following "Bring On The Night" that truly enchants with its refinement and simplicity at once, poignant and intense, offering three unforgettable instrumental passages. Summers' arpeggio in particular truly shows his ability to make every song unique without ever overdoing it, without gut-wrenching solos, relying solely on the strength of his personality. "Walking On The Moon" is Copeland's finest performance. A hi-hat pattern that manages to strip the whole song of gravity, suspending it in a void (for something similar, listen to "Gravity" by Hüsker Dü). Sting's songwriting is able to range widely, finding, with deceptive ease, hooks that are always different yet incredibly effective. Another rock classic for everyone, and already the third one on a single album. "The Bed's Too Big Without You" is worth revisiting if only for its distinctive bassline, which would be repeatedly copied and reused by the most varied musicians, simply because it's yet another modern standard of the kind Sting can pull out of thin air — but his vocal performance here is also extremely intense. Finally, "Contact" and "Does Everyone Stare" are two Copeland tracks both brimming with energy, but also with near-jazzy instrumental refinements.

Reggatta De Blanc launches the Police worldwide, becoming one of the albums of the year. Between '79 and '80 the trio embarks on an incredible world tour that reaches places no rock band had ever reached before. Beyond the classic stops, they reach generally overlooked destinations, from Hong Kong to Bombay — the first Western rock band to play there live — from Cairo to Athens, sometimes even playing two shows a night.

In the summer of 1980 the Police record their third album in the Netherlands (for tax reasons).

Zenyatta Mondatta is a disappointment for the entire music press and receives scathing reviews. Even though it's clear the trio have realized they could sell by the truckload just by recording their own digestive noises, and that the album is in large part a foregone conclusion, it still deserves, at least in part, some reappraisal. At the very least, there are some good tracks to be found, besides the now-expected Sting classic, "Don't Stand So Close To Me", which stands out above all for its composition and lyrics, as would become clear with the 1986 remake. "Driven To Tears" is also very well liked, which besides having the usual stratospheric drum part, has a distinctive chorus, slowed down and broken up by constant breaks, and in its lyrics marks Sting's "social awakening". Also worth remembering is Copeland's underrated "Bombs Away", which ranks among the Police's best tracks and features two fine Summers solos, where he shows off his passion for Eastern sonorities. The second side, however, is largely tedious and all but forgettable. The "reggatta" vein has been squeezed dry, and by now there are no more ideas left in it.

Despite the negative reviews, the album confirms the superstar status achieved by the trio, who by now have the world in the palm of their hand. Now it's a matter of picking up the musical thread again, of evolving toward other sonorities beyond those already completely wrung out. So in 1981 comes Ghost In The Machine. New wave according to the Police, dance and funk according to the Police — you could define it in various ways, but in fact, even though a now-biased section of the critics continues to resist them, this album marks a point in the band's favor, embracing darker sonorities and shadowy atmospheres, picking up well on the many signals being sent out by the post-punk universe. The arrangements are perhaps even a bit too rich, but it's no heresy to say that certain sonorities on this album would turn up years later in the Cure, in songs like "Why Can't I Be You?". For the first time, on this record Summers finally tackles head-on the style of his friend Fripp, transfiguring it into a subtle guitar approach, more classically rock or pop depending on the track, but never banal or already heard, making it unmistakably his own. Above all, hearing now that he's certainly not a flashy, frontline guitarist, you notice how, precisely from the second row, he always manages to leave a unique mark.

"Spirits In The Material World" is the first Police song to feature a dense bed of keyboards, underpinning a pulsing bass while the vocal delivers lyrics somewhere between the mystical and the political. The song is once again marked above all by the clattering hi-hat and Copeland's characteristic dry hits, as is the following "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic", another tremendous showcase for the drummer, who manages to make this Caribbean-flavored pop song unforgettable. The wonderful "Invisible Sun" is dense, dark, heavily stamped with deep keyboards, an obsessive guitar riff, and beautiful lyrics about the civil war in Northern Ireland. On "Hungry For You", Sting has fun singing in French over a driving funky track, backed by blazing horns (he himself plays sax and clarinet throughout the album). "Demolition Man" is an arsenal going off. A guitar flourish introduces "Too Much Information", a track with incredible drive and more relentless horns in slightly off-kilter tonality. After another frantic song, "Rehumanize Yourself", comes "One World (Not Three)", the last reggae-rock song the Police would ever put on record, and a fine farewell to the genre. Summers' "Omegaman" is a great rock sprint in 4/4, physically overwhelming and naturally marked by the guitarist's constant, glittering riff. "Secret Journey" and above all the gorgeous closer "Darkness", by Copeland, bring back dark, clouded atmospheres through which only a single ray of light barely manages to filter.

By now the Police had been filling stadiums for years, and they could have simply repeated the trick of Zenyatta Mondatta and not given a damn about the critics — but perhaps Sting's pride, perhaps Copeland's class and power, perhaps the deep personality clashes that by now pitted the two openly against each other, gave rise in 1983 to Synchronicity, a record made up of classics from the first second to the last. The keyboard carpets are forgotten, the funky horns are abandoned, and out comes the album you don't expect. The tense, nervous rhythm of "Synchronicity I" opens the door to psychoanalysis. An intellectualizing Sting throws himself into a rereading of Jung, accompanied by the barrage of arpeggios from Summers/Fripp. The following "Walking In Your Footsteps" drags us into tribal electronic rhythms, into a jungle thick with African mist and animal echoes. "O My God" revisits the theme of loneliness in a crowd so dear to the early Sting, now in the guise of a perfect pop songwriter. With a bass that at times recalls McCartney's on "Daytripper", Sting lays out harmonic progressions superbly backed by the usual great clattering drumming and the tidal waves of a hyper-flanged guitar, even allowing himself to sketch out a dissonant, jazz-flavored ending on sax. A very unusual but striking song follows, "Mother", written and sung by Summers, marked by a crazy odd time signature, wrapped in frantic Eastern-tinged guitar and clarinet, and by a hallucinated, harrowing vocal truly stamped with a desperate madness worthy of Norman Bates.

The fun, lightweight "Miss Gradenko" is the fruit of the now-limited compositional space granted to Copeland, marked by a perfect pentatonic guitar solo and a cheerful atmosphere that vaguely recalls the first LP. Closing side one is "Synchronicity II", which ruthlessly psychoanalyzes the average family. Dry, relentless off-beat drumming and an angry vocal tear through the veil hiding the tragedies buried in the banality and frustrations of everyday life.

Sting's classic of classics opens side two. "Every Breath You Take" is THE pop song par excellence, the one that keeps repeating itself even as it takes on different guises and different authors. Like "Stand By Me" (whose chord progression it borrows in the verse, an incredibly transformed standard turned into something else entirely unrecognizable), like "Yesterday", like very few other songs, it manages to already feel present in the listener's mind the very first time it's heard, like an archetype, like a deja vu. A love song that has become one of the genre's absolute peaks, the kind we ourselves would want to write to our beloved — except the word "love" is never once spoken. A monotonous off-beat keyboard note introduces "King Of Pain", which then unfolds as a rock song in minor keys, with an open-ended chorus and the usual, perfect, tension-laden breaks. "Wrapped Around Your Finger" is yet another hit single, but it's the following "Tea In The Sahara" that magnificently closes the album, with an incredible minimal guitar 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 vaporizing the song, 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 closer, an entertaining taste of jazz-rock that finds Summers and Sting, the band's two jazzmen, conspiring together with one foot in the past and one in the future of them both.

Once the triumphant Synchronicity tour was over, the Sting/Copeland tensions became unsustainable. The Police thus took a "break" that continues to this day. The band would never officially split up, but Sting and Copeland simply began recording solo albums — the former continuing on toward the immense success he seemed destined for, the latter first devoting himself to film scores (his splendid "Don't Box Me In", sung by Stan Ridgway of Wall of Voodoo, taken from Francis Ford Coppola's "Rumble Fish") and then to putting together supergroups like Animal Logic and Oysterhead, alongside giants like Stanley Clarke and Les Claypool. Before long, Summers too wasted no time keeping busy, churning out album after album of fusion, or more properly jazz.

In 1986 came Every Breath You Take – The Singles, a singles collection featuring a fine remake titled "Don't Stand So Close To Me '86", very different from and considerably better than the original, above all for its vocal harmonies and guitar arrangement — far more atmospheric.

The Police were one of the most beloved and influential bands in history: in a handful of albums, they pushed rock and "mass" pop to unimagined heights. Born out of punk, to which they owe so much while remaining quite distinct from it, they prove, as other bands of their era did, how rock can take the most disparate forms while ultimately remaining the same thing: the great popular music of the 20th century.

Ride the wave of great music

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