The Police paradox

It often happens that musicians themselves are a song's worst enemy. But sometimes that aversion can reach downright extreme levels. It happened to the Police too. On the English band's third album, “Zenyatta Mondatta”, released in October 1980, two instrumental tracks sit side by side: “The Other Way Of Stopping”, written by drummer Stewart Copeland, and “Behind My Camel”, composed by guitarist Andy Summers. It's this latter track that lies at the heart of one of the strangest episodes in the band's history.

“Behind My Camel”, which remains a terrific track – at least to this writer's ears – won a Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance in 1982, but frontman Sting couldn't stand it. His aversion was so strong it drove him to an extreme act: stealing the original tape and burying it in the garden in an attempt to stop it from ever being finished. As he told Vic Garbarini: “I hated that song so much that one day, while I was in the studio, I found the tape lying on the table. So I took it round the back of the studio and buried it in the garden.”

Years later, Summers revisited the episode in an interview with Classic Rock, confirming the tense mood within the band: “I was always much more interested in the weird stuff. And anyway the commercially successful songs always seemed to come from Sting. But we didn't have enough songs to fill the album, and I had this thing, 'Behind My Camel'. I said, 'What about we do this one?' And Sting said, 'I'm not playing on that!' I really do think he buried the tape in the garden. Stewart was up for working on it, so I just played bass on it myself.”

The context in which the album was born was anything but relaxed, too. After months of touring, the band went back into the studio in mid-1980 under heavy pressure from the industry. In the liner notes to a reissue of “Zenyatta Mondatta”, Sting recalled: “The whole industry was waiting for an album. While I was writing it, I kept getting messages from the record company saying the retailers were waiting for it. I had this image of thousands of people, cogs in a well-oiled system, waiting for this album, and there I was sitting there struggling. It got to me.”

Despite these tensions, “Zenyatta Mondatta” proved an immediate success for The Police, hitting number one in the UK and cementing the trio's popularity in the United States as well, where the singles “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” both cracked the Billboard Top 10.

Sting himself, however, has always taken a critical view of the record: “”Zenyatta” was our most flawed album. Surprisingly, it was also the one that made us huge”. Summers, by contrast, wryly pointed out the paradox surrounding the success of the most talked-about track: “I loved the irony of it. I'm sure there was a bit of smug self-satisfaction: 'See? I told you so!'”.

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24/04/2026