The 1980 album The Police couldn’t stand making: “A bit of a cock-up”
The entire process of being in a power trio was always a tricky balance for The Police.
Each of them were absolutely amazing on their instruments every single time they played, but whenever they tried making some of the best music that they could, a lot of it ended up sounding more than a little bit tense because of how much each of them wanted to get their own contributions into the mix. They all still knew how to best serve the song whenever they worked on any of their records, but there were more than a few times where things started to become torture when they walked into the studio as well.
But in the beginning, they seemed to be doing everything right from a raw recording perspective. The unspoken rule about the other punk bands they were coming up with was keeping everything raw in the studio, and when you listen to all of their greatest hits, you can hear them sticking to the bare essentials. All of the 1980s production hadn’t come in yet, and while Outlandos D’Amour was one of their best moments, there’s a good reason why Sting regarded Reggatta be Blanc as one of their best albums.
They were still using the same studio and going back to their old stomping grounds for album number two, and it really shows in how cohesive the band sound together. ‘Message in a Bottle’ was bound to be a smash hit before they had even recorded it, and since the band had been working on more atmospheric songs like ‘Walking on the Moon’, they were more than willing to take a chance and see what happened when they worked on songs that didn’t exactly have the same kind of pop structure as everything else.
When the money started rolling in, though, things were beginning to get a bit more disconnected. The band didn’t have the same kind of home-y feel of listening to their records in their old studio, and since they ended up flying to a different part of the world to cut Zenyatta Mondatta, they fet more disconnected than ever when trying to put together an album that sounded at least somewhat cohesive.
And Sting didn’t even bother saying that the record wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, saying, “There are a few really good songs on ‘Zenyatta’, like ‘Driven To Tears’, ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’, ‘When The World Is Running Down’, ‘De Do Do Do…’ The rest of it you can forget. That’s our most flawed record. Surprisingly, that was also the one that made us big.” It’s one thing when the songwriter starts getting bored with his own material, but if Sting was already spinning his wheels, you can only imagine what the rest of the band was doing.
Stewart Copeland only needed a few days to get his drums sounding great but Andy Summers remembered the whole thing feeling more fractured than before, saying, “The album was a bit of a cock-up. It was so rushed. We only had a month to do it in, yet had to take a week off in the middle to come to England and do the Milton Keynes concert. We literally had to rush out of the studio, without getting a chance to really think about what we’d done, or see the tapes through and make sure the cut was alright.”
And it shows from how much Sting ended up detesting some of the songs on there. They did end up turning into one of the darlings of MTV when they started making videos for ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’, but the fact that Sting ended up burying the tape for ‘Behind My Camel’ was proof that he wasn’t exactly having the best time.
But when any band starts getting rushed around that much, it’s usually both a blessing and a curse. This is the kind of attention that everyone strives for when they first make a record, but when it gets in the way of creativity, that’s when everything starts sounding a little bit less inspired than before.
