The 1981 album that left Sting “terrible to work with”
Nothing was going to stand in the way of Sting becoming one of the biggest artists that he could be.
He didn’t think that The Police was going to be the main outlet for him forever, and even though he was already hitting a groundswell when he released his first solo album, he would have rather kept making solo music for the rest of his days and never gone back to his old band, even if his solo career never took off. That’s how much he cared about defining his own legacy, but he did admit to being a bit of an ass along the way whenever he came up with one of his own tunes.
But when you look at the band’s track record, who was going to be the one to argue that Sting’s songs were worse than what they had to offer? Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland clearly had the chops to play anything they wanted, and there are many songs by them across their discography that aren’t half-bad, but when you’re working with someone that’s written a song like ‘Message in a Bottle’, there’s no question who’s going to be the important member of the group.
Sting was always gunning towards something bigger and better than what he had already done, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t step on people’s toes as well. There were plenty of times where he took charge and told everyone how he thought the song was supposed to go, and that wasn’t going to sit well when working with a band that was supposed to be three equal people all working together.
Copeland already had his fair share of spats with Sting in the past, but Ghost in the Machine was the first time when the tensions started to get more than a little bit insufferable. Every one of their albums did have some moments where things could get a little bit tense, but there was another member of the band that came into the picture while no one else was paying attention. And that member’s name was cocaine.
While Sting wasn’t usually heavy into drugs, getting the chance to take something that would double his energy wasn’t something that he took lightly. He loved the idea of being able to work ten times faster than he used to, but when he looked back at the way that everyone was behaving during that time, he raised his hand and said that cocaine brought out the worst in him whenever he was leading the sessions.
He could be downright vicious during his time with the band, and he didn’t want to get to that point ever again, saying, “I was terrible to work with, I was unsympathetic, aggressive, mean, selfish, egotistical. Cocaine is horrible. It makes you feel uncomfortable in your skin. I was lucky I couldn’t get much of it into my system because it always blocked up my sinuses. I realised it was so stupid taking it that, some time after we recorded Ghost, I did it one last time, said some kind of ritual incantation and got rid of the rest.”
And to his credit, Sting never seemed all that concerned with the drug culture once he started working with his solo bands. He knew that he was lucky to have some of the greatest names in jazz working with him, and while they could hit stumbling blocks every now and again, he knew that everything was going to sound great if he had someone like Dominic Miller working with him on any number of his tunes.
It just took a bit of a learning process for him to realise what he was doing, and when looking through his track record, Sting wasn’t egotistical enough to say that he didn’t do anything wrong. He knew he hurt a lot of people, and it was his job to stand in his truth and admit that there were problems that he was at the root of.
