The 1981 album that made Sting resent The Police: “Nightmare”
There was always a sneaking suspicion that Sting was going to outgrow the Police at some point.
Any power trio is always a precarious thing to balance for so long, and even if the songs were still there, Sting didn’t want to get bogged down playing songs that he would grow to resent. He needed to find the time to make tunes without having to compromise anything, but if you’re in a band with three different minds, you’re going to need to bite the bullet and hear out everyone in the band.
Granted, it’s not like Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers were forcing their tunes on the band, either. The drummer was the first one to say that many of Sting’s songs were the best tunes that they could have asked for, and when everyone else was writing a bunch of decent tunes that would have fit on a decent punk rock album, was there really any argument between them and ‘Message in a Bottle’ or ‘Roxanne’?
Those were proven hits, but that was also part of the problem with Sting’s approach. He needed to have those flagship songs that he always came back to, but he also didn’t want to make everything sound too poppy, either. So if he was going to stay with the band, he wanted to be able to make music on his own terms rather than focusing on what the next single should be every time they played.
Zenyatta Mondatta felt like the end of an era for them in a way, and while Ghost in the Machine was one of the best things that they could have made, it’s not like the pop songs ever left. ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ would have been a hit even if they only used Sting’s demo, but when looking through the rest of the album, Sting started to feel a little bit of resentment creeping in during every session.
Not on the part of the band, though. They were still willing to do everything they could to make the song better, but Sting didn’t think that there was any reason for them to make tunes like that anymore. He was already starting to add in new horn parts to everything that they were doing, and with new ideas arriving every single day, Sting knew that there was no reason for him to stay in the band if he didn’t have that much to work with anymore.
Summers and Copeland were great at what they did, but if they weren’t the right people for the song, Sting knew he had no business still being in the band, saying, “Things were getting very horrible. Very dark. Miserable. Our marriages were breaking up, our marriage was breaking up, and yet we had to make another record. Nightmare. Then it hit us that this is how we’re going to have to make our living for the rest of our careers. I started looking for a way out. It was too much of a shock because I said from the beginning the Police will last three albums, and well, we did really.”
And given how much they started to get testy during the Synchronicity sessions, there was no other option left than to go their separate ways. It was great that they stopped at the very height of their career, but if you were to ask Sting, there was no real reason for him to look back at the time that he had with The Police.
That version of him almost seemed like a different person half the time, and when you look through a lot of the biggest tunes he made as a solo artist, he wasn’t looking to copy what he had already done. The point was to make music that was a little bit left of field, and even if he stuck it out with the rest of the band for a while, that didn’t mean that he had to like everything that they were doing.
