‘Invisible Sun’: The most genius song Sting ever wrote
All the love in the world to the guy, but Sting really, really wants people to think he’s a genius.
To be clear, I don’t really hold that against him. All of us want to be viewed as our best selves. We want to be seen as kind, generous, funny and, yes, smart. Sure, you can judge someone for that if you want to, but that is the kind of behaviour you get from someone who also wants to come across as perceptive, radical and, that word again: smart.
The problem is that for all of Sting’s popularity, both solo and with The Police, that desire to be taken seriously as an intellectual often takes on a slightly crass form. Rather than writing lyrics that are actually incisive and witty, the man born Gordon Sumner tends to just clunkily shout out other writers in his lyrics. Shoehorning a reference to “that famous book by Nabokov” in ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’ and building ‘Bring On the Night’ around a few choice quotes nicked from TS Eliot.
If anything, the lyric that might just be Sting’s most genius moment is ‘Every Breath You Take’. It takes a hell of a mind to write a song from the perspective of an obsessed, dangerous stalker and have it become an all-time classic love song that’s been played for many weddings’ first dances. Yet, that’s exactly what he did. Portraying a horror story from its antagonist’s perspective so that it then becomes a love story.
However, considering how confused Sting gets when people tell him that ‘Every Breath You Take’ is the song they share with their sweetheart, one wonders how intentional that was. Chances are, the man just wanted to write a song about a stalker, but his generational ability as a melody-writer got in the way. No, the most genius moment in Sting’s considerable songwriting back catalogue comes from the album before ‘Every Breath You Take’ took over the world.
What makes the most genius song by Sting?
‘Invisible Sun’ was one of the first moments that The Police got explicitly political on record. The band had always had a social conscience. Their 1980 record, Zenyatta Mondatta, also had ‘Driven to Tears’, where Sting somewhat vaguely laments at class disparity and how confusing and upsetting it all is. However, ‘Invisible Sun’ is something much deeper and richer that actually reckons with the events of the day rather than throw up its hands in confusion of it all.
The track was written and released at the height of The Troubles, and was directly inspired by the 1981 hunger strikes in Belfast. Unlike ‘Driven to Tears’, the song directly reckons with the events it inspired, musing on how people living under government oppression or in war-torn home countries like Beirut find the will and hope to not only continue fighting but living at all, using the evocative metaphor of the invisible sun giving light and hope to those people that no one else can see.
There are the usual smart-arse references that Sting tends to dot his songwriting with, too; however, the point isn’t to show just how well-read and worldly he is. By specifically saying the line “lookin’ at the barrel of an Armalite”, he is shouting out the brand of rifles used by paramilitary organisations all over the world, most notably the IRA. This gives the song a specificity and a directness without actually needing to be so blunt as to talk about the Irish Republican Army by name.
All this, combined with the song’s uncharacteristically heavy, almost goth-tinged production, makes this one of the standout moments not only in the back catalogue of The Police, but Sting as well.
