Who was the real ‘Roxanne’ from the Police song?
‘Roxanne’ may have taken some time to find its audience when it was first released in April 1978, but The Police’s reggae-infused rocker, recorded in tango time, has since become a post-punk classic. It’s now synonymous with sweat-stained dancefloors and teenage drinking games, cementing its place in music history.
It solidified the band in public consciousness upon its re-release in 1979, leading to ten major UK hits – including five number ones – in the four years that followed. The originality of the song’s arrangement and extended chorus made it stand out from pretty much everything else on the radio at the time, along with a glaring piano blunder that the band failed to edit out of the mix. These weren’t the only elements of the song to attract attention, though.
The track is a tale of a woman selling her “body to the night”, with its singer repeatedly trying to convince her not to “put on your red light”. It makes no secret of speaking to and about a prostitute, something which was far from unheard-of in the history of rock music that preceded it but which rarely broached the upper end of the UK singles chart in such an overt manner.
Arctic Monkeys would later reference the song in their 2006 single along similar lines, ‘When the Sun Goes Down’, which marked another rare occasion when the theme of prostitution found chart success. This nod from the Sheffield band over 25 years later demonstrates just how unusual the lyrical content of ‘Roxanne’ was.
So, was Roxanne a real prostitute?
It’s often assumed that the song’s writer Sting had a direct encounter with a specific prostitute while the Police were touring in Paris, on whom he based ‘Roxanne’. In fact, there was no such person, and the prostitutes more generally inspired him the band would hang around the run-down hotel they were staying in.
“In the street were all these belles de nuit, you know, ladies of the night,” Sting recently told Howard Stern. “I’d never been exposed to that, and I was kind of fascinated by it”.
The name for the character in the song came from the French play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmund Rostand. In the same hotel foyer where they noticed call girls standing on the street corner, the Police spotted an old poster for the play which listed its characters, including Bergerac’s distant cousin Roxane.
Since Bergerac himself was a real figure of history, a 16th-century French author of considerable repute, so was the Roxane of the play. Her real-life counterpart lived with his sister Catherine de Bergerac, although she wasn’t an object of his romantic desires as in the dramatised version of their story.
As Sting brought the image of the women turning tricks outside with him to his hotel bed, the female name on the Bergerac poster stuck in his mind. “I kind of conjured one up in my room, as Roxanne.” And the woman he conjured up is more alive than ever, almost half a century later
