Murder trials and endless torment: why the music industry wouldn’t release The Police’s biggest hit today
Sometimes, when there is a concept behind a song, it can be easy for an artist to lose themselves within that concept, to the point that people cannot tell the difference between where the story begins and the song itself ends. This is what happened with The Police and their track ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’. Though Sting has confessed that it was an opportunity for the band to flex their storytelling muscles, a lot of people turn their noses up at the track to the point a lot of listeners don’t think it would be released today.
The song is incredibly catchy and instantly recognisable as one of the band’s biggest hits; however, because of its controversial subject matter, many people struggle to get on board with it. In it, Sting sings about a taboo relationship between a teacher and one of his students, as the teacher tries to resist the urge to form a romantic relationship with the track’s muse.
Sting has previously confirmed that the intention behind the piece was to write a Lolita-style story to music; he even references the book in the song with the line, “It’s no use, he sees her / He starts to shake and cough / Just like the old man in / That book by Nabokov.”
“You have to remember we were blonde bombshells at the time, and most of our fans were young girls, so I started roleplaying a bit…” Sting said when asked what inspired him to write the controversial lyrics. “To be frank,” he said, “It was right in our market. A lot of teenage girls were buying our records. So the idea was, let’s write a Lolita story.”
The song is considered controversial not only because of the lyrics but also because of how the lyrics have been used. For instance, Chris Dawson was an ex-rugby league player and PE teacher who started having an affair with one of his students, Joanne Curtis. This would be controversial on its own; however, on February 18th, 1982, Dawson rang the police to report the disappearance of his wife, Lynette. Two days after Lynette went missing, he asked Joanne Curtis if she wanted to move in with him.
Dawson always said that his wife had run away to join a commune after the two of them had marital problems. Her body was never found, but two coronial inquests were carried out in 2001 and 2003, both of which ruled that a known person must have murdered Lynette.
The suspicion surrounding Chris was massive, especially given how quickly he moved on following his wife supposedly running away. Joanne Curtis’s sister was on the receiving end of a lot of bullying at school because of the situation, where other children would sing the lyrics for ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’ to her. The lyrics were very fitting given Dawson’s affair with a pupil, and all aspects of the case, including the persistent bullying, were discussed by journalists and lawyers on the podcast series The Teacher’s Pet. When they spoke about the track, they all came to the same conclusion: it wouldn’t be released today.
“It’s astonishing to think today whether it would pass the pub test in 2022,” they said, “Probably not; you’ve got band members smoking, you’ve got young women in tight sweaters, it reeks of sexuality.”
It’s difficult to decide whether the song would manage to be released today as while the lyrics are disturbing, it’s intentionally written with a twisted narrative in mind. It’s the equivalent of someone making a movie from a villain’s point of view or doing the same with a piece of literature. It’s always been more challenging for people to separate the message conveyed within music because of how much we usually connect to it. Hence, The Police hit might just have had an entirely different trajectory in the public sphere if it came out today.
