Sting explains what The Police had in common with The Beatles: “Friction can be creative”
Anyone who puts any band on the same level as The Beatles will have to come correct right out of the gate. There’s nothing wrong with being one of the most successful bands in the world, but the kind of chemistry that existed between the Fab Four is the kind of thing that only seems to come once every century, let alone each subsequent generation. Although Sting claimed that The Police had the same type of energy that The Beatles did, it’s probably not as much of a self-congratulatory move as you might think.
After all, the one main difference is that Sting wrote all the songs when working with the new wave architects. Since the rest of the group was more interested in creating textures every time they sat down to write a song, some of the greatest moments in their catalogue usually come from when Sting finds a bulletproof melody and decides to run with it throughout a track.
And when you look at the songs that Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers were cooking up, it’s easy to understand why Sting was the one who got the most attention. That’s not to say that all of them were bad, per se, but when you listen to a song like Copeland’s ‘Any Other Day’, it makes sense why that ended up as a forgotten gem while ‘Walking on the Moon’ or ‘Message in a Bottle’ took centre stage most of the time.
If there’s one thing the groups did have in common, it was the frustration that came with compromise. No musician ever wants to hear that what they were doing isn’t going to work, and having to surrender to your bandmates is always going to be a bitter pill for anyone to swallow.
So, if that kind of tension affected The Beatles as they went to record The White Album, just imagine how it would sound if it was just one guy telling the rest of the group how the songs should go. It’s one thing to be critical of yourself, but when you start crossing the line between being a bandleader and treating your fellow musicians like hired guns, it’s going to be a lot more frustrating.
In fact, Sting doesn’t deny that kind of tension. If anything, he thought that the same tension The Beatles had is what made The Police so revered, telling David Sheff, “Certainly it was an important chemistry. Friction can be creative. I think the reason The Beatles were such a wonderful group is that they had two songwriters of almost equal stature sparking each other off–amazing competition and that is why they were such a phenomenon.”
Although Sting didn’t have someone to serve as a Lennon to his McCartney throughout his career, there’s a lot to be said about the way that both The Police and The Beatles worked together. Compared to other bands that sounded like they could fall apart at any moment if the timing was off, both acts had their music down to some form of telepathy half the time, almost operating like a single entity whenever they were onstage. That kind of magic might not have been long for this world, but having that kind of creative synergy with one’s mates is a true art.
