The 1983 hit for The Police that Sting considers a “nasty little song”
By the early 1980s, The Police had jumped from punk-reggae underground stars to mainstream pop favourites.
Hit singles like ‘Message In a Bottle’ and ‘Walking on the Moon’ had already hit number one on the UK Singles Chart, while ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’ and ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ crept into the American top ten. But The Police needed something transcendent to make them the biggest band in the world. They needed ‘Every Breath You Take’.
The lead single from what would eventually be the final Police album, 1983’s Synchronicity, ‘Every Breath You Take’, was a cross-continental number one hit that enjoyed massive crossover success. The moody ballad seemed to have a dark sense of romance about it, one that translated to fans and casual listeners alike. Of course, that meant nothing to Sting, who knew that the obsession and compulsion behind the song was more dangerous and creepy than romantic.
The confusion surrounding ‘Every Breath You Take’ has endured for decades, largely because the music never sounds as threatening as the narrator. Andy Summers’ chiming guitar line and the restrained rhythm section create an atmosphere that feels elegant and reflective rather than unsettling, making it easy to overlook the possessive language hidden in plain sight.
It became one of those rare songs where the melody and lyrics seem to be pulling in opposite directions. Listeners heard tenderness, while Sting had written something far closer to psychological obsession, creating a disconnect that has followed the track ever since.
“I think it’s a nasty little song, really rather evil,” Sting told the NME in 1983. “It’s about jealousy and surveillance and ownership… I think the ambiguity is intrinsic in the song however you treat it because the words are so sadistic.”
“On one level, it’s a nice long song with the classic relative minor chords, and underneath there’s this distasteful character talking about watching every move. I enjoy that ambiguity,” he added. “I watched Andy Gibb singing it with some girl on TV a couple of weeks ago, very loving, and totally misinterpreting it. (Laughter) I could still hear the words, which aren’t about love at all. I pissed myself laughing.”
Perhaps the gentle push-and-pull of the song’s arrangement covered up those sinister thoughts lurking at the centre of the lyrics. Sting himself believed that the song’s composition kept the circular nature of the lyrics going in an infinite loop, even though that wasn’t his original intention.
“The song has the standard structure of a pop ballad, but there is no harmonic development after the middle eight, no release of emotions or change in the point of view of the protagonist,” the writer wrote in his book Lyrics By Sting. “He is trapped in his circular obsessions. Of course, I wasn’t aware of any of this. I thought I was just writing a hit song, and indeed, it became one of the songs that defined the ’80s, and, by accident, the perfect soundtrack for Reagan’s Star Wars fantasy of control and seduction.”
That irony extended beyond the audience to the band itself. While the single elevated The Police to a commercial level few groups ever experience, not everyone involved believed they had captured the song in the best possible way. By the time Synchronicity was being recorded, relations between Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland had become increasingly strained, with creative disagreements bubbling beneath almost every session.
The polished minimalism that helped make ‘Every Breath You Take’ such a global success also left Copeland wondering whether the band had sacrificed too much of its personality in pursuit of a perfect pop record.
Drummer Stewart Copeland also had his own gripes with ‘Every Breath You Take’. Although he had been known for his wild mix of world beats, off-kilter rhythms, and hard-hitting rock drumming, Copeland’s drum part on ‘Every Breath You Take’ was perhaps his most subdued. Copeland didn’t see any of his own identity in ‘Every Breath You Take’ and felt like the song was more generic as a result.
“In my humble opinion, this is Sting’s best song with the worst arrangement,” Copeland told Revolver in 2000. “I think Sting could have had any other group do this song and it would have been better than our version – except for Andy’s brilliant guitar part. Basically, there’s an utter lack of groove. It’s a totally wasted opportunity for our band. Even though we made gazillions off of it, and it’s the biggest hit we ever had, when I listen to this recording, I think ‘God, what a bunch of assholes we were!'”
“Sting was a master of bait and switch,” he added in a 2019 SongFacts interview. “I was with him a couple of weeks ago doing a documentary about music and I asked him, ‘Why didn’t you make ‘Every Breath You Take’ a nice song that people could get married to? What’s the matter with you?,’ and we laughed.”
Check out ‘Every Breath You Take’ down below.
