The 1985 album that pushed Sting to breaking point: “Completely and utterly mad”
Any Sting project needed to have a little something more than just a couple of good songs to get past his radar.
He wanted to make music that was a lot more adventurous than everything else that he heard on the radio, and even if there were a few tunes that were still hits, it wasn’t like he was looking to get massive radio play off of his more jazzy records every time he walked into the studio. Each of those projects felt like a new creative endeavour for him, but there were more than a few times when he felt like he barely held onto his sanity half the time he walked into the room.
It was bad enough trying to find a way to find a way to work with The Police, but when Sting first started his solo career, it seemed like he finally had the freedom he had been looking for. Everyone knew that he was going to at least put out something that sounded great, but now that he didn’t have to answer to Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, the whole album was bound to start going well, right? Well, not exactly.
Every single artist normally has that moment where they think they can do it all, and while Sting could certainly make an entire album by himself and still look like one of the greatest artists in the world, getting all his ideas was bound to be a little bit difficult. He had a vision for what he wanted his music to be, and even if there were some obstacles in the way from time to time, the hardest challenges were always in finding the right musicians for every single song.
Dream of the Blue Turtles was a stellar record, but a lot of that came from meticulously finding what the songs needed every time they jammed. He had enough awareness to realise where the melody needed to go on tunes like ‘If You Love Somebody Set Them Free’, but finding the right kind of approach doesn’t always happen easily. And when Sting got too in his head about what a song needed, he admitted that there were moments where he started to crack up in the studio.
And while every musician has those moments where they seem to go a bit over the edge, you would have thought that Sting was very disturbed based on what he was doing during the making of his solo debut, saying, “I really do have my moments of madness, though few people are privy to them. It takes one of the people close to me to bring me out of myself. I’ve been known to roll on the floor for half an hour – it comes out in the studio sometimes, like in the song.”
“The Dream of the Blue Turtles, which started with me rolling around for 20 minutes–completely and utterly mad, cackling, for no apparent reason. It’s a side I show to only a few friends.”
Sting
Then again, it’s not like Sting was ever trying to push himself to the brink like that all of the time. Sometimes the songs demanded a lot more out of him than he thought, and while it might have been a daunting task worthy of him rolling himself into a ball on the floor, it was better for him to relieve that tension than try his best to work through whatever obstacles that he was coming up against with his bandmates.
It’s not like the record doesn’t speak for itself, though. ‘Russians’ and ‘If You Love Somebody’ might be the bigger singles from the project, but when you look at the kind of masterpiece ‘Fortress Around Your Heart’ became, Sting was more than willing to put himself through his paces and find the exact right melody to put behind any of his songs, even if he was using chords that you wouldn’t normally find in a pop song.
It took him until records like Ten Summoner’s Tales to realise that he could still have fun playing this kind of music, but for someone starting their solo career, it’s almost shocking that Sting’s mental troubles were the only problem facing him. Anyone else would have been pulling their hair out trying to find out what the next song should be, but Sting knew that if he took a minute to himself, he was going to have something he could be proud of by the time the record came out.
