The album Stewart Copeland said was the end of The Police: “It was over”
All great rock and roll bands are on the verge of splitting up at all times. They can put up as many fronts as they want in front of the camera, but tension can exist between any band that stays together for too long, and it only takes one person saying the wrong thing for everything to get out of hand.
The Police always managed to keep things somewhat professional, though it was clear that Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers were going to have trouble once Sting started asserting himself more.
But would anyone really complain about having songs like ‘Roxanne’ or ‘Walking on the Moon’ in their arsenal? Copeland may have got his foot in the door early when working under the moniker Klark Kent, but the minute that the band started gaining momentum, it was mucheasier to roll over and play along to tracks like ‘Message in a Bottle’ than suffer through any kind of half-hearted songwriting happening on the rest of the record.
In fact, let’s look at their debut, Outlandos D’Amour, for reference here. There are some fine tunes all around from Sting, but when not looking at some of the singles like ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ or ‘So Lonely’, Summers’s ‘Be My Girl’ was never exactly going to be my girl. No matter how many creeps there are in the world, writing a tune that devolves into a spoken-word piece about a sex doll isn’t the greatest radio fodder.
The band did right by the fans by returning to the studio and cutting Reggatta De Blanc, but Zenyatta Mondatta felt slightly different. Copeland’s ‘Bombs Away’ fits perfectly well among the rest of the tunes, and Summers has some of his most outlandish solos on the record like ‘Driven to Tears’ and the stellar ‘Behind My Camel’, but ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’ was already showing them moving in a different direction.
Sting was becoming the real star of the show, and Copeland knew that he and Summers weren’t going to be needed for much longer, saying, “Looking back, I’m grateful that we got at least five albums, because, really, it was over after the third album. After Zenyatta Mondatta, which was the first time the tension started to appear, and by the time we got to Montserrat for Ghost in the Machine, it was hell on Earth.”
It’s not like the rest of the public didn’t feel like Sting was branching out, either. Most of their music videos up until that point were a bunch of goofy shots of them hamming it up for the camera in any way they knew how, but since ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’ had a grander concept with Sting as the teacher protagonist in the tune, it wasn’t nearly as important to watch the rest of the band.
Also, it’s a very subtle nitpick, but the album titles were a significant change of pace as well. The whole allure behind their first three album titles was that they were a little bit goofy, but after dropping that for Ghost in the Machine and Synchronicity, it definitely felt like they were trying to move towards the pop market a little more, even if Sting was still writing the odd adventurous song like ‘Demolition Man’.
The Police could have easily gone on to make 20 more albums since their breakup, but Copeland was absolutely right when he saw the writing on the wall on the third go-around. It would have been fantastic to see them continue to sell out stadiums, but it was better for them to make something they could be proud of rather than go through the motions for the rest of their lives.
