The album Sting said birthed The Police: “That was where it all clicked”
Long before there were lawsuits and they hated each other’s guts, The Police were truly a very tight unit. Let’s not forget that, at least for a short-lived time, they were undeniably the biggest band in the world.
As a trio, there was very little room for error in masking your flaws or pitfalls, and as such, it meant that each Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland, had no choice but to master their own individual contributions to the band and constantly bring their A game to the table. You can see how, in the long run, this was always bound to end in disaster as the tensions began to fray, but in its heyday, it truly meant they were the absolute cream of the crop.
This was blatantly showcased in the fact that they produced merely five albums in the space of five years, like a non-stop super machine of rock. Granted, it wasn’t as though they were aware of this clock ticking quickly down on their tenure right from the beginning, but it proved that the room for trial and error was minimal, and basically, they had to get things right from the very first note.
In this sense, given how stratospheric The Police became in such a limited timeframe, they must have found their true essence as a band at a very early stage. According to Sting himself, that arrived with their second album Reggatta de Blanc, released in 1979, as it truly defined everything that The Police were set to become and would be remembered by.
“That was where it all clicked,” the frontman later reflected. “There was so much happening in my writing and singing, Stewart’s and Andy’s playing, and suddenly it all meshed together. We had reggae influences in our vocabulary and they became synthesised into our infrastructure until it was utterly part of our sound and you couldn’t really call it reggae anymore. It was just the way we played.”
That weaving of both explicit and implicit reggae tones, as well as that of new wave, punk, and jazz, was truly what made The Police harbour their entirely distinct sound, and thus win over the hearts of the world. The issue was trying not to force it too hard, lest it became overly manufactured. Sting discussed the evolution of starting by replicating others’ sounds and then finding your own, to which he said, “’Reggatta’ was that moment for us.”
But overexcitement ensued after that. Then we got caught up in the whole business of becoming a ‘successful rock group’ and almost lost it,” he admitted. “We calmed down after that, but we had to work hard to get back into that serendipitous state again.”
Maybe this was the exact reason The Police were never destined to last very long – because, regardless of what anyone says, there’s a limit to how far innovation can go.
Of course, there’s many debates to be had around this, not least from the members of the band themselves, but it does provide some potent food for thought. Perhaps the key to The Police’s success was simultaneously the elixir of their downfall, because in always pushing for something new, they also pushed each other to the limit.
