“We beat the crap out of each other”: The album The Police hated making
It admittedly sounds extremely flippant to say that being in one of the biggest bands in the world must be an inordinately tough job, but go with me. Amid all the luxury and rosy proclivities that fame affords, there’s an unspeakable amount of pressure that goes with it to ensure that every note you hit is pitch perfect and every album a golden history maker. Some bands thrive under the challenge, but so many others falter and crack under the stress. Just ask The Police.
You’d think with a string of hit albums and a genre-defining agenda under their belts, Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland would be pretty happy with their lot. But once again, the pressure to deliver became less of an enticing chalice and more of an oppressive weight over time, meaning that by the time the fifth album Synchronicity rolled around in 1983, the previously free-flowing ride of producing a hit record for the new wave was their toughest surf to catch.
Like many bands, the effects of this pressure manifested itself in some pretty fiery animosity towards one another, risking being sucked into potentially fatal voids. With the benefit of hindsight, of course, the band could recognise how their blazing trajectory to this point was almost a recipe for disaster, as they later recalled: “Ghost in the Machine had taken us into stadiums and then Synchronicity made us even bigger, but the recording sessions were very dark.”
However, it wasn’t just “dark” in the sense of the mood, but also violent tensions. They added: “We beat the crap out of each other. We’ve laughed about it since, but going back into that black hole isn’t something we tended towards.” Having thankfully narrowly avoided being sucked into a irretrievable vortex in the recording process, unfortunately for the band, despite their misgivings, they were just too good a trio of rockers to not produce gold dust – and thus, Synchronicity propelled them to even further unfathomable heights.
But in many ways, their fated story drew a few too many parallels to the Greek fable of Icarus, as flying too close to the sun was exactly what led to their downfall. The sun in question could be anything from the transatlantic number one album, the Grammys haul, or the heights of Shea Stadium, but on top of having hated making the album, the riches that Synchronicity lavished over The Police ultimately burned too bright, and subsequently led to their final fracturing.
While you can hardly imagine that the band regretted the wall-to-wall critical rapture that the album managed to garner, it provides yet another example of a classic record created by an outfit who were set to fall apart. It does, however, stand to one fact – that if you’re a good enough musician, it really doesn’t matter what may be going on behind the scenes, as you’re still able to smash out the hits.
In the end, Synchronicity ironically was the precise thing that The Police had a distinct lack of when recording their final album. But even through all the trials and tribulations, it was testament to their strength, both individually and collectively, that they were still able to present an image to the world of coming out on top – even if the reality was a lot more ugly.
