The bands that “motivated” Sting to become a star
Sting always prided himself on being a proper musician throughout his time in The Police.
In an age when people were going back to the roots of what rock and roll could be, the frontman was more than happy to show off his knowledge of music theory, but that didn’t go along with being the coolest person in the world.
Then again, the term ‘coolness’ should never enter a band’s vocabulary when working in the studio. Everyone should be going for a sound that they like, and once the more trendy sounds start to creep in, that’s normally when bands start chasing the big money rather than worry about any kind of artistic credibility. But no matter which decade it was in, ‘Roxanne’ was always going to be a mainstream hit.
Throughout the group’s career, Sting’s strange way with melody and unusual chord voicings always set him apart from everyone else in rock and roll. He wasn’t afraid of sounding musically mature, but since the punk movement had started, there were a lot more people that preferred that everyone stick to the same fistful of chords that everyone starts with and make the most of that.
And given how much The Police were influenced by punk, it’s strange to think that they were somewhat of a pariah of the industry. Most people could put up with the anger in a song like ‘Next To You’, but it was a lot harder to forgive their punk ideals when listening to tracks like ‘Walking on the Moon’, even if Stewart Copeland’s drums sounded perfect playing off of Andy Summers’s guitar.
But it only took one bad night for Sting to turn his back on punk and get a fire in his belly, saying, “One thing made me want to be successful more than anything else – there was this big bash held for all the new bands and The Stranglers, Sex Pistols, Clash, Ramones, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello and the Boomtown Rats were all invited, but we weren’t. We went anyway but when we arrived they wouldn’t let us in because we weren’t cool. That experience motivated me to succeed.”
All’s fair in love and rock and roll, but that sense of competition may not have been totally out of disrespect. People like Paul Simonon would occasionally be friendly with Sting and talk about bass technique, but it a lot easier for someone like John Lydon to look at The Police, pick up on the fretless bass that Sting was playing, and convince himself they were playing strange jazzy rock and roll.
Nothing could have been further from the truth in the beginning, though. Yes, there were some strange jazz chords that would come later, but there’s a strict anything-goes mentality on those early records, fitting somewhere between the garage rock sounds of their contemporaries and the musicality that you would get from bands like the Beatles or Cream.
So, really, what Sting was doing may have been one of the greatest punk rock statements anyone could have made at the time. After all, the genre prided itself on not going along with the crowd, so if people like Sex Pistols and The Clash were rebelling against the corporate side of rock, this was Sting rebelling against the rebellion that he held so much respect for.
