The complete lie that gave The Police a career: “We decided to pull a scam”
Sting didn’t bother trying to unlearn all the rules of rock and roll once he started making a name for himself with The Police.
The band were already seasoned pros, and even if they weren’t necessarily the simplest band to learn from, they had put in too many hours for them to cower to the same rudimentary chords that every other punk band was trying to do at the time. They were proud to be professional musicians every time they played, but they still had the fake it until you make it mentality whenever they started working on some of their first major tours.
Then again, every band needs to have a little bit of craftiness if they’re going to be one of the biggest bands in the world. No one gets to the top of the music world by using the same set of rules that everyone else does, but even by the standards of the punk scene, the band was certainly going about their music in a more kooky way than most. This was the year that brought the first Van Halen record and even new wave bands like The Cars, but there was no preparing anyone for what ‘Roxanne’ sounded like.
Sting’s pop smarts were what gave them a bit more of an edge compared to every other punk band that they were working with, but it took a long time to catch on. The song was weird enough to stick out whenever it was played on the radio, but when they made their first trek across America, they were playing the same squalors that everyone else was on the circuit. And while they did eventually get to play storied venues like CBGBs, no one was going to talk about how they had one of their best gigs in Poughkeepsie in a random club that no one had heard about.
But it’s not like the band were going down horribly at those gigs, either. It’s nearly impossible for anyone to have that much energy behind their songs and not get the crowd to react, but compared to the punk crowds that were nonstop energy every single time they played, there was always going to be a little bit of a dip when someone started playing a song like ‘So Lonely’ in between bands like The Clash.
At the same time, being a musician is also about being a bit of a salesman, and Sting pulled an expert-level promotional move when working on some of those early shows. Because when you think about it, promotion is all about trying to overexaggerate everything, so if there were little embellished details on everything that their contemporaries were doing, Sting felt that it was better to straight-up lie to the press about how they were going down.
Even though the shows weren’t exactly the best every time they played, Sting remembered presenting it to the papers like they were becoming huge on both sides of the Atlantic, saying, “In England nobody wanted to hear us, so we decided to pull a scam and go to America. So the people came to see out of curiosity why some Englishmen would play in Poughkeepsie or Des Moines and we came back to England with the lie that we had made it in America.”
Any other band would have been incredibly cheeky to get that kind of press for themselves, but when looking at The Police’s trajectory, they were already starting to get some of their classics in. ‘Message in a Bottle’ was starting to drum up a buzz in the underground, and even though they were incorrectly labelled as a teenybopper band when they began working on their primitive music videos, they could at least have fun with the fact that they pulled the wool over people’s eyes to break down the door.
The band didn’t necessarily have that much in common with the punks of the day, but they did know a thing or two about being mischievous, and while Sex Pistols may have tried to cause mayhem, this is what happens when a great rock and roll swindle is done right. They didn’t need to dumb down their musicianship, but sometimes it pays to tell a little white lie to get one’s foot in the door.
