The reason The Police wasn’t a democracy, according to Sting
“A band is a democracy,” Sting proclaimed in 2016. If only he felt as though The Police had lived by this mantra.
Now, as much as we know this isn’t true, a lot of bands have managed to exist on relatively democratic terms, with various members sharing songwriting duties, and those who aren’t knowing their place in the band as auxiliary parts. For an example of where democracy in a band dynamic has worked, The Band are a pretty strong example, with four members who all wrote songs and took turns to contribute lead vocals. This, of course, could be an anomalous example, but the fact that it works at least gives some credence to what Sting is insinuating.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band was ultimately not a democracy, and was entirely governed by the tyrannical rule of Don Van Vliet, the Captain himself. Nobody else dared to try and steer the ship away from his singular vision, and they knew not to meddle with his madcap ideas of how his music should sound. This is an example of a band with a clear leader, and one who wouldn’t dare allow the other members of the band to contribute without his explicit permission.
However, in the case of The Police, it was somewhat deceiving, and while it may have seemed to have been equal between the three members of the group, Sting thought that someone else was pulling the strings throughout his entire time working with the new wave act.
Their debut album, Outlandos d’Amour, performed relatively well for a new band who had had little mainstream exposure, but it was with their second album that they were set on their way, with Regatta de Blanc being the first of four consecutive albums that The Police put out to reach number one in the charts in the UK. The only issue is, these five albums are all the band would release before Sting decided that he’d much prefer to work alone, and as a result, everything collapsed before him.
This, along with the fact that he was the frontman and arguable face of the band, is perhaps why you’d assume that Sting was the leader of the group, making Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland follow his every move, but in his 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, he was a lot more accusatory of another member for having been the most controlling contributor.
“A band is a democracy,” he began, before clarifying, “Or the semblance of democracy. You have to pretend more in a band”.
Speaking about their 2007 reunion, he noted, “It was a return back to that forced democracy and reminded me just why I’m not in the band. It was Stewart’s band. He started it, he named it, and it was his concept.” When asked if there was any sense of democracy when the band released their final answer, his response was short and sweet: “No”.
While there may have been no democratic process in the band, the fact that Sting left the band to pursue a solo career also suggests that he also didn’t want to be involved in a democracy, but was also the one who didn’t want to be governed by an autocratic figure telling him what to do every step of the way.
