The messy break-up of The Police
A few factors led to the 1984 breakup of The Police. Despite being at the height of their fame when they disbanded, internal disagreements continued to cause tension, and their differing ages also played a fundamental role. Unlike a majority of bands who rose up in the same scenes, The Police didn’t grow up together. Sting, who was nearly a decade younger than guitarist Andy Summers, always considered being in a band a young man’s game, and in that sense, they were doomed to fail.
“I don’t think any grown man can be in a band, actually,” Sting once told Mojo. “A band is a teenage gang. Who wants to be in a teenage gang when you’re knocking 70? It doesn’t allow you to evolve.” Naturally, it never presented itself as an issue in the early days. After settling on a line-up of Sting, Stewart Copeland, and Andy Summers in 1977, the power trio forged a fierce bond on the club circuit.
The band enjoyed a string of commercial hits with the likes of ‘Message In A Bottle’ and ‘Every Breath You Take‘, but Sting came to find the format of the group somewhat stifling. “The three-piece is a wonderful vehicle but it’s limited; drums, bass, and guitar,” he explained. “I think we achieved an amazing amount of stuff in the short time we were together. Very unique, but I just wanted a broader palette because I was song-driven and not necessarily band-driven.”
With the hit singles came a quiet tension. Sting was accused of dominating the songwriting, which Copeland and Summers wanted to contribute to more. They were selling out stadiums but were totally unable to delegate when it came to writing. Copeland saw some of Sting’s best tracks as a “totally wasted opportunity” for them to evolve as a band despite the money they made.
Sting’s take was that the songs conceived by Copeland and Summers simply weren’t as good as his own, which created a noticeable divide. “Part of the frustration was that [they] were driven to write,” the frontman said in 2007. “It’s difficult to tell somebody it’s not a good song, and it was usually me.”
He wasn’t shy at dismissing his bandmate’s efforts either, once saying he could have written entire albums worth of material but, instead, had to entertain their songs. “Explaining to someone why their song isn’t working is a bit like saying their girlfriend’s ugly,” Sting commented. “It’s a very personal thing. That pain was something I didn’t want to go through anymore”. But they struggled on, effectively disbanding at the end of a 105-show run for the Synchronicity tour in 1984, after Sting felt the band had reached their personal “Everest” and should quit while they were ahead.
Reflecting on the breakup in 2020, he mused that the band began as a democracy and then spiralled into the opposite, describing its final moments as a “benign dictatorship”.
