The “inconsistent” Police album Sting thought could have been much better
Some of the best music in history has come from the worst dynamics in the studio. The sessions for The Police’s Synchronicity, for instance, were filled with intense disagreements and fallouts, while Sting started to experience a different kind of strain that came with the desire to explore different endeavours.
This was present through many of their projects, not just Synchronicity. After all, it doesn’t take an expert to notice that Sting was always the kind of musician who would eventually break free and go solo, his vision too unique to ever thrive in a group setting for too long. The others knew it too; Sting was always a natural leader, often at the expense of the other members’ comfort and sanity.
Still, his desire for control might have caused tensions, but he also knew he’d eventually outgrow the band one day and want to spread his wings elsewhere. In fact, he once said that no “grown man” can be in a band because it’s a “teenage gig”. According to the musician, staying put “doesn’t let you evolve”, which is precisely what he yearned for from day one.
That said, his work in the band remains some of his best. From Outlandos d’Amour, the energy and genre-blending through tracks like ‘Roxanne’ and ‘Next to You’ proved he was never one to shy away from risks, and across the following records, Reggatta de Blanc and Zenyatta Mondatta, he took the earlier sessions as learning curves and allowed them to inform more complex lyric-writing and better sonic cohesion.
Of course, everybody knows that Sychronicity represents the band at their creative best, but everything you hear on that record already existed elsewhere, often in subtler, less refined versions. This is natural when you’re in a band; each record often builds on the last, and especially for someone like Sting, constantly evolving and moving is usually the only way forward.
During the creation of the first record, Sting implemented this mindset by incorporating his interests, namely reggae, which immediately gave the rock sound a sophisticated edge. It’s not perfect, a little strange in its pacing in places, but it did well to provide the basic framework for The Police’s positioning and offering in the rock landscape at the time, all while allowing Sting a springboard to effectively work on something bigger and better for the second record.
Reflecting on these changes in 1979, Sting described how Regatta de Blanc differed from Outlandos d’Amour, specifically referring to how they’d been able to refine their sound from everything they’d learned from the first project. “Like the first album, we produced it ourselves because we don’t really believe in producers,” he said, “but because it’s our second album, we’ve actually learned a few tricks.”
He went on, “We’ve grown up as producers; therefore, the sound on the album is 100% better than it was on Outlandos d’Amour. It was slightly inconsistent on Outlandos, we thought. We’ve learned a lot of tricks. The songs are better, I feel. We’re much more proud of the album than we were of the last one. We’re very, very confident about it.”
These differences are clear: with songs like ‘Message in a Bottle’, ‘Walking on the Moon’, and ‘Bring On the Night’, the band made it clear how advanced they’d become, probably also likely because they were feeling more laidback than they were before, which says a lot considering many of their work emerged from the depths of frayed dynamics. With Regatta, however, things flowed naturally, with some songs even coming together with little rehearsal beforehand.
