The Police period Sting called the “lowest” point of his life
Some of the best music can often come out of the worst situations. Even if artists might go through hell in their personal lives, some have had that uncanny ability to take all of their grief and sorrow and somehow find a way to channel it into musical magic whenever they sit down to write a song. Sting may have already been able to make music like a seasoned pro, but he found himself emotionally descending as The Police were about to hit their stride.
Coming out of the same underground scenes that had birthed punk and new wave, The Police were already a strange oddity before they had hits. Encompassing everything from reggae to rock and roll to jazz into their vocabulary, Sting was ready to try anything he could get his hands on when working on the band’s first handful of records.
While the group had the borderline unnatural ability to turn any track into gold, there was also constant tension getting in the way of the group. Since a songwriter typically knows what the piece is supposed to sound like in their head, Sting would eventually become the dictator for how he wanted some of his songs to go, leaving Stewart Copeland feeling stifled and on the verge of murdering his bandmate.
Then again, that tension was what gave the band their distinct sound. As much as Sting may have wanted to write the traditional style of a pop song or try his hand at a jazzy beat, Copeland was always the free-spirited one trying to bring more virtuosity into the group, all while beating the drums as if they owed him money.
It is the sort of contradiction that only really makes sense once you have lived inside it. Success does not arrive as a gentle reward, it arrives as pressure, as expectation, as the sudden realisation that you cannot step off the treadmill without the whole machine judging you for it. For The Police, the climb to the top did not smooth out the fractures, it amplified them, turning every creative decision into a referendum on control, taste, and ego.
And for Sting in particular, that timing was cruel. He was writing songs built for the biggest rooms on Earth while privately shrinking, trying to keep a straight face as everything that mattered to him started to wobble. That is why Synchronicity feels so charged even in its cleanest moments, because beneath the polish there is a man documenting the cost of getting what you thought you wanted.
As the 1980s saw the arrival of MTV, though, The Police were about to become one of the biggest bands in the world. Since they had already been slowly working to a peak with hits like ‘Every Little She Does is Magic’, Synchronicity shot them into the stratosphere with one hit single after another…and Sting was pissed.
While Sting admitted to loving the idea of playing stadiums around the world, his personal life was in shambles as well, saying, “It was probably my lowest point. You know, because my relations with the rest of the band were going down, my first marriage was failing, so it was a time of abject misery, and yet you had the world at your feet.”
When listening back to the album, Sting is practically putting his heart back together. Aside from the infectious sounds of ‘Every Breath You Take’ or the nonsensical epicness of ‘Synchronicity II’, songs like ‘King of Pain’ and ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger’ are the kind of pieces that can only come from someone who saw his heart shatter and had to take a good look in the mirror afterwards.
If anything, it might have been the raw wounds that made Sting fold the group a few years after the album’s tour had finished. Instead of relying on the tension-fuelled session to get them on the charts, Sting would completely restructure his approach to his solo output, moving into the world of jazz and world music and working with some of the biggest names in the world of fusion. Most people would call Sting crazy for leaving a good thing behind with The Police, but sometimes it’s about taking care of yourself before your band.
