The Police song Sting tried to destroy: “I hated that song so much”
There is no good art without bad art, but to get to the real juicy stuff, you must clear a whole load of crap your artistic intuition is forcing you to produce, and despite being one of the most popular bands of their time, The Police weren’t safe from this fate either.
It was a fate exacerbated by the early success of hits like 1978’s ‘Roxanne’, which still rattles through most karaoke joints and old-school boozers up and down England. When you produce something so great, so widely loved, so early on, you’re always operating in the dizziness of your own shadow.
Famously, the band split in 1984, but it was during the creative process for their third album, 1980’s Zenyatta Mondatta, that things reached a fever pitch. We might be aware that some crap must come out on the guitar before the good stuff, sure, but pretentious frontman Sting believed that he was immune to this reality. Worse for his bandmates, he believed that they were doomed to terrible songwriting all the time, so while he skipped around the muck, they were forced to roll in it.
Amid the creative birth of Zenyatta Mondatta, guitarist Andy Summers found himself directly in the firing line of Sting’s songwriting self-righteousness, who had zeroed in on one of Summers’ self-written pieces: the fully instrumental ‘Behind My Camel’.
On the track, a slow drumbeat pulls the music forward with a glam-rock adjacent guitar riff that conjures a strange, alien mood. The bass is steady, lethargic, and the drums are played almost exclusively on the hi-hats, making for a surreal soundscape, almost like a shot in the dark.
Sting wasn’t intent on letting go of his hatred for the sub-three-minute piece, a fact he revealed in 2000 in a conversation with Revolver: “I hated that song so much that, one day when I was in the studio, I found the tape lying on the table”.
He might have tried to stop himself for his next move, so drastic and full of resentment, it was obvious the band wouldn’t see another four years; nevertheless, he went ahead and got his hands dirty, if only to make a point. He shared, “So I took it around the back of the studio and actually buried it in the garden”. The gall, the showmanship, the drama, the commitment to an idea that you’re better than your own bandmates, it truly was an outrageous display.
Summers was having none of it, of course, defiant and more than a little pissed off, he dug the tape up, and it ended up on the album. Happily, the man can be as smug as he likes for his work on the track, as it ended up winning a Grammy Award for ‘Best Rock Instrumental Performance’ in 1982. Funnily enough, Sting had refused to play on the track, and Stewart Copeland admitted he only played drums because there wasn’t anybody else to do it.
I might have some idea why Sting went to such crazy lengths, as, according to the drummer, their third album was when they started to really feel the industry breathing down their neck. He exclusively told Far Out, “Zenyatta was when we first started to feel the pressure of commercial success. The stakes were now higher. Previously, there hadn’t been any stakes. It was us three doing what we thought was cool. Now there was a machine to feed; it was important to a lot of people. So that was the first feeling that this wasn’t our personal property anymore.”
