The secret, unexpected reference tucked inside a Sting hit: “It really tickles me”
It might be strange to think about the fact that one of Sting’s best songs was based on a lighthearted quip about committing a crime. Well, not exactly, but when he met raconteur Quentin Crisp, who’d just moved to New York from London, he told the musician he couldn’t wait to receive “his naturalisation papers so that I can commit a crime and not be deported”. Sting, obviously, instantly felt the wheels turning.
Any master of abstraction would have done what Sting did in that moment and seen it as fodder for a story, a stranger-than-fiction premise that talked of a person alienated by their own town, ostracised because it wasn’t home, an outsider who stuck out because they didn’t feel the part. But there’s a lightheartedness there too, in the charming beats of ‘Englishman in New York’, the type that mirrored Crisp’s nonchalant response to Sting’s question about what crime he wanted to commit.
“Something glamorous, non-violent, with a dash of style,” Crisp had said. “Crime is so rarely glamorous these days.”
It also reflected Sting’s desire to cling to playfulness as a way to distract himself from the fact that homesickness is actually pretty harrowing, something he also experienced when he moved to New York and sought out English pubs, just to shout at football matches on screen alongside his fellow Northerners amid the haze of malaise.
“We are a superstitious and primitive tribe,” he wrote in Lyrics By Sting, “When the match was over, we’d fade back into the city like ghosts.” This striving for underlying playfulness – the self-depracating type only the English understand – extended to specific choices he made for the song, beneath the obvious rhythms of his familiar reggae-inspired jaunts and into the deeper easter eggs that made it brim with layered meaning.
One that people might not immediately detect is the inclusion of ‘God Save The Queen’, an obvious quip at British pretentiousness underscored by a fond appreciation for something so quintessentially home, no matter how strange a reference it may seem. “One of my favourite little jokes is from an ‘Englishman In New York,’ where at one point we’re playing ‘God Save The Queen’ in a minor key,” Sting told Guitar in 1996. “It really tickles me, but nobody else hears it!”
So subtle it almost entirely fades in, the reference tucks itself well beneath the restless lilt of moving through a city you’re not familiar with, like there are as many references packed in (jazz, classical, reggae, rock, pop…) as things going on down the street, mirroring the overwhelm of New York and the desire to fade away from it all. All of this, of course, was entirely intentional: “I wanted to give the impression of somebody walking down the street, passing different musical events,” he told Musician in 1987.
This works well, especially when it all breaks down into chaos during the mid-section, like simultaneously being lost in your thoughts and coming across different kinds of music as each shop passes by, the various experiences doing little to distract from the hooks of disillusionment. The kind that Sting recognised in Crisp, only subverted to reflect his own perils, walking as an alien among people who seem to know it well.
