“All about my life”: the songs that pushed Sting to end The Police
When The Police first started, there was no doubt that Sting was already a cut above the rest of his bandmates in terms of songwriting.
Every one of them were absolute monsters on their instrument, but since Stewart Copeland had been working on his more punk-leaning songs that were a bit more rudimentary in the early days, it was easier to settle with songs that were clearly going to be hits like ‘Roxanne’ and ‘Message in a Bottle’. But after a few too many years of having disagreements about where the songs should go, Sting only needed a few great songs to realise that he was going to need to cut his band members loose.
Then again, there was never anything malicious about The Police splitting up. They simply weren’t on the same page anymore, and even if they had some of the greatest pop rock tunes of the 1980s already under their belt, it was going to be much more interesting for them to go off and do their own thing. And while Copeland was content to play his drums and work in the realm of scoring, Sting became the darling of adult contemporary the minute that he started working with more jazzy musicians.
That didn’t seem all that out of place considering their love of jazz chords on songs like ‘Murder By Numbers’, but Sting’s songwriting was already delving into too much pop territory for the rest of the band. ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’ was practically perfect by the time that the rest of the band were presented it, and while there was a lot more for them to do on Synchronicity, it’s not like they could get in the way of the pop-flavoured tunes once Sting started pulling them out.
But there was a lot more going on underneath the surface of tracks like ‘King of Pain’. The songs themselves were some of the greatest hooks that the band had in their arsenal up until that point, but since Sting was going through his own personal battles back home, he wasn’t about to start sharing that with his bandmates. He was in the midst of a fairly messy separation, and he doesn’t leave much to the imagination in a lot of his lyrics.
And as much as people love to sing along to tunes like ‘Every Breath You Take’ and ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger’, they tend to forget how sinister they are. ‘Every Breath’ is about a stalker that is trying to assert dominance over someone that he probably doesn’t even know, and while ‘Wrapped’ sounds closer to a love song, the final verse about the pent-up anger he feels and trying to turn the tides in the relationship can only come from someone that has had their heart broken more than a few times.
It was probably cathartic to make these kinds of songs, but Sting felt that he shouldn’t be making this kind of music while putting Copeland and Andy Summers’s face to it, saying, “When I sat down with the band and discussed what we were going to tackle this was all I could write. ‘Every Breath You Take’, ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger’ were all about my life. And so that was the end of the Police because I realised that I couldn’t involve this kind of personal work in a democratic process, at least not about the issues.”
Which makes a lot of sense considering what he was probably going through to get those songs off the ground. It’s one thing to have disagreements with how the song should be played or what instrument is needed for a certain section, but how are you going to argue with someone’s lyrics about their personal relationship if they actually were happening? They already had fights about the more petty things, so when it got personal, there were bound to be some burned bridges if they started attacking each other in that way.
But maybe it was for the best that the band stopped at the time that they did. Sting was already looking to move on to more interesting things in his solo career, and considering how far they had come in just under a decade, the fact that they retired while playing the biggest stadiums in the world is one of the best ways that anyone could have thought of to wrap up their career.
