“He’s invincible”: The one musician Bono said made flawless melodies and whose band is only challenged by Nirvana
No matter how hard they try, there’s no such thing as an artist putting together the perfect song.
You might be able to write a hit, you might even be able to have that hit last in the public consciousness for years, or even decades, but flawlessness simply doesn’t exist, even if your name is Bono.
Although many would consider acts like The Beatles or Led Zeppelin to have some of the best tracks of all time under their belt, there’s a good chance that both John Lennon and Jimmy Page will tell you that their biggest triumphs do have their fair share of moments where things don’t always go as planned. Despite any technical errors, nothing gets in the way of a good melody, and Bono considered this artist to have the best hooks in the business.
When looking at the biggest rock bands of all time, the only reason why they were able to reach the top was because of their immaculate pop ears. Any band can spend time in their basement crafting what they think is the perfect riff, but the minute they start focusing on the complexity of the lick instead of the song itself, everything is bound to fall apart.
That’s half the reason why some of U2’s greatest moments work so well. Bono certainly has a history of overthinking in some respects, like on the album Pop, but when looking at where they went on The Joshua Tree, the beauty behind all of those songs comes from the fact that they kept things incredibly simple, whether that’s the gentle strums on ‘With Or Without You’ or using the bare minimum on ‘In God’s Country’ or ‘Bullet the Blue Sky’.
And once they did bother to make a more heightened version of their sound on Achtung Baby, none of them forgot about the power of a good melody. Even though there are what sounds like countless guitars on tunes like ‘Until The End of the World’ or ‘Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses’, both of them could still be played on piano or one acoustic guitar and still hit the listener just as hard.
That approach might work wonders, but Bono’s approach to songwriting was something Sting knew all too well. When looking through the best moments of The Police, he knew exactly when a song could spread out and when it needed to be stripped back to the basics, whether that’s the strange jazzy sections of a deep cut like ‘Murder By Numbers’ or making the most omnipresent pop song of the 1980s with ‘Every Breath You Take’.
Even though The Beatles have had their fair share of jaw-dropping moments, Bono felt that Sting was unmatched in terms of clever hooks, saying, “As a power trio, The Police are challenged for supremacy only by Nirvana and Cream. Sting’s melodies are flawless, but like Paul Simon, he allows the certainly of the melodies to recede in the lyrics. When he’s exploring themes of vulnerability, he’s invincible.”
Sometimes, he didn’t even need to have the same lyrics to keep a great hook going. Sting knew how to recycle some of his greatest melodies when he needed to, and looking at how he turned ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’ into the chant of Dire Straits’ ‘Money for Nothing’ or recycled ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’ for the ending of ‘O My God’ off of Synchronicity.
Still, it was never a matter of Sting being lazy and reusing a hook to get some more zeroes on the end of his check. It was about what served the song, and if the perfect melody had already been written, why not try to soak it up for all it’s worth?
Where should you start with The Police?
Trying to pick a place to start with The Police then there is perhaps no better person to give you advice than the leading man himself.
For Sting, he knew he could rest easy knowing that they went out on top with Synchronicity, saying, “The last two Police albums were about me wanting to write more personal songs and the framework the Police created wasn’t exactly the right one. It was really a power struggle between three massive egos about who would do what, who’d be who. Yet the best record we made was the last one – if an idea was going to get through this process it had to be a good one.”
