THE POLICE
Produced by Hugh Padgham and The Police
THE POLICE:
Sting: Lead and backing vocals, bass guitar, acoustic guitars, keyboards, horns
Andy Summers: Acoustic and electric guitars, piano, keyboards, vocals
Stewart Copeland: Drums, percussion, keyboards, vocals
All music and lyrics by Sting except...
"Mother" music and lyrics by Andy Summers
"Miss Grandenko" music and lyrics by Stewart Copeland
Released June 1, 1983
The Summer of 1983 was a time of transformation and milestones for me. I was 14 years old and had just completed a miserable year of 8th grade and was awaiting what would hopefully be better days to come at the dawn of high school. It was the Summer when I obtained my very first job (as a Summer school classroom assistant), as well as my Social Security card and number. It was the Summer when I experienced the epiphany of a potential collegiate future when I visited my beloved Madison, WI for the very first time. It was the Summer when Luke Skywalker brought balance to the Force, the Griswold's took their first vacation (thus quietly introducing my soul to the wit and witticisms of John Hughes), and the triumvirate of Tom Cruise, Rebecca DeMornay and Tangerine Dream completely rechristened the significance and majesty of Chicago's booming "L" trains. But, when I think back to the Summer of 1983, there is one artifact that stands so supremely tall for me, for then, as well as for now. 1983 was the Summer of "Synchronicity."
The Police's "Synchronicity," their fifth and what would ultimately become their swan song, is one of the greatest albums I have ever had the pleasure to experience within my lifetime. It is a deeply propulsive, gloriously eclectic, unapologetically experimental, instantly accessible, musically dexterous, supremely melodic, richly sophisticated and sublimely textured release that served as the culmination of the band's musical journey as well as provided a towering new peak in Sting's songwriting and produced the most luxurious fruits born from the band's legendary inter-political tensions and creative friction. The more that I have thought about that album over the years, I am amazed that it was such a high flying chart topper in the first place but such was the music scene in the early 1980's, when artistry could stand shoulder to shoulder with music industry commerce, an industry I certainly supported as I bought that album TWICE that Summer. Believe me, dear readers and listeners, I wore that album OUT!
As with many of you, I was introduced to The Police through the radio airwaves with all of the songs that are now most familiar and even iconic. Songs (and music videos) like "Roxanne," "Message In A Bottle," "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic," "Can't Stand Losing You," 'De Doo Doo Doo, De Da Da Da" and others all proved that the band could craft selections that were simultaneously idiosyncratic and instantly infectious. But, it was when I first heard a full album that I realized that The Police had opened me up to an entirely adventurous new musical world.
The first album by The Police I purchased was a copy of the band's fourth release, "Ghost In The Machine" (released October 2, 1981), mainly on a whim as I spent an afternoon browsing around the long defunct JR's Music Shop. Never will I forget the look on the record store clerk's face when I brought the cassette to the counter. He just looked at the album with the deepest of knowing gazes and then, he looked directly at me, smiled and stated with cool emphasis, "This is a reaaaaallly good record, man." While I didn't fully "get it" on first listen, the clerk's words and opinions deeply became my own very quickly as that album's storm cloud atmospherics, relentless rhythms and grooves, post punk attack and superior musicianship throughout just captured me, giving me a new musical experience and education that only made me salivate over what the band could possibly offer up next. In late May of 1983, near the end of my year in 8th grade, I would find out...
Growing up, I often found myself at the mercy of being held captive by my parents' penchant for driving around various neighborhoods as they looked at all manner of houses. While we never had any plans to move from our house (or at least, no intentions that they ever decided to share with me), there I was, trapped in the backseat, forced for seemingly endless car trips from one neighborhood to another, looking at what felt to be every single house that had ever been constructed, and then, being further forced to listen to conversations between my parents, conversations that, to my fourteen year old heart, were hopelessly banal. On one such car trip, my parents' graciously answered my prayers to at least change the radio station from the news to Chicago's WXRT-FM. Even with the distressingly low volume and radio static, I was more than thankful.
Now, as I have often written on this site, music chooses you, and I firmly believe that despite that distressingly low volume and radio static, what I soon heard came into my ears as loud and as clear as if I had the radio tuned in and turned up to my personal satisfaction. The DJ made the announcement that on that particular day, the station had just received the new single by The Police and now, they were set to premiere the selection. From the very first drumbeat to the final strains fading into the night, "Every Breath You Take" was a song that connected! It sounded so familiar yet there was nothing else that I had ever heard that sounded quite like it. I was transfixed by its melancholic beauty, its romantic urgency, and the slow burn of its intensity. To me, it felt like the perfect song. To me, "Every Breath You Take" instantly felt like a standard.
I went to school the very next day and asked if anyone else had heard it. No one I asked had experienced what I did the night before but no matter, because soon it felt as if the entire world knew what I already knew and we shared in the glory of that song together. Even so, "Every Breath You Take," as extraordinary as it was, did not fully prepare me for the experience that would be the entire musical statement of "Synchronicity, and from the very first sounds on the album, I was swept away.
Side One of "Synchronicity" begins with "Synchronicity I," which features a rapid synthetic pattern that sounds like a cross between The Who's "Baba O'Reilly" and something that would not sound out of place on a Tangerine Dream album, Stewart Copeland begins to tap the ride cymbal in perfectly accented rhythms and soon the track explodes in a propulsive yet tight as a straight-jacket frenzy. Sting enters the fray with a collection of lyrics that feels as the wide ranging opening statements for all we are about to hear. "With one breath/ With one flow/ Yo will know/Synchronicity/A sleep trance/A dream dance/ A shared romance/Synchronicity," he sings. Soon, we arrive at the breathlessly sung, multi-tracked vocal harmonies that swirl in sound, as well as with its cavalcade of lyrics and $10 dollar rhymes, like a hurricane through your speakers.
"A connecting principle
Linked to the invisible
Almost imperceptible
Something inexpressible
Science insusceptible
Logic so inflexible
Casually connectable
Nothing is invincible"
I mean, really!! Just compare those lyrics, words that express the existential states of randomness and inter-connectivity, to what you just might hear on the radio in 2014 and tell me that the top of the charts were not just better in 1983!
The album continues with the percolating "Walking In Your Footsteps," a track that continues the through the wormhole pacing of the first track albeit in a more subdued and atmospheric fashion with Andy Summers' guitars echoing Sting's lament to the long extinct dinosaurs as well as humanity's inevitable ride to oblivion. Inter-connectivity returns in "O My God," a more relaxed funk groove in which Sting instructs us to "Please take the space between us/Fill it up some way" as a means to alleviate feelings of spiritual alienation, isolation and disconnection.
Yet before any potential naysayers may feel The Police to be nothing more than a trio of arrogant high minded eggheads, we arrive with Andy Summers' contribution to this musical stew, the hysterical art-rock madness that is "Mother." This is a song that sets its blues structured lyrics, which could serve as a new theme song for the character of Buster from television's' "Arrested Development," and almost indescribable musical backdrop which features horns, a variety of percussion, and a wall of synthetics, a to Summers' maniacally unhinged vocal delivery. It just sounds like its own soundtrack to an unfilmed motion picture, a film that could be either superbly comedic or downright terrifying.
Stewart Copeland next offers his selection, "Miss Gradenko," a track of delicate precision that magically manages to contains what feels to be a mountain of music in just under two minutes combined with a sly lyrical commentary that merges lustful thoughts ("Your uniform don't seem to fit/You're much too alive in it") with more synthetic themes ("You've been letting your feelings show").
Side One concludes with "Synchronicity II," easily the album's most aggressive track, one that juxtaposes anxiety inducing suburban family tensions with sequences of life beginning and ending in the primordial ooze that rests within "a dark Scottish loch." Once again, Sting takes themes of existential randomness and inter-connectivity yet instead of the transcendence we found in "Synchronicity I," what we hear this time sounds more like the oncoming apocalypse.
From the intellectualism and even dark humor of the lyrics to the complete inventiveness and attack of the music, The Police were out to show the world that their music was equal parts brains and balls, so to speak, as it was music to serve the thrashing soul as well as the philosophical one. The whirlwind of the first side of "Synchronicity" truly feels as if the band took absolutely everything we knew about them from their four previous albums and re contextualized those elements into a combination that truly served as an evolution. Their musical influences of punk rock, reggae, jazz, pop and funk were less overt and more representative of the musical language they were building for themselves. What is truly amazing about "Synchronicity" to me is that as rambunctious as that first side is, the album increases its maturity on the second side as the experience actually grows quieter, moodier and more atmospheric as it goes.
The four songs that make up Side Two of "Synchronicity" is nothing less than a Master Class in exquisiteness and elegance. Yet, at the risk of becoming to pristine of an experience, Sting's lyrics showcase a deep turbulence as well as emotional, psychological and existential trauma and tension that gives the listener something to claw onto, lest the music itself should float away.
"Every Breath You Take" has remained as resplendent as it was when I first heard it over 30 years ago. It is truly the definition of "timeless." And certainly, that aforementioned turbulence and trauma of the track lies within the lyrical content which takes what sounds to be a love song for the ages but is actually a song of surveillance, obsession and control. It is a track of less defiantly being more. Sting's lyrics are astonishingly simple, clean, direct and profoundly economical as he finds precisely the exact words and rhymes that need to be said and absolutely nothing more. Every single word is just...RIGHT. The same goes for the musical performance in which these three supremely skilled musicians discover, and instruct the listener, that by not making the track so musically busy they actually create more emotional tension and romantic urgency. Simply stated, this track is The Police's masterpiece.
Not terribly far behind in any conceivable way is "King Of Pain," a song that perfectly captures the inner angst of any teenager listening yet also utilizes that same economy of lyrics and musical performance to essentially create a series of vignettes that speak to existential misery through a series of grotesque ("There's a King on a throne with his eyes torn out") and poetic imagery ("There's a skeleton choking on a crust of bread"). "King Of Pain" is a musical painting, which every line producing a perfect still image.
"Wrapped Around Your Finger" and "Tea In The Sahara" close the album in gloriously sophisticated style as The Police keep raising their own bar within their own album, giving themselves and the listener new heights to climb. I distinctly remember running to the dictionary to learn definitions to the language Sting was introducing me to while also being astounded that he could figure out how to get a name like "Mephistopheles" to fit so beautifully in the framework of a pop song. And as fr the musical performances, what transpires in "Tea In The Sahara" is nothing less than transportive.
Over these 31 years, The Police's "Synchronicity" is an album that continues to mesmerize, just as much as it did when I was fourteen years old. It is a testament to a time when songs were birthed with such craftsmanship, inventiveness, and strength that what was produced could stand not only the test f time but also thousands upon thousands of repeated listenings...and believe me, I have heard these songs that many times.
What was it about these three men, who could not find it within themselves to record any more albums, that they somehow found their way to making this collection of songs work so brilliantly? It is almost as if they just knew that "Synchronicity" would be the end to their collective musical story and if so, they had to give it their all. And give it their all they truly did. Sting's musical and songwriting genius cannot be overstated as he proved himself to be one of the finest of his generation. But please, we cannot understate massive influence Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland had over the musical direction of the band's music. Summers and Copeland were never mere sidemen and I would highly recommend that you dive into the respective solo careers of both musicians and then, you will easily hear how their talents not only shaped the songs that Sting wrote but how every song was representative of the trip as a whole, as a complete entity of three equal players.
"Synchronicity" is the sound of a Summer long past but also the sound that lies within the possibles of the future. This is music designed for every season and for all seasons.
CODA:
I also highly recommend that you seek out the B-side selections from "Synchronicity" as any one of them could have found a spot on the album...or better yet, just merge them with what already exists and make an even longer album!
The first song, the witty, sinister and controversial "Murder By Numbers," is well known to those who originally purchased the album on cassette and the then new format of Compact Digital Discs. But if you go to You Tube, you just may find two more tracks that are even more compelling.
Andy Summers' contributes "Someone To Talk To," a pulsating tune (with Sting on saxophone) that details the dissolution of Summers' marriage. Summers sings lead vocals and unlike "Mother," it is a straightforward performance in which his less polished vocals could not have served the heartbreak any better.
Best, and darkest, of all is "Once Upon A Daydream," a hypnotic and wholly disturbing tale of love gone horribly wrong with unplanned pregnancy, murder, jail and insanity. As Sting himself sings, "This is no place for tenderness," and it is guaranteed to send chills up and down your spine.
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