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Sting & The Police Collection

Twenty-two tracks from a band who used reggae rhythms to make new wave, and a songwriter who then spent thirty years refusing to repeat himself.

These cats were the shit!!! Their music atill sounds fresher than most of the crap on the airwaves today.

Sting & The Police

The Police were three highly accomplished musicians pretending, briefly and successfully, to be a punk band. Stewart Copeland was a drummer of genuine technical sophistication, Andy Summers had years of professional experience behind him, and Sting was a jazz bass player and schoolteacher.

What made them distinctive was rhythm. They built almost everything on reggae and ska patterns — the emphasis on the offbeat, the enormous space in the arrangements, the guitar playing chords rather than riffs — and combined it with pop songwriting of unusual quality.

Sting's solo career went further into jazz, world music and classical repertoire, with a rotating cast of first-rate players, and it has been consistently more interesting than its reputation as adult-contemporary fare suggests.

What to listen for

"Walking On The Moon" is the clearest demonstration of the method — a bassline, an occasional guitar chord, and almost nothing else for four minutes.

"Every Breath You Take" is the enormous one, and the standard observation is worth repeating: it is not a love song, it is a song about surveillance and possession, and it gets played at weddings constantly.

"Roxanne" and "Can't Stand Losing You" are the early records where the reggae influence is most naked.

"King Of Pain" and "Wrapped Around Your Finger" come from Synchronicity and show how strange the band had become by the end.

"Shape Of My Heart" is the best thing in the solo catalogue — a song about a card player as a metaphor for emotional withholding, with a guitar figure by Dominic Miller that has been sampled and covered endlessly.

"They Dance Alone" is the political one, about the mothers of the disappeared under Pinochet in Chile, and it is one of the bravest things in his catalogue.

"Fields Of Gold" and "Sister Moon" are the ballads, and the second has a jazz arrangement that rewards close listening.

Go deeper

Regatta de Blanc (1979) and Ghost in the Machine (1981) are the two Police albums where the experiment is most audible.

The Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985) is the solo debut, recorded with Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland and Omar Hakim — a jazz band playing pop songs, and considerably better than the reputation.

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