“All for one, one for all? Fuck that. That is very restricted. I am out for myself they usually comprehend it!”
By December 1980, The Police had been on high of the world. Launched two months earlier, their second album, Zenyatta Mondatta, debuted at primary within the UK, with Do not Stand So Shut To Me, their third UK primary single, changing into the biggest-selling single of the 12 months. In America, they had been set to headline New York’s legendary Madison Sq. Backyard, in Australia the album had additionally topped the nation charts. But when this sort of success sounds just like the dream for any younger band, it was accompanied by tensions which threatened to tear the band aside. Speaking to Basic Rock in 2023, guitarist Andy Summers said that by this level, he had determined that he was “working with two complete arseholes.”
The quote firstly of this text got here from Sting, the band’s vocalist/bassist talking to English music author Phil Sutcliffe for The Police: L’Historia Bandido, a band biography he was working upon with fellow author Hugh Fielder. “So long as the group is helpful for my profession I am going to keep,” Sting added. “When it is not I am going to drop it like a stone… I do generally suppose, I would like this to finish.”
“The artist in me is searching for demise, it is searching for destruction.”
Given Sting’s mindset, it is no shock to listen to that the periods for The Police’s subsequent album at AIR Studios in Montserrat the next summer time had been fraught and fractious. It was producer Hugh Padgham’s concept that the three musicians ought to file in separate rooms at AIR – Sting within the management room, Summers in the primary studio, and drummer Stewart Copeland within the facility’s eating room – however the association served as a neat visible metaphor for the divisions throughout the group. The temper in all probability wasn’t helped by Andy Summers getting a cellphone name from his spouse Kate throughout the periods telling him that she wished a divorce: it positively wasn’t helped by the truth that, by this level, Sting had found the ‘joys’ of cocaine.
Revisiting the time interval for an article in MOJO journal in the summertime of 2008, Phil Sutcliffe quotes Stewart Copeland’s ex-wife Sonja Kristina, vocalist along with his former band Curved Air, as saying, “Sting was by no means actually into medication till being round coke. It had a nasty impact on his character. It made him much less thoughtful, subsequently extra prima donna-ish and tiresome.”
When this quote was shared with Sting, who freely admitted “I used to be horrible to work with, I used to be unsympathetic, aggressive, imply, egocentric, egotistical”, he did not deny the observations.
“I am certain,” he admitted to Sutcliffe . “Cocaine is horrible. It makes you’re feeling uncomfortable in your pores and skin. I used to be fortunate I could not get a lot of it into my system as a result of it at all times blocked up my sinuses. I realised it was so silly taking it that, a while after we recorded Ghost, I did it one final time, mentioned some sort of ritual incantation and removed the remaining. I by no means took it once more.”
Not that his ego deflated accordingly. When A&M, the band’s label, prompt that the Andy Summers-penned Omegaman must be the album’s first single, Sting flat-out vetoed the concept, insisting that it shouldn’t be a single at any level. As a substitute, the chosen singles, Invisible Solar, Each Little Factor She Does Is Magic and Spirits In The Materials World, would all be Sting compositions. In the end, it is laborious to argue with the frontman’s imaginative and prescient – Each Little Factor She Does Is Magic would high the charts within the UK, Eire, Holland and Canada, peaking at quantity 3 on the Billboard chart in America – however his bloodymindedness solely additional exacerbated the discord inside an already fractured unit. The album could be an vital stepping stone in the direction of The Police’s undisputed masterpiece, 1983’s Synchronicity, however the writing was on the wall for the group, and the tip for The Police was very a lot in sight.