Every Breath You Take

The Disguise

“We went back to England with the lie that we'd made it in America.”

Stewart Copeland had been playing progressive rock; Andy Summers was thirty-four with a decade of London clubs behind him; Sting had spent his twenties in Newcastle jazz bands and got his stage name from a black-and-yellow striped sweater. Sting has been candid that they “snuck in” through a narrow window when three seasoned players could pass for punks. Getting anyone to listen took a confidence trick: no English promoter wanted them, so they toured America in a stolen station wagon, went home claiming they had made it there, and got work on the strength of the claim. The gig Sting says he would keep above all others was Bombay, played to an audience that had never heard rock and roll of any kind. It ended in a stage invasion.

1978–1983

Five albums, made between tours

Outlandos d'Amour took six months, because the only studio time they could get was Sunday afternoons at a small place owned by a doctor who liked music. Reggatta de Blanc was made in ten days flat. They produced themselves throughout, and the lyrics were reading things pop songs did not generally read — Nabokov, Paul Bowles, Arthur Koestler, Jung on coincidence; two of the album titles come straight off a bookshelf. Success made the work harder rather than easier. Making Ghost in the Machine on Montserrat was, in Copeland's words, hell on earth, and halfway through Synchronicity they came close to asking for help: George Martin, the Beatles' producer, owned the studio and lived across the valley, so Summers walked down through the trees in the heat to knock on his door. He got a cup of tea and a sympathetic hearing from a man who had plainly seen it all before, and who thought they would be fine. They were, for long enough to finish the record.

Stopping at the Top

The tour closed in Australia in March 1984

Sting's explanation is unsentimental: they had achieved everything they set out to a hundredfold, and after that “you get diminishing returns of satisfaction.” A band, he says, is like a teenage street gang — you can't mature and you can't explore while stuck with the same three people. Copeland puts it geometrically: the rare and lucky thing is that they never saw the other side of the parabola. What none of them understood at the time, and only worked out decades later in some belated group therapy, was that they had never disagreed about music so much as about what music was for. It was not painless. They had lived inside the thing for seven years and then, as Summers puts it, they had been living in a magic castle and one day there was no more magic castle. The way back, for each of them separately, was to go on making music — and six of tonight's eighteen songs come from the decades that followed.

The Guitarist

Andy Summers learned his craft by slowing records to half speed

Andy Summers taught himself nearly everything he knew. There were few teachers and no usable instruction books when he started, so he learned the way everyone did then: hunched over a record player with the speed halved, picking a jazz solo out by ear an octave low and then trying to bring it back up to tempo. One solo took him a year. Later, wanting to learn a particular chiming technique, he simply telephoned the guitarist he admired from a Nashville hotel room and asked for a lesson; the man turned up half an hour later with a small amplifier and charged him forty-five dollars. Summers used that technique on the Police records at a time when no other rock guitarist was. And during the Montserrat sessions, while the band was falling apart around him, he spent his spare hours working through Bach's violin duets on the guitar — learning both parts, in a house where one of the other two understood exactly what he was doing and the other had no idea what he was talking about.

The Teacher

Sting and Dominic Miller both practice Bach daily — the cello suites, the partitas

Ask Sting about theory and he redirects to instinct; ask him about instinct and he ends up at Bach. He and Dominic Miller both describe Bach as their shared teacher, and the reason they give is the eight-bar surprise: play eight bars of Bach and something surprises you, then the next eight bars surprise you again. Dominic Miller adds a practice principle worth passing on to any musician in the hall tonight — a colleague once told him that if it sounds good while you're practicing, you're doing it wrong, meaning that playing every note without dynamics, absolutely even, is one of the hardest things there is. Bach is the ideal material for it, because the personality is already written into the notes.

The Unexpected Note

Perfectly ordinary, and almost nobody uses it

His fingerprint is a fondness for the note just to the side of the one you expect. In a song in a minor key there is a particular darkening note available to any songwriter, entirely ordinary, that pop music almost never settles on — and he settles on it, and holds it, and it is the moment in the tune that catches you. He is drawn to rhythms pop abandoned too. “I love three,” he says. “It's very old-fashioned; you can only do a waltz to it. There's something about a waltz that I'm a sucker for.” And he changes key inside a verse without announcing it: Fortress Around Your Heart moves house twice before the chorus even arrives, and sounds to a listener like it has been standing still.

Method

A germ, then a structure, then — on a walk — the words

The writing process is consistent and, by his own description, unglamorous. It begins with a germ: a cadence the fingers stumble onto, a riff, a two- or three-chord sequence. “A guitar riff is not a song,” he says. “It needs to be structured.” So the structure comes next and comes before the words — verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, key change, coda — and only then does the lyric arrive, usually on a walk with the demo in his headphones. “Some people listen to music and they see color. I see characters, I see situations. But it's the music that's telling me the story.” Dominic Miller's account of the same process from the other side is that Sting arrives with three chords nobody else would have thought of and then moves straight on to the next idea, at which point Miller does the obsessing on his behalf and brings back options. He calls it a tennis game: the ball comes back with a different spin on it.

Andy Summers adds a detail from the very beginning of all this. When he joined, Sting turned out to be carrying an enormous leather-bound book, thick as a family bible, filled with songs he had been writing for years and had never had anywhere to put — not in the jazz group he had come from, and not in a punk band that was going nowhere. Once there was finally a band that could play them, out came the book.

The View from the Drum Stool

Two or three takes, and whatever happened is on the record forever

Stewart Copeland's perspective is worth having, because he was on the receiving end of this method for five albums and did not always enjoy it. Sting, he says, does not bring in a melody and a lyric to be arranged: he arrives with the whole thing finished in his head, drum part included, and any departure from it was a real problem for him. Copeland's own working principle was the opposite — he never played anything the same way twice and describes himself, accurately, as a poor session musician. The consequence is audible. The drums were usually captured in two or three passes, the second take generally the keeper, before anyone had settled what the song was; whatever Copeland invented in that hour is permanent, while the other two then spent weeks refining guitars and vocals over the top of it. One part improvised under pressure and frozen, everything above it polished at leisure — which accounts for a good deal of the tension you can hear in the music.

Register

“You can't be a baritone with a rock band.”

The vocal register is a deliberate choice, not an accident of range. To be heard above a rock band, he argues, you cannot be a baritone; he compares it, drily, to a sergeant major making himself heard over artillery. It is the reason a car radio turned down low in 1978 could still deliver Roxanne to the back seat — and one of the practical problems an orchestral arrangement has to solve, since the orchestra can put far more air under that voice than three men ever could.

What an Orchestra Reveals

The drummer, arranging these songs decades later, met them properly for the first time

The best argument for tonight's undertaking comes from the least likely member of the band. Stewart Copeland spent years insisting he never listened to the lyrics — he was busy, he was at the back, and all he generally saw was the back of Sting's head, which he preferred, since the alternative meant he was about to be told off. Then, long after the band had stopped, he sat down to arrange a program of Police songs for orchestra, and the work forced him to do two things he had never done: read the words, and take Andy Summers's guitar parts apart in order to hand them to other instruments. His reaction to the lyrics — “oh, that's what he's singing about” — ended in a verdict he asked not to have repeated to the man himself. The guitar parts turned out to be carrying a harmonic complexity he had spent five albums drumming straight past.

That is exactly what scoring this music for a symphony orchestra does. It has nowhere to hide the harmony; every inner voice has to be given to somebody and played out loud.

Tonight

A last thought worth carrying into the concert. Sting says he has never played Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic the same way twice — that he looks for one incremental change in every arrangement, in a bass articulation, a phrase, a key. “A song is a living artifact,” he says. “It's an organism. It's not a museum piece. You have to breathe oxygen into it.” An orchestra is a considerable amount of oxygen. These songs were written by a bass player who thinks in independent lines rather than in blocks, who reaches instinctively for the colours an orchestrator recognises on sight, and who has been studying the same teacher as the players onstage tonight. Scoring them for strings, winds and brass does not dress them up or make them grander than they are. It simply lets you hear what was in them all along.