Police fans, what happened to this band? The last album was killer! Then, nothing. Was Sting’s ego just too big? I do blame him for their downfall. He had to go on his own a put out a few solo albums. Whoopie.
As for his untamed ego, ever hear him in an interview? He’s a legend in his own mind. (This planet isn’t big enough for him and Bono, too.) - Jinx
You answered your question—Sting. I swear to Og his ego is bigger than Bono’s and he doesn’t have to try hard.
They are on a reunion tour now. I saw them early last fall. Good show. They are on the west coast - playing tonight in Ridgefield WA, and then working their way across to Madison Square Garden to end Aug 07, with the B-52’s. Not interested in the ego’s or personality conflicts. I just want to hear the music.
I was a big Police fan at the (first) end of their time together, but slightly too young to go and see them live. I compensated by devouring every written word I could find and one particular live review I read (in Smash Hits, btw, for UK dopers) has always stuck with me. It very roughly read “I’ve seen them on stage swaggering and magnificent, but tonight they were none of that”. I remember that the implication of the review was that they clearly couldn’t stand one another and were going through whatever contractual motions they still had to do.
Incidentally I did manage to see them live, last year at Twickenham rugby stadium. It suffered from the usual stadium gig issues and, well, lets just say I’m glad that I finally saw them, but bleah. It chimes in with the issue of egos, when I say that they just didn’t seem to get what was expected of them. It seemed to me that most people were expecting a greatest-hits-on-stage kind of deal, when the band were more interested in showing how incredibly musical and talented they are. Tight though.
Most of what I’ve heard about the band’s breakup points to Sting, although the three of them never got along well.
I saw them in Chicago last summer. I was too young to enjoy them in their heyday and I’d been hoping for a reunion for a long time. Afterwards I couldn’t help but feel that maybe the tour shouldn’t have happened. On the surface it was a great show and I had a blast…but I also got the feeling their hearts weren’t in it and it was all about the money. Maybe that’s heresy but it’s the vibe I got.
Yeah, everything I’ve read (Police Fanboy here) attributes to the fact that Stewart and Sting HATED each other and couldn’t be in the same room together at the same time in the end.
Still, Sting put out a couple of great solo albums. (Bring on the Night = one of the best live albums ever). Stewart and Andy, while both insanely talented, have ended up proving that Sting was the songwriter that allowed them to best show off.
It appeared to me, as it was happening, that when Sting experimented with a solo career, he just decided to keep going. As much as I enjoyed The Police, it was Sting I enjoyed the most, and I was also happy to see the reggae beats go away.
Is Sting still an insufferable egomaniac? I remember when they broke up hearing interviews with him that made me want to slap him. But it seems I heard him speaking, later, and he was quite self-effacing and pleasant. Anyone heard him interviewed lately?
Friend of mine works for a company that The Police did a gig for – one of their shows was to benefit this cause, I don’t recall what – and the word was that Sting was a total douche. His handler told the exec to just say “hello” and shake Sting’s hand, and that if Sting wanted to continue the conversation he could then speak. Nice.
According to the band members on “Behind the Music” after they played Shea Stadium they decided to break up on a high note.
As noted, there were conflicts within the band that would have lead to a death spiral of mediocrity anyway. All things considered, it was rather forthoughtful of them.
Hmmm, I have a conflicting story about Sting. Friend of mine is a journalist for Star TV, some MTV-type network in Asia. He interviewed Sting in a hotel with his camera crew and said he was (shockingly) one of the nicest guys he’d ever interviewed. He was playing his classical guitar when they came by, gave a great interview, and shot the bull with my mate and the camera crew well after they finished. They expected douchiness but got a pretty nice bloke.
Most of the responses here are fairly accurate. The Police were Stewart’s band - he found the members, he wrote their first songs, and they were managed by his brother. Sting was a budding talent in his own right, but if you listen to the first three albums (Outlandos, Reggatta, Zenyatta) there is significant input from all three members on the albums, from actual songs to their contributions to each other’s songs.
About the time of Ghosts (1981-1982) Sting started bringing completed demos to the band. There are some boots of these demos and everything is complete - bass, drums, vocals, guitar, keys. The songs on the album sound a lot like the final versions. Andy and Stewart started to feel like Sting’s backing band rather than a group - he was the principal songwriter and didn’t leave space for their input. He also started refusing to sing on songs that he didn’t feel that were up to snuff. (“Someone To Talk To” was a track from the Synchronicity sessions that Andy wrote, and Sting refused to sing on it - Andy felt it could have been an album track if he had.)
Stewart and Andy have given interviews stating that after Synchronicity, Sting just didn’t write songs for the band anymore. They got together in 1984 or 1985 (the sessions that produced “Don’t Stand So Close To Me '86” and the unreleased “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da '86”) - Sting proposed reworking the old songs, Stewart broke his shoulderblade and couldn’t play, and essentially no-one was into the idea. That was the end of the band.
But it’s probably too simplistic to say they hated each other. All the members of the band worked together (but not all three) post-Police, and they even gigged at Sting’s wedding in the early 90s. As much as Sting is blamed for being the guy with the massive ego and the one that broke up the band, Stewart and Andy were world-class musicians with impressive experiences, while Sting was the hayseed from up North when the band got together.
There’s a revealing story about “I Burn For You,” which showed up on the Brimstone and Treacle soundtrack in 1982. It’s a great, atmospheric song, but Stewart and Andy thought it was too soft sounding and refused to record it, until the opportunity came up for them to put it on side 2 of a soundtrack album. It’s clear they were pretty tough customers as well.
I saw them at Fenway on the reunion tour. I thought it was a great show, and I’m not surprised that this came to pass. Sting is quite an experimenter and once he came out with the lute album I figured he might do the unexpected - for so many years reforming The Police was thought to have been an impossibility, the money was great, and Stewart’s recent movie “Everyone Stares” received very positive reviews. Stewart and Andy always said that the tragedy of the breakup is that they never did a farewell tour - and it’s clear that this is a tour, not a reformation to record new material. So I think once they’re done, there will be any number of live albums, DVDs, a proper clearing of the vaults… and that will be the end of The Police.
Regardless of Sting’s ego, the basic fact is that the three members did not see eye-to-eye on artistic vision, especially Sting and Copeland. They were just not moving in the same direction.
And that’s fine, isn’t it? Their collaboration gave us a half-dozen or so of the best rock albums ever made and their subsequent solo projects pleased the people who like that kind of thing. What more can you ask of them?
Why would we want to chain artists to cranking out the same stuff year after year if they have other things in mind and can make a go of it?
Just came in to say that I saw them in late May at the Hollywood Bowl- any animostity there may be was not at all apparent. Btw, Elvis Costello opened for them. The show was totally fantastic, though I wish they’d have play Synchronicity.
Oh, and I might add, if the Police had stayed together, it would have been because Copeland and Summers agreed to go along with Sting. The result probably would have been much like the stuff that Sting has done on his own. The way this worked out, those who want to follow Stewart and Summers’s vision can do that to.
I would just love to hear what the album after Synchronicity would have sounded like. They really seemed to be at their apex, as far as their work together went. I doubt it would have sounded like Dream of the Blue Turtles.
Who knows? Maybe it would have sounded like shite.
It’s not entirely impossible that both impressions could be correct. Sting will be 57 in October, so when the Police broke up he would have been 32 or 33, depending when exactly you date that event. He was still a young man during The Police’s run.
It’s not at all uncommon for people to mellow out and become more accommodating and pleasant as they age. Age often brings wisdom and patience and the understanding that other people have needs, too. Some people stay the same as they age; some people get nasty and bitter as they age; some get nicer. He may simply be one of the ones who got nicer.
I was surprised when I lived in the US how highly The Police were regarded - they got played a lot on rock stations and seemed to be part of some sort of classic rock-type canon. It was hard to reconcile with the absolute derision and scorn directed at Sting in the UK music press, which I read every week growing up. His music was considered a bland parody of white-boy soul that was bought by people who hate music. Sting himself was usually discussed in the context of a punchline to a joke.
Bono was a punchline too, but everyone sort of admitted that U2 were a decent band. Sting’s solo stuff though was just abysmal. You know the type of band that is considered so exerable, that a pitchfork media review consists of a picture of a monkey pissing into its own mouth? That was the flavour of a Sting review in Melody Maker in 1988 (Obvously, the publishing industry had not yet evolved to this level of sophisticated visual criticism in those days).
Anyhow, I mention this because I used to love hearing old Police tunes come on the radio in the US, they were a great band right enough. The cuntishness of Sting, or at least perceived cuntishness, has sort of wrecked their legacy here in the UK.
The Winnipeg Story. Undoubtedly too good to be true.
On the last tour, tensions were high within the band, particularly between Sting and Stewart Copeland. After a sound check in Winnipeg in the early afternoon, Stewart and Sting were both going for a walk before the concert, largely to cool off. Stewart saw Sting turn left out of the Centennial Concert Hall, and so Stewart turned right. Stewart then wandered through the rough and ugly North Main section of Winnipeg, (ambulance service to all the large bars every 15 minutes), got turned around, couldn’t find anyone who’d give him directions, couldn’t get a cab, walked back to the concert hall in an even worse state than he started off in.
Sting, meanwhile, had followed up on someone’s recommendation and had spent the rest of the afternoon at Prairie Sky bookstore, having herbal tea and meeting Winnipeg’s unique culture of occultists, poets and ex-hippies, talking Jung and Kierkegaard and generally having a great time. Sting had such a good time that he re-arranged the schedule so that instead of going on to whatever the next city was and having the day off there, they’d fly out the day after and spend their day off in Winnipeg. Stewart walked into the concert hall swearing about what an armpit this town was, and Sting flounced over and said that he’d fixed it so they could all spend an extra day in this wonderful place, whereupon Stewart Copeland took a couple of swings at him.
The concert that night was interesting, not least because 2/3rds of the band wanted to kill each other.
Yeah, it’s probably for the best that they broke up when they did, even though as a pre-teen I was crushed that my favorite band (except for U2) was breaking up.
I saw their show in New Orleans last year. I was prepared (dare I say, looking forward to?) a little tension and onstage fireworks. But there was none. They seemed to be really enjoying themselves, and it had the feel more of a club gig than an arena show. Some of the songs were kind of sloppy, but all of the songs were good (except for “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”, which seems to have been permanently fucked up by the whole '86 thing).
He also could have just stopped doing so much cocaine. It’s a hell of a drug, you know.