The Police, Part 3

Zenyatta Mondatta is a transitional album in many respects, it being not only the symmetrical midpoint of the discography but also the median overlap between the early guitar-heavy, more collaborative pop-punk-reggae period and the darker Sting—and synth/sax-dominated endgame. Additionally, having all but made their name with the wildly successful touring in support of Regatta de Blanc, the Police now found themselves in the exorbitant “tax exile” bracket of the government’s revenue-pruning purview. Heeding their eventually imprisoned accountant’s advice, both Sting and Summers became antagonized British residents of the then IRA-embattled Irish isle (Copeland was able to remain in London as an American citizen), and the band would thusly choose to record their third album across the channel at Wisseloord studios in the Netherlands.

Co-producer/engineer Nigel Gray was on board once more, though this would be his final album with the trio, just as it would also be the last Police release to feature a mishmash title. Now too big for his fame-adjacent britches, Gray’s renegotiated fee pushed the resulting expenditure to twice that of the first two albums combined, though thanks to the massive profit margins of those frugally produced LPs, and the fact that this album was still brought in well under the typical major label recording budget, A&M didn’t even flinch. Also, and more detrimentally, Gray was now prioritizing the red-light-district pursuit of sex and drugs over the studio work that bankrolled it, making him a pressure-augmenting liability, as there was now a swelling retinue of management and crew—not to mention their label—depending on the next record also becoming a hit.

Speaking of drugs, the cocaine train had begun its all-consuming commute through the upper echelons of society and its adjacent entertainments, and the trio was now plied on the touring and recording fronts with piles of temporarily empowering but emotionally stunting white powder. This is when the vice grips of ego-coddling fame, external expectations and enabling, and unfeasible timetables began to tighten (they actually had to stop in the middle of the scheduled month of recording to play some festival dates back in England and Ireland and ended up remixing the entire record the night before they left on a world tour) and the interpersonal bonds to fray. In other words, this album documents the beginning of the end.

Sting was still bringing in the hits, though now he was getting darker, more complex, and also more socially and politically conscious with his lyrics, putting all the heavy book reading and news watching he’d been doing to proper use, and generally turning away from simpler expressions of love and infatuation. He was also becoming progressively less tolerant of his bandmates’ contributions due to his statistically reinforced status as the group’s preeminent songwriter.

In addition, already having proven themselves as proficient and inventive co-producers, and having amassed a plethora of new toys while touring, this album prominently features those new sounds. “Don’t Stand so Close to Me,” the first single and lead-off track, opens the record with a low, ominous Eb1 drone from one of Sting’s two sets of Moog Taurus I bass pedals, an extremely versatile instrument heard more often in progressive rock than pop music, with a wide pitch range and selection of tones that could be triggered with one’s feet, a boon for a trio member hoping to fill even more space beyond bass guitar and vocals. This unnerving low-end resonation, followed by Summers’s brief guitar statement of a related Lydian theme is humorously contrasted by the very brief and faint, low-fi blipping and clicking of the drum machine of the boom box on which Sting recorded many of his song demos (he called it Dennis), setting a strict tempo guide for the hyperkinetic Copeland, who tended to speed everything up.

Sting drew on his experience as a former educator—and as the harried teen idol pinup du jour—to describe the teacher of a young, ambitious female student infatuated with the narrator’s stature as a person who is as of yet still in a position of desirable power over her, a power he would ironically lose were they to go through with the illegal affair. Structurally significant are the front-loaded three verses (and accompanying choruses), with the exposition completely out of the way before even a bridge, solo, or any kind of interlude appears (it’s typical to insert one of those between the 2^nd and 3^rd verses, just to break things up and maintain listeners’ interest). It’s a bold move, but they pull it off with the help of multiple reggae-hybrid Copeland beats and creative fills, a rhythmically clever Sting bassline, and a Summers guitar part that resembles and complements the vocal.

The song structure puts the emphasis on the narrative, not dissimilar to Bob Dylan, whose words asked us to pay closer attention to the message, or whatever one’s individual interpretation of it may be:

Young teacher–the subject of schoolgirl fantasy
She wants him so badly, knows what she wants to be
Inside him there’s longing; this girl’s an open page
Bookmarking, she’s so close now
This girl is half his age

Her friends are so jealous–you know how bad girls get
Sometimes it’s not so easy to be the teacher’s pet
Temptation, frustration, so bad it makes him cry
Wet bus stop, she’s waiting, his car is warm and dry

Loose talk in the classroom–to hurt they try and try
Strong words in the staffroom–the accusations fly
It’s no use; he sees her, he starts to shake and cough
Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov

The lyric leaves so much to the imagination, with impropriety implied but not empirically substantiated. It’s an unsolved mystery with only the flimsy insinuation that the two subjects might have actually consummated the mutual attraction and only circumstantial accusations as “proof.” And who at the time, or before or since, had actually name-checked someone like Vladmir Nabokov (and his controversial book Lolita, which describes a similar sexual scenario that was consummated, albeit not mutually desired) in a song lyric, much less rhymed it so seamlessly with “cough?” Who else could have implied so much with so few words? Only one track into the album and Sting has already upped the pop lyric ante, not just for himself but also for his fellow recording artists, and for listeners everywhere (though there is enough ear candy present to be enjoyed merely on the surface level).

The edgy subject matter is sugarcoated by Sting repeating more or less the same vocal melody across the entire song, and initially an octave lower (a device Kurt Cobain would later put to ample use), it becoming its own Beethoven-esque motif that was so widely recognizable and catchy that he would thereafter lend it to Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” with an apropos “I want my MTV” plug thrown in for good measure, proof that Sting could have sung any old lyrics on the back of that melody and the song would still have been a massive hit (though it is beyond refreshing that he went the extra mile and then some in pursuit of innovation).

The choruses are also absolute pop perfection; whereas the verses are G-minor dark, the choruses see the sun break through the clouds with an almost Motown-like, totally ironic exaltation of the song’s title in the barely related key of A major (ending weirdly and wonderfully on alternating Am13 and A7add9 chords). Sting self-harmonizes via vocal overdubs, Andy provides the chorus-pedaled guitar continuo, and Stewart—who mostly kept his kick and snare hits in their proper place—again innovates with his cymbal work instead, using the bell of the ride to all but compel anyone within earshot to get up and shake their asses, or fellow percussionists to air drum theirs off. (What do listeners tend to connect with most in a song? Memorable vocal melodies with which to sing along, compelling if not relatable lyrics, and a groove that makes you move; in that light, and as epitomized by this song, the Police followed this brief to the letter.)

All of the aforementioned elements carry the song through to the end bridge, where Summers takes over in a surprising way. A swell of majestically mystic guitar fades in and out with the verse’s chord changes, the sonic windfall from the tree of a newly acquired Roland guitar synthesizer, another instrument more commonly used by progressive bands (Rush’s Alex Lifeson had played one on 1978’s Hemispheres, and Robert Fripp—with whom Andy would subsequently record two albums—and Adrian Belew used them in the early eighties’ King Crimson lineup). It’s the perfect, unexpected production touch to take the atmosphere of the rest of the song to a new and exciting place, and to reward the listener for making it through the uninterrupted verses and choruses.

Sting spices up the fade-out with a high A6 keyboard pad carried over and up an octave and a whole step from the bridge’s G5 (it’s amazing what one synth tone can do to add an effectively orchestrated, space-filling texture), and another perfect vocal hook piously sung to the words, “Please don’t stand so close to me” intertwining polyphonically with the chorus melody.

“Driven to Tears” finds Sting taking inspiration from the outside world and connecting with his nascent inner activist, something that would draw quite a bit of flak from this point on. Now famous enough for his words to be seen and perceived as pretentious, but without the resources or knowhow to effectively promulgate positive change, he is forced to sit on the benches and comment helplessly and ashamedly as the world rages on around him:

Hide my face in my hands
Shame wells in my throat
My comfortable existence
Is reduced to a shallow, meaningless party

Seems that when some innocent die
All we can offer them is a page in some magazine
Too many cameras and not enough food
This is what we’ve seen

Driven to tears…

Protest is futile; nothing seems to get through
What’s to become of our world, who knows what to do?

The less-is-more ethos prevails in the arrangement, with Summers’s high inversions that bob and weave with the vocal on the verse and are held out as minor 7^th chords on the choruses. The pre-solo F# buildup features a “Whoa (or perhaps woe?)” vocal hook from Sting, and then Andy goes full jazz beast mode with an angular but highly melodic solo that is miles away from punk in all but its brevity and attitude. The song’s end rave-up is literally and figuratively revved up by what sounds like a car engine accelerating, a subtle but effective production touch, though perhaps incongruent with the activist bent of the lyric.

Copeland shines bright on this track, with killer ride work over a four-on-the-floor, cross-sticked reggae groove in the verses and a half-time hybrid on the choruses, during which he breaks out some of his own new toys: a set of four octobans—a 6” diameter, long and slender tom exclusively and conveniently produced by Tama, the manufacturer of the kits he used at the time. The way Stewart works around the drum kit during the choruses is almost symphonic in its independent polyphony; whether it’s inserting a skillfully nuanced, intra-snare-hit hi-hat flourish here, octoban accents there, or fills that start on the four of one measure and end on the two of the next, the percussive innovations are myriad and astounding, and yet also somehow manage to elevate the song’s trajectory without usurping its throne.

Playing against type, Copeland lays back in the cut and collects an easy paycheck while Sting and Summers present the next track’s only chord progression—C11add9, D11add9, Em11—on “When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around” (arguably the world record holder for longest song title). Again, ingenious minimalism prevails, with Andy’s “solo” merely a sixteenth-note-picked E5 that starts barely-audible faint but volume-swell crescendos to a white-hot pinpoint before dropping back into the expansive verse chords that help the group sound more like an orchestra than a trio. The song fades out on the repeated first verse, a title-appropriate recycling.

This track—like several songs on the subsequent Ghost in the Machine—would instigate a trend for Police tunes that hung their hat on only one chord progression, which would have been a risky proposition had this and the other respective riffs been any less interesting, or the dynamic shifts less thrilling. Here, Andy’s watery-chorused whole-note strums and Sting’s neo-disco, offbeat-stuttering bass line evoke expansive, jet-set images of champagne, cocaine, and bikini-clad women lounging on yachts that just never get old, even as Sting incongruently sings of a possible post-cold-war apocalyptic dystopia, or closer to the recent truth, such a condition of poverty as to force the narrator to make do with decaying remaining things in lieu of new:

Turn on my VCR, same one I’ve had for years
James Brown on the TAMI show—same tape I’ve had for years
I sit in my old car, same one I’ve had for years
Old battery’s running down, it ran for years and years…

When I feel lonely here, don’t waste my time with tears
I run Deep Throat again—it ran for years and years
Don’t like the food I eat; the cans are running out
Same food for years and years, I hate the food I eat

“Can’t Stand Losing You” was a cowardly, self-pitying kiss-off compared to “Canary in a Coal Mine,” which pulls no punches and exudes unwavering self-confidence (not to mention worldliness mixed with high falutin vocabulary; Sting brazenly rhymes Fiorenza with influenza!). It’s an uptempo romp that again finds Copeland more static than expected, proof positive that he could indeed prostrate himself at a song’s altar, or that he occasionally allowed himself to be brought to heel by Sting, with the simple backbeat almost becoming a kind of passive-aggressive, no-bells-and-whistles-for-you lash out (there’s not even so much as a cymbal crash in the entire song…!) and has Summers utilizing the more rapid upbeats of the heretofore unexplored ska genre. A single progression prevails once more, albeit longer and more linear, and they have the good sense to break it up with a held-out stop in a key-of-A modality featuring a brief, refreshing cascade of syncopated, rapid-fire sixths from a piano that are rhythmically and functionally reminiscent of the octave break in Billy Joel’s “My Life.” It’s not clear exactly whom Sting might be singing to, but the subject sounds like a high-maintenance bore who had it coming.

Copeland snaps out of his temporary coma and releases the groove kraken on “Voices Inside my Head,” another single progression “jam” with one line of octave-doubled lyrics—“Voices inside my head / Echo things that you said” —used more as a texture. Disco was not yet a distant memory, and you can hear Stewart’s cheeky nod to the lambasted genre’s signature offbeat hi-hat groove for a measure during the initial buildup at 00:37 before quickly moving on to less stigmatized pastures (one can easily imagine this track having been played at Studio 54, which had given up the tax-evading ghost earlier that year). This is the Police at their heavy-grooving, improvisational best, and who would’ve thought that Sting’s supersonic squealing—first heard as a kind of wantonly puerile vocal tic at the end of “Be My Girl / Sally” —or Copeland’s borderline clutter-creating dub drum echo would become such complementary textures! Summers basically pre-invents U2’s The Edge with his delay-repeating guitar melody, and you can hear the spontaneous electricity of this cut building, crescendoing, and finally decelerating right in the studio at that white-hot moment. It’s a shame they prudently edited to the de-escalating end fade at 2:35, as one can’t imagine this delectable groove ever wearing out its welcome. One concomitantly longs to know what other succulent improvisatory morsels might have ended up on the cutting room floor.

Copeland, now wide awake, takes the opportunity to drop his only Zenyatta song contribution into the mix, a humorous diatribe on rife second-and third-world dictatorships called “Bombs Away,” which had been inspired by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the latest conflict in his Lebanese childhood home. He uses a tastily nuanced sixteenth-note hi-hat groove for the first and last time, and his lyrics dovetail nicely with Sting’s inchoate socio-political conscience:

The general scratches his belly and thinks
His pay is good but his officers stink
Guerilla girl, hard and sweet
A military man would love to meet

The President looks in the mirror and speaks
His shirts are clean but his country reeks
Unpaid bills
In Afghanistan hills

Bombs away, but we’re okay
Bombs away in old Bombay

“De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” kicks off what was once side two on the LP record and cassette tape with another stellar Sting single. Having already proven himself a consummate wordsmith, he now turns against his own and other professions that can and do use words to condescend and control, only for it to go straight over the heads of punters and critics alike, who took the inanity of the do-wop-saluting song title at face value, disregarding Sting’s lyrical elucidation:

…Poets, priests, and politicians
Have words to thank for their positions
Words that scream for your submission
And no one’s jamming their transmission

‘Cause when their eloquence escapes you
Their logic ties you up and rapes you

De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
Their innocence will pull me through
De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
They’re meaningless and all that’s true

The “True” of the second chorus provides the vowel for the melisma that feeds into the bridge, which flaunts an aurally expansive sequence of quarter-note-on-2-and-4 major 7^th chords as extensions of the stretched fingering Sting had used on “Message in a Bottle,” accompanied by a swirling scalar run by Summers weaving back and forth through the continuo like a melodic needle and thread (one can easily guess which part Summers favored when performing this song live). The long outro on the verse groove could go on ad infinitum and not get boring, but Sting adds some bowed flourishes on his double bass to accentuate the low end, and he would in fact bring an upright along for this album’s tour, whipping out the reminder of his erstwhile jazz band tenure for several songs (mainly “Don’t Stand so Close to Me,” “Walking on the Moon,” and “Shadows in the Rain”).

(The Police took the band XTC out with them on this album’s tour; XTC’s first hit had been the Colin Moulding-composed “Making Plans for Nigel,” which is very similar to “De Do Do Do”s verses in its chord progression [I vi iii] and staccato bassline, and one wonders whom was cribbing from whom [XTC’s song had come out the year before, which seems to lay the deed of origin fairly and squarely in their camp]).

Andy Summers then chimes in with his sole album offering: an intermezzo instrumental called “Behind my Camel” (where one finds…yes, precisely), which seems presciently apropos in terms of one of their upcoming world tour destinations (Egypt, to be exact). It’s an exotic guitar figure in an eastern scale that’s been effects-processed to a barely recognizable semblance, overlaid on a chordal synth pad and a staid rhythm section (Summers had to play the three-note bass part himself, and it feels like Copeland phoned it in, including his begrudging crashes on the four of certain measures). Did it deserve the 1982 Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance? We all know how much of a phenomenon-rewarding, seniority-favoring, get-it-wrong sham these awards shows can sometimes be (to wit: Jethro Tull winning over Metallica in the Best Hard Rock / Metal category later that decade). But did Summers deserve the scornfully puerile treatment he got from Sting, who hated the track so much he buried the corresponding tape in the garden behind the studio?! At the very least, Summers should get more than a modicum of credit for filling 3:00 of empty celluloid with some palette-expanding diversity.

Sting comes back—as does Summers’s ska feel, reinforced by Copeland’s kick drum hits—on “Man in a Suitcase,” another jubilant lament on the excessive busyness and concomitant travel that now engulfed the band. The field recording of a woman making a flight announcement over an airport’s PA system adds allusive production value, and the reggae-ified bridge leading into an upward key modulation for the final verse and chorus all serve to boost the song’s dramatic footprint. Copeland’s minimalistic yet heavily syncopated beat on the choruses gives the song—which never quite attained lift-off live—one hell of a signature groove stamp.

The penultimate cut “Shadows in the Rain,” like “Roxanne” and the more similar “Hole in my Life,” is a shining example of how well the band could “Policify” a song or modify the genre, feel, and instrumentation and production paradigm, and give it a distinctive edge to make it sound like something only they could have written and recorded (Summers called it “The sound of tight compromise”). And like Sting looking off in a totally different direction on the album cover, it’s also a foreshadowing of the schism that would later propel him into his solo career, as they only performed the song a handful of times live—mostly on the tour for this album—and never like how it sounds on the record (they reverted to more of a swinging reggae feel in concert, which is closer to what the composer himself wanted, and more akin to how he would interpret it later on as a solo artist).

It’s interesting to note that for once Copeland’s kick drum isn’t warring with Sting’s bass (Exhibit A: “Deathwish”), not that they were always conflicting, but they are noticeably locked in here, with Copeland adopting a “So Lonely”-ish groove and tempo, and Sting thumping through his idiomatic low-Hertz jazz motif. Everything else in the mix—and there isn’t much—sounds distant due to being heavily reverbed and / or delayed, including the psychotic lead guitar texture (with Copeland manipulating the delay length control on Andy’s Echoplex in real time, and to harrowing effect), and the vocal, which augments the verge-of-insanity feel of the lyric:

Woke up in my clothes again this morning
Don’t know exactly where I am
And I should heed my doctor’s warning
He does the best with me he can

He claims I suffer from delusions
Yet I’m so confident I’m sane
It can’t be an optical illusion
So how can you explain
Shadows in the rain

And if you see us on the corner
We’re just dancing in the rain
I join my friends there when I see them
Outside my window pane
Shadows in the rain

The instrumental album closer “The Other Way of Stopping,” which is actually a line from one of the late Bob Newhart’s comedy routines called “The Driving Instructor,” sounds like it was hastily assembled under the gun and with the last 3 ½ minutes of side 2 needing to be filled. It ends the album in lieu of just one more individual song from any of the band members, but it does its killer-filler job well, ushering the listener out with some dynamic playing and on a sonically optimistic high, which seems ironic considering where the Police were headed.

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In the summer of 1981, Sting, Stewart, and Andy found themselves on the Caribbean island of Montserrat to record their fourth album at famed Beatles’ producer George Martin’s AIR Studios. Working in the tropical paradise was supposed to be a self-congratulatory indulgence, but Summers was sued for divorce by his neglected and cheated-on wife Kate after having been on the island less than a week, and Sting’s first marriage would soon suffer the same fate (he had already begun the torrid affair with future wife Trudie Styler that would inspire the clandestinely lustful, French-sung paean, “Hungry for You [J’aurais Toujours Faim De Toi]”).

New coproducer Hugh Padgham, who had worked easily with Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel among others, was dropped into an interpersonal meat grinder as a hapless ambassador unfit for the diplomatic role of maintaining détente the way Nigel Gray had (nor would the now impenetrably arrogant and self-absorbed trio tolerate such mediation, especially from an unfamiliar presence).

Sting had always done a fair amount of songwriting and preproduction homework, but he entered AIR Studios with at least one song thoroughly demoed at a studio in Montreal, forcing his bandmates into the enraging anathema of sideman status.

Ghost in the Machine, which takes its title and some of the lyrical concepts from the Arthur Koestler book of the same name, starts with one of the cleverest rhythmic fake-outs ever committed to tape. Just as one could go years before realizing that the digital-display cover art—which dovetailed nicely with the wide-scale proliferation of new technology in our eighties divertissements (movies like Star Wars and Tron, and the then ascendant personal computer and electronic arcade game industries) —is actually a representation of (left to right) Andy, Sting, and Stewart’s faces, one could also be thoroughly puzzled as to where the one really falls in “Spirits in the Material World”s verses. It actually feels more persistent, innovative, and menacing—and the vocal makes more rhythmic sense—with the synth and six-string stabs on the downbeats and the kick drum on the “and” of 2 and 4 than it does with the intended placement of the keyboard and guitar on the more ska-like offbeats and the kick squarely on 2 and 4. Either way one perceives the beat, and as reflected in the album’s red and black Sith-lord color scheme, it’s the start of a dark, hectic ride.

In much of the video footage captured of Sting from those sessions, he is rarely seen without an alto saxophone slung around his neck, flurrying notes of which were first heard on “Peanuts” three albums prior. This is audibly borne out through most of the album, even in the playful squonks from the vocal booth before he sings of the volatile dichotomy of the human condition:

There is no political solution
To a troubled evolution
Have no faith in constitution
There is no bloody revolution
[Contradictory declaration or “bloody” as British slang emphasis?]

We are spirits in the material world…

Sting readdresses the power of words in the next verse, and with grab-the-dictionary panache to boot:

…Our so-called leaders speak
With words they try to jail ya
They subjugate the meek
But it’s the rhetoric of failure

This and the subsequent track—“Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” the highest-charting single of the album—both featured dominant synth textures, adding the keyboard work of outsider Jean Roussel to the band mix on this song, much to Stewart and Andy’s consternation (though the chorus’s steel drums, performed by an unlisted musician, add an uncontested Caribbean touch). To Sting’s credit, no matter what else they tried arrangement-wise, this top ten hit didn’t work until Copeland went in and put his drum part down over what was already there on the demo. One wouldn’t know it from listening to the spontaneous-sounding result, though; Copeland’s drumwork, ranging from delectably nuanced hi-hat and snare cross-sticking on the verses to full-on raise-the-rafters choruses with killer ride accents, would become the kind of rarified stuff drummer magazines—and now YouTube educator, commentator, and interviewer Rick Beato—would rave about for years to come (especially the spontaneous snare fill at 2:57).

It’s the sunniest track on the album, with the lightest subject matter, dating back to pre-Police days in its origins, and yet it still adds to the album’s overall melancholy in its cinematically unrequited Lydian- and French-horn-augmented longing:

Though I’ve tried before to tell her
Of the feelings I have for her in my heart
Every time that I come near her
I just lose my nerve as I’ve done from the start…

The second verse would get do-it-twice-and-it’s-jazz recycled several times over the next decade, as Sting would append it to the end of Syncrhonicity’s “O My God” and would occasionally use it as a meta vocal vamp onstage during the solo years:

…Do I have to tell the story
Of a thousand rainy days since we first met
It’s a big enough umbrella
But it’s always me that ends up getting wet

Other than it being Sting-penned, it’s difficult to fathom why such a desolate lyrical and musical soundscape like “Invisible Sun” was chosen as the initial single. The intro synth pulse is joined by a higher Taurus pedal melody preprogrammed to add a futuristically sterile perfect fifth above the chosen note (a signature setting for Sting), a “Message in a Bottle”-like guitar riff by Summers, a monotone, headed-for-the-firing-squad six-count, and wordless hard-labor-camp chant from Sting (though it does tend to read as “Woe” again), and one of the most minimalistic backbeats ever conjured—nothing but a single midsized tom hitting on 2 and 4, where the snare usually lives—by Copeland for the verses.

The lyrics—and subsequent video, which the BBC banned with predictable censure—speak out about everything Sting had seen not only during his time in Ireland but also of what he had experienced with the Police while touring in countries like Peru and Argentina, which at the time were suffering under oppressive governments:

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life
Looking down the barrel of an Armalite
And I don’t want to spend the rest of my days
Keeping out of trouble like the soldiers say

I don’t want to spend my time in hell
Looking at the walls of a prison cell
I don’t ever want to play the part
Of a statistic on a government chart

The choruses offer a little hope in the G Mixolydian modality change:

There has to be an invisible sun
Gives its heat to everyone
There has to be an invisible sun
That gives us hope when the whole day’s done

But the spiritual optimism is fleeting, and even the unfettered Summers finally succumbs to the bleakness at 3:18, when his plaintive, string-bendy end solo unceremoniously stutters and gives out like a post-apocalyptic robot finally coming to a jerking halt, its battery completely depleted.

Already having outed himself as an avid polyglot, making at least a modicum of effort to say something from the stage in the native tongue of wherever the touring trio found themselves, Sting sings of a French-obscured, frustrated romantic side quest rife with sordid passion on “Hungry for You (J’aurais Toujours Faim De Toi).” Loosely translated via Google, it reads:

I cannot sleep tonight
I want you until I am dry
But our bodies are all wet
Completely covered by sweat
We drown ourselves in the tide
I have no desire
You have ravaged my heart
And I have drunk your blood

But we can’t do what we want
I will always be hungry for you

The world is mine
I won it in a card game
And now I don’t care
It was won too easily
This is it then, my beautiful traitor
I must burn from jealousy

Everyone who becomes famous has to undergo a transformation where all of their singular traits and dysfunctions get enlarged under the social microscope and they morph into the exaggerated epitome of themselves so as to be clearly defined and thus more easily digestible by consumers and mass media. Before Sting became Mr. Tantric Sex, he had been the “Demolition Man,” a selfishly ambitious Mephistopheles who became an outwardly projecting sadist more often than a self-examining masochist. Here he sees himself as a destructive presence shielded by a negatively charged force field of personality, his particular manifestation of the permanent psychic wall every celebrity has to self-protectively erect. He warns us to stay away for our own good in the lyric:

…You come to me like a moth to the flame
It’s love you need but I don’t play that game
‘Cause you could be my greatest fan
I’m nobody’s friend, I’m a demolition man

I’m a walking nightmare, an arsenal of doom
I can kill a conversation as I walk into a room
I’m a three-line whip, I’m the sort of thing they ban
I’m a walking disaster, I’m a demolition man

One underlying riff again prevails for the entire song, and Sting’s saxophone melodies break it up like a jazz-inflected air raid klaxon over Copeland’s manic drumming. Meanwhile, Summers’s bob-and-weave solos wail like B.B. King on bath salts, exacerbating the manic chaos of the music and lyric.

“Too Much Information” predates TMI by a few decades and skews more toward the expression of seen-it-all busyness represented in the preceding “No Time This Time” and “Man in a Suitcase.” Another single riff presides, though its downbeat is counterintuitive from where one’s ears would expect it to lie, lightly dusted with more hooky saxophone licks, predictably restless drumming, and some interesting funk guitar work from Summers.

The National Front—a political party comprised of far-right British fascists with a racially biased sense of exclusionary nationalism—came into glaring prominence in the late seventies / early eighties, running in parallel with punk’s frustrated overthrowing of the inequity foisted on them by the upper echelons (the NF of course chose to place the blame for everything on non-white immigrants). “Rehumanize Yourself,” which is the album’s only semblance of punk in its tempo and timbre (with the saxophone overdubs occasionally imitating an English police siren), and happens to be a Copeland collaboration with rewritten lyrics by Sting, focuses initially on the fatal beating of a teenager by NF-enabled youths in Newcastle, about which Sting had journaled and subsequently elaborated in his 2003 memoir, Broken Music, and lyricized herein:

He goes out at night with his big boots on
None of his friends know right from wrong
They kick a boy to death ‘cause he don’t belong
You’ve got to humanize yourself

Later, he humorously but boldly addresses the blessedly unsuccessful political faction more directly:

…Billy’s joined the National Front
He always was a little runt
He’s got his hand in the air with the other cunts
You’ve got to humanize yourself

Copeland, having been somewhat in absentia on the previous three one-riff-pony songs, reawakens with unrestrained vigor on the last single-progression track of the album, “One World (Not Three)” with a kinetic double-time shuffle and accompanying fills and variations for the ages. Especially noteworthy is the dropout at 4:02, the bring-it-back-in-with-flair snare fill at 4:13, and the half-time atomic groove bomb he drops a second later.

Sting sings of the first and third worlds with no mention of the second (i.e., communist countries) in his lyrical appeal to listeners to disengage with labels of geography, class, and race and recognize that we are all one:

…Lines are drawn upon the world
Before we get our flags unfurled
Whichever one we pick
Is just a self-deluding trick

One world is enough for all of us

Like frustrated Beatle and “Spirits in the Material World”-inspiring George Harrison before them, Copeland and Summers would both get the now standard single song on the album despite having brought in more than one tune for consideration, and even those two tracks that made the cut would get glass-checked by Sting despite his reluctant acquiescence to sing on them.

Summers’s “Omegaman,” with its uptempo verses and half-time, quasi hip hop choruses, accessibly innovative chord changes, and complementary guitar melodies for days (not to mention a Sting-congruent lyric), had actually been under consideration by the label to be the first single until Sting shot it right out of the sky with the flak of controlling envy.

Copeland’s aptly named “Darkness,” which would get relegated to the somewhat demeaning final spot on the album, delves into Stewart’s dissatisfaction with his dwindling creative freedom within the confines of the Police (could “Darkness” be a symbolic reference to Sting?), and the mounting pressures of all-devouring fame that were now more than just threatening to impose implosion on their individual and collective lives:

I can dream up schemes when I’m sitting in my seat
I don’t see any flaws ‘til I get to my feet
I wish I never woke up this morning
Life was easy when it was boring

I could make a mark if it weren’t so dark
I could be replaced by any bright spark
But darkness makes me fumble
For a key to a door that’s wide open

Instead of worrying about my clothes
I could be someone that nobody knows

Copeland again chooses the keyboard as the Rosetta stone for his muse, with what sounds like a synthesizer patch of an out of tune saloon piano with a trailing string swell blocking out offbeat triads from start to finish. The drums are heavily delayed and / or reverbed, with tastily echoing hi-hat work over a roving, fretless-bass-synched kick drum, and occasionally an overdubbed octoban flam ricochets like thunder across the soundscape, a congruent reflection of their stormy Caribbean environs, not to mention their interpersonal malaise. Summers contents himself with low-mixed, intra-verse soloing, and Sting effectively self-harmonizes on vocals and throws in an occasional saxophone flourish.

It’s difficult to imagine Sting having done any introspection after inflicting such cruel subjugation on his bandmates. Nevertheless, he spelunks good and deep into his soul’s cave on Ghost in the Machine’s penultimate track, “Secret Journey,” the start of which sees the magnificent return of Summers’s Roland guitar synthesizer, with which he creates waves of such complex chordal wizardry as to be in sublime synergy with the song’s enlightening intent (the swells’ short return in the middle is ingeniously punctuated by Copeland’s hemiola’d ride-bell accents, which evoke foggy images of a docking boat, probably Charon’s). The killer groove that fades up through that ethereal afterbirth–punctuated by Sting’s eighth-note staccato-stabbing bass and the reincarnation of Copeland’s two-kicks-on-2, snare-on-4 beat from “Regatta de Blanc,” only this time with chunky hi-hat accents between the backbeats––is the heady stuff of unprecedented and unrepeated genius. Summers puts a “Walking on the Moon”-esque, long A minor chord on the 4 of the first of two paired measures, and overdubs a cool countermelody that underpins but doesn’t overwhelm Sting’s vocal:

Upon a secret journey
I met a holy man
His blindness was his wisdom
I’m such a lonely man

And as the world was turning
It rolled itself in pain
This does not seem to touch you
He pointed to the rain

“You will see light in the darkness
You will make some sense of this
And when you’ve made your secret journey
You will find this love you miss” 

And on the days that followed
I listened to his words
I strained to understand him
I chased his thoughts like birds…

And when you’ve made your secret journey
You will be a holy man

Sting belies his own struggles within the Police’s confines with his use of the word “darkness,” and with the recognition that the solution for his loneliness lies in befriending said loneliness, and that the lack of love must be remedied by recognizing one’s worthiness of genuine, non-egotistical self-love. Perhaps as a result, and even in selfless recognition of the detriments of his interpersonal dominance on his bandmates, he is at least subliminally realizing that his future lies as a solo artist outside the Police’s confines.