‘Synchronicity’: The album that made gold and broke The Police

On August 18, 1983 The Police offered a concert at shea stadium in New York in front of 67,000 people, a larger audience than the one The Beatles brought together in 1965, which stayed at 55,000. There, on stage, the leader of the English trio (bass and vocals), Gordon Matthew Sumner Sting, decided to end the group. They were at their best, presenting their fifth album, Synchronicity, a magnum opus with three Grammy Awards that sold 15 million copies, with timeless hits like King of Pain, Synchronicity I either Wrapped Around Your Finger. But above all the songs rose Every Breath You Take, one of the parts most broadcasted in history and the only one of the generation boomer which sneaks into the 100 most-streamed songs on Spotify, alongside current stars such as The Weeknd, Harry Styles, Dua Lipa and Post Malone. Andy Summers (England, 81 years old), the group’s guitarist, sums up in a telephone conversation from his home in Los Angeles: “We were a unique band and the sound came from the chemistry of three very different people. It’s incredible when something like that happens. And it doesn’t happen very often.” In addition to Sting and Summers, the trio was completed by drummer Stewart Copeland.

In The Last Play at Shea (2010), documentary Recounting Shea Stadium’s role as a rock venue, Sting said of the performance that ended the trio: “You can’t climb a higher mountain than this. This is Everest, so I made the decision.” [de disolver The Police] on stage,” he adds. Now, to celebrate more than four decades of Synchronicity The album has been reissued in a deluxe format with additional material: demos, alternative versions of the songs, various artifacts and some reflections by Jason Droper, a writer and former Universal Music executive who has worked with Prince, Queen, The Beach Boys and David Bowie.

“The Police were The Beatles of their time and Synchronicity was going to be almost impossible to top. The group had been evolving at an almost unbelievable pace since the release of their debut, Outlands of Love [1978]and decided to end their career on a high note. Not all groups dare to do that,” Droper told EL PAÍS. The album was recorded over six weeks in a studio on the island of Montserrat with the help of producer Hugh Padgham.

Throughout their career, The Police, who were born in the British punk scene, combined many influences to create their own sound. On the band’s first albums they introduced rhythms reggae and pop structures. From there, they evolved. “When they recorded Synchronicity Nothing was off limits. Sting drew inspiration from the theory of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung for his lyrics. [sincronicidad como la coincidencia temporal de dos o más acontecimientos, no relacionados entre sí causalmente, cuyo contenido significativo es idéntico o semejante] and wove them into the pop-rock of the new wave, as Synchronicity I”says Droper. On this particular track, which opens the album, a riff The synthesizer is repeated and accompanies conceptual verses. “If we share this nightmare, we can dream spirits world. / If you act as you think, the missing link, synchronicity”, referring to a kind of universal and collective memory (or the muse of human inspiration). Synchronicity We also find ballads like Every Breath You Take, “which showed how far the group had come since its early days,” Droper adds.

Andy Summers admits to EL PAÍS that he doesn’t speak to his former bandmates. He hasn’t listened to “anything” from The Police for years either. “I’m not interested. It’s an old work. Yes, I’m the one who did all that, but I don’t want to listen to it anymore,” he argues, and then confesses that his favorite song by the group, despite all the talk about it today, is “the one that’s the most popular song of all time.” Synchronicity, go on being Message in a Bottle, Released in 1979, Summers was ten years older than the rest of the band and never felt like the responsible member of the trio. “I was just the oldest and I felt like I had to train them because I was the best musician of the three of us,” he says shamelessly. When things got ugly during the recording of the album and the relationship between the trio was not flowing, Summers took a car and went to the house of George Martin, producer of The Beatles and owner of the studio where The Police were recording, to ask for help. “I’m sorry to hear you’re having a hard time, but why don’t you try to fix it yourselves? I’m sure you can. It’s typical of English groups, I’ve seen it before,” Martin advised him. These words gave Summers the strength and peace of mind to continue forward and record one of the best albums of the group’s career.

Sting and Copeland had formed The Police with Henry Padovani in 1977. Later, they recruited Andy Summers, an experienced session musician. For a short period between July and August 1977, The Police performed live as a quartet with Padovani and Summers sharing guitar duties. But after a disastrous recording session, with John Cale as producer, Padovani was asked to leave the group. Padovani tells this newspaper about the first time he heard Synchronicity: “I was in Corsica with my friend Topper [Nick Headon, exbatería de The Clash]. Topper had been fired from The Clash and we had put together a band with him and Pete Farndon from The Pretenders. Topper was a heroin addict and Pete had just died in April. After sending Topper to a clinic [pagada por Pete Townshend, de los Who]I met him at t
he airport when he was coming back from Los Angeles and I took him to Corsica. My parents looked after him. When I heard Synchronicity “I thought it was different to what we were used to expecting from The Police – there were a lot of synthesizers. The songwriting was cool, but different. The Police had come out of punk, but six years had passed and all the bands that managed to survive had changed too. They were adults and the music was too. Synthesizers were a new technology, so everyone was exploring the possibilities.”

In 2006 Andy Summers published his memoirs, One Train Later, where he writes about the end of the group: “Sting has been saying that this is the time to stop, to get off, to quit at the peak of the curve. He has repeated it as if it were a fait accompli, but instead of denying this idea or working out some slower form of dissolution or telling him to fuck off, I have murmured a kind of assent as if it were an attractive concept, an interesting idea. But on a visceral level it is devastating. Is it possible to walk away from this poppy, this opiate success, this belladonna mortal of stardom?” Summer says today: “As it happened to The Beatles, our manager, Miles Copeland forced us to keep quiet about the press. He wanted us to continue for two or three years, but after a while we had to tell the truth. It was a difficult situation to deal with. The Police was an incredible platform for all of us. We became famous and had a career afterwards. I, personally, and I’m sure everyone else too, have never wanted to define myself as a person by having been in that band.”

His words also reveal a strained relationship that began during the recordings. “Sting is more distant, it’s harder to talk to him, and I start to hate the feeling that I’m a guitarist in someone else’s hands,” he writes in his memoirs. But the key moment is when he reveals that being in The Police cost him his marriage. “You can imagine the kind of life we ​​lived. We all got divorced. The band was very famous and there were a lot of women on the street pining for us. I’m sure you understand what I mean. Three young, handsome guys in the most famous rock band in the world. And what does that mean? Divorce,” he admits.

Then there was the press. “Constant media exposure fosters the worst in you: childish behavior, arrogance, complacency… But how do you become a successful musician without all this press, media, lawyers, accountants, managers, “Is it all hype and fanfare?” he asks. And he adds: “Now it is very difficult to dedicate yourself to music because of the end of the recording industry, because everything is Spotify and musicians do not get paid. It is terrible and very difficult to have a life as a musician. I have one and I am very grateful for that. The public wants to see me perform, so I can go out under my own name and play, but it is very difficult for most people. My son plays the trumpet and music is a very powerful thing, a force of relief. You have to play music because you love it and it is essential to you as a person. To my son, if he asked me for advice, I would tell him that this music thing you have to do because you love it. There is no other reason to do it,” he says goodbye, who continues to maintain an active career: he published his last album in 2021.

Padovani says he remains friends with Sting. “We correspond a lot. I don’t know Andy very well, but Stewart and I are great mates. I know a lot of things you guys will never know, and that’s the way it should be. I’ve known those guys for 50 years; we were brothers in a band. When they split up, I got Sting and Stewart on a record of mine in 2006, when they weren’t speaking. Six months later, they reformed The Police. That’s what friends do,” he says, pleased.

Friendship when you’ve formed a band and had success seems relative. That Summers doesn’t speak to the others, in fact, doesn’t seem to surprise Jason Draper. “Both creatively and personally, The Police had an intense relationship. But each member of the band also had their own interests outside the group. At the time of recording Synchronicity, “Sting was just beginning his solo career, Stewart was soon to begin composing film scores, and Andy had always been interested in photography,” he notes. As Stewart Copeland says in the album’s liner notes: “We realised that the only way to get all these other things in life was to strangle the goose that laid the golden eggs, or melt down the golden cage and eat the goose that laid the golden eggs.”

After the Shea Stadium show, the tour continued until March 1984. There was never an official announcement of the end of the group; they simply went their separate ways. Then, in 1986, they played a few charity concerts, and the group played at Sting’s wedding in 1992. In 2007, they reunited and played together at the Grammy Awards, and then went on a world tour. On August 7, 2008, they gave their last concert in New York. Today, while Summers stresses that they are not speaking to each other, Every Breath You Take will sound day after day on any radio station.