A&M 3732
Producers: Hugh Padgham and the Police
Track listing: Synchronicity I / Walking in Your Footsteps / O My God / Mother / Miss Gradenko / Synchronicity II / Every Breath You Take / King of Pain / Wrapped Around Your Finger / Tea in the Sahara / Murder by Numbers
July 23, 1983
17 weeks (nonconsecutive)
By the early ’80s, the Police, which started out as a modest punk-influenced trio, had grown into a superstar attraction. Ghost in the Machine, the group’s fourth album, spent six weeks at number two in late 1981. Meanwhile, the group’s trademark blend of reggae, jazz influences, and pop had provided a blueprint for Men at Work (whose detractors sometimes derisively referred to them as “Cops on the Beat”). But by the time the Police entered the studio to record their fifth album, the group’s formula was getting tired.
“The trick was to try to keep the happening ingredients, add to them, and take them into new places,” says drummer Stewart Copeland. “All the ingredients that were in the first album — a high-energy approach, the reggae thing, and emotional lyrics — were still there on Synchronicity.” Yet the band faced some new challenges, as Synchronicity became the most trying album, both emotionally and technically, of their career.
“The more we learned about how to use a studio and how to make records,” Copeland says, “the more we wanted to push the parameters. We put ourselves into more challenging places creatively. Also, we were getting along less and less well.”
By that time, the members of the band found notoriety outside of the Police. Singer/bassist Sting had starred in the film Brimstone and Treacle and recorded a solo single for the soundtrack, while Copeland had scored Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumblefish. Meanwhile, guitarist Andy Summers had cut an instrumental album with Robert Fripp.
Although Copeland says the Police’s squabbles weren’t “nearly as exotic as a lot of other groups’,” he quips that “in those days, Sting thought he was the devil. It was my job in life to persuade him that he wasn’t the devil, he was just an asshole.”
One of the conflicts within the band was Sting’s lofty lyrical themes. The album was inspired by psychologist Carl Jung’s theory of Synchronicity and Sting’s painful divorce. “Lyrically, it was his personal odyssey through discovery of these strange places of the mind, but I couldn’t stop myself from popping the bubble occasionally, because I had studied all of this stuff in Psych 101,” Copeland says. “It was exactly what they taught me in college.”
Though Copeland would occasionally rib Sting about his lyrics, both he and Summers acknowledged that he was the best songwriter in the group. “Andy and I would show up with a third or a half of an album’s worth of material and Sting would show up with two albums worth,” says Copeland. “By the end the day, when we sat down to play, stuff that sounded best usually ended up being Sting’s.”
For the Synchronicity sessions, held over a six-week period at Air Studios Montserrat, Sting came armed with several gems, including “Every Breath You Take.” The song, which Sting reportedly wrote in a mere five minutes, “was one of our simplest-sounding recordings, but the most complicated to record,” says Copeland. “We knew we had a killer song and we didn’t want to fuck it up. To present the simple elements of that song in a really important way, without just being trite or cliché, took a lot of head-scratching.” At one point, the band tried the song with a Hammond organ. “Finally, Andy came up with that guitar figure, then we had an idea about how to do the song,” Copleand says.
“Every Breath You Take” was just one of several gems on Synchronicity, which turned out to be the Police’s swan song. “We just scraped a whole bunch of new areas that would have been damned interesting to build on,” Copeland says. “I’m very disappointed that we didn’t go on to make three more albums.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of July 23, 1983
1. Synchronicity, The Police
2. Flashdance, Soundtrack
3. Thriller, Michael Jackson
4. Pyromania, Def Leopard
5. The Wild Heart, Stevie Nicks