How The Police’s Biggest Album Nearly Crashed and Burned

“We fall into the trap of finding someone we think we love and then locking it up, or being locked up ourselves by that,” Sting told Playboy magazine in 1985. And I think we have to be bigger than that. I think our souls have to be larger. Of course, I’m as jealous and small-minded as anybody else.”

While not particularly fair to the wife Sting had recently abandoned, that point of view had been fertile ground for his songwriting. In 1983, with sessions for his band The Police’s fifth album looming, Sting and his new partner Trudy Styler decamped to Ian Fleming’s old Jamaican hideaway Goldeneye, where he wrote the bulk of the songs that would make up Synchronicity: “King of Pain,” “Wrapped Around Your Finger” and, of course, the worldwide smash he was referring to in that Playboy interview, “Every Breath You Take.”

“The song is very, very sinister, and ugly,” Sting would later tell the BBC. “And people have actually misinterpreted it as being a gentle little love song, when it’s quite the opposite.”

As a new, expansive box set marking the 40th anniversary of the behemoth album, which racked up more than 8 million in sales in 1983 alone, garnered three Grammy awards and led to the massive tour of the same name, hits shelves on Friday, The Daily Beast spoke to the other two-thirds of the band—guitarist Andy Summers and drummer Stewart Copeland—about how the internal battle over the creation of that song and much more.

While relations inside The Police were notoriously fraught—though “only when we were making music,” Summers insists—the sessions for Synchronicity were especially troubled. Still, the results were astonishing.

In 1983, three albums would dominate the top of the Billboard charts for practically the entire year: the soundtrack to the movie Flashdance, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and Synchronicity, largely on the back of what would become the band’s most beloved song, the simple yet haunting “Every Breath You Take.”

“That song was going to be thrown in the garbage can,” Summers recalls. “Sting and Stewart were arguing about it. It was pretty gnarly. We had lunch and then we were back to this fucking song, and Sting said, ‘Go in there and make it your own.’ And I went in and, literally, one take, played the guitar part. Everybody in the studio control room stood up and cheered. It just needed that little dust of magic, which I gladly provided, and sounds very much like The Police. So, I’m not one to rest on laurels, but I can take the credit for that, because that song was not going to be on the album.”

The single hit the number-one spot on the Billboard chart in the second week of July and stayed there until the end of August. The stark, noir-style Godley & Crème music video for “Every Breath You Take” ran on heavy rotation on MTV for more than a year.

“The album was number one for four months straight,” Summers adds, sounding almost amazed, still. “It was the year of MTV, and we were the chosen band of MTV. You just couldn't get more than we had at that point.”

The deluxe new version of Synchronicity—#159 in Rolling Stone’s Greatest 500 Albums of All Time—is being released in multiple formats, including a 6-disc box set containing 55 previously unreleased tracks, songwriting demos, session outtakes and a newly mixed version of the band’s infamous 1983 Oakland-Alameda Coliseum concert, plus liner notes featuring new interviews with the band, rare archival memorabilia and loads of stunning unseen photographs.

While first generation fans may prefer the band’s earlier albums, there’s no doubting that Synchronicity was a cultural phenom and creative high-water mark for The Police.

“After the fourth album, Ghost in the Machine, we toured a lot, because our credo was, ‘We’ve got to make it in the US,’” recalls Summers of the period in 1981 and ’82 leading up to the making of Synchronicity. “A lot of bands were trying to be big in the UK, but the important thing for us was to make it in the U.S. We toured relentlessly and it was by the fourth album that it broke open.”

Unlike the vast majority of the players that came out of the punk scene that, perhaps inadvertently, birthed The Police, Sting, Summers and drummer Stewart Copeland were all virtuoso players, and had adopted an airy, pop-reggae sound that played to their strengths as a three-piece band.

“When there’s four of you, it sort of starts to dissipate,” Copeland explains to The Daily Beast of how the band’s signature sound—and decision-making process–came about. “When it’s five, it goes into fractions. It starts to subdivide. When it’s a three-piece, there are no subdivisions. It’s two against one, democracy, we’re done. Move on. So, you are much more codependent and decisions are arrived at very quickly. Everything is concentrated. The relationships are more intense. And the music that you make, I believe, is more intense, as well.”

Summers believes the reason is far simpler. “The Police was a shit hot band,” he says flatly.

After some prodding, however, he continues, adding, “We were very conscious of trying not to sound like anyone else. And eventually it was the chemistry that the three of us had that made it so. Plus, we were selling music, not attitude. In the end, everything was successful.”

But the making of Synchronicity didn’t always go smoothly.

“There were both verbal and physical fights in the studio,” producer Hugh Padgham told Sound On Sound at the time. “Often, when these would take place, I’d try to be Mr. Producer and get in the way, saying, ‘Come on, do you have to kick the shit out of one another?’ But they’d just turn around and shout, ‘Get out of it! What do you know? You don’t know anything about us!’”

For Sting, any conflict was “a function of the creative process,” as he recalls of the Synchronicity era in the documentary Under the Volcano, about AIR Studios, where the album was recorded. “You had three alpha males trying to forge something that pointed in one direction and not three.”

By the time they got to Synchronicity, Summers says Sting’s “mindset had changed,” already thinking about how he could “get out of the band” and go solo, as he ultimately would the following year in 1984. “Plus, it got difficult to have the sort of freshness and do what we had done the last time, again, but a little bit different,” he adds “It felt like we were pretending we were still that same band we were five years ago, and it wasn’t really working.”

With tensions running high, and the album on the verge of being abandoned, Miles Copeland, the band’s manager and Stewart Copeland’s brother, flew into Montserrat and read the band the riot act. There was too much riding on the album to let it all fall apart through petty arguments, he insisted.

“We were sitting around feeling grumpy,” Summers recalls. “It wasn't really working. There wasn’t much agreement about anything. And then, I think, we sort of collectively decided, ‘Well, it’s George Martin’s studio. Let’s get George Martin to produce. That would be cool. We’re so fucking popular, surely he’ll do it.’ And so, I got the gig to walk down the valley to see him, a very charming English bloke. We had a cup of tea and a very nice chat about what was going on, and then he said, ‘I think it’s all going to be alright. Go back. It’s going to work.’ So, he turned down the gig, but it felt like he had waved a magic wand over us. And when I got back, the atmosphere had changed. Suddenly, we were very polite with one another. It was really strange. All the aggro disappeared. And we carried on and finished off the record.”

Still, there was the matter of which songs would appear on the final album. Sting, who had by that time lost all sense of the democracy the band had once enjoyed, had decided he had too much of a personal stake in the songs for the album to be diluted by what he saw as Summers’ and Copeland’ inferior attempts at songwriting. After a brief stalemate, they reached a compromise: Summers and Copeland were given one song each on the record, with the fast songs appearing on side one, and the slow songs appearing on side two. The album was complete, but at the expense of draining every last remaining reserve of tolerance Sting, Summers and Copeland had for one another.

“The theory that the Synchronicity album is entirely a function of Sting getting divorced is a gross oversimplification, and naive,” Sting maintained to GQ in 1985, oddly referring to himself in the third person. “Pain wasn’t a new idea to me last year. But to have a creative outlet for feelings that would normally be ground up and internalized and reformed—you feel cauterized. Some of the things on that record are quite sinister and angry and twisted.”

“I get tired of journalists and people writing about it saying, ‘Oh, they hated each other's guts and it was terrible,’” Summers says today. “That’s stupid. No one would have survived that. We didn’t last as long as we did because we argued all the time. We were intelligent, well-read people that discussed politics and the world and everything else at large. We disagreed in the studio because we cared so much, and the way our music has stood the test of time underscores that.”

As for digging into the band’s vaults for this new release? Summers and, most especially, Copeland embraced the idea with gusto.

“At the time, we might have been sort of uptight about our image or whatever,” Summers explains. “But now, it’s all history. Put it out.”

“I actually have discovered, through my buddy Trey Anastasio, from Phish, and that world— and that’s Rage Against the Machine, Foo Fighters, Primus, Tool, Phish, Pearl Jam—that the unreleased material is what people want to hear,” Copeland, who later formed the supergroup Oysterhead with Anastasio’s and Primus’ Les Claypool, adds. “And with the uber-gods of music for my generation, the Beatles, releasing outtakes, and then the Get Back documentary, all those things, they’re not the finished product. They’re not pristine. They are, in fact, kind of broken. They’re kind of wrong. But as a fan, that’s what I want to hear. And I don’t judge the Beatles harshly because I’ve heard one of their songs that is not perfect. It doesn’t hit me that way. In fact, I can understand their perfect music much better from having heard the demos and outtakes.”

“I think they’re sort of charming.” Summers says of the demos and works in progress on the new box set. “Every song’s got to go through a sort of evolution. The first version’s not really that good, but then, eight versions later, you realize, ‘This is the way it should be.’ Like a painter, where you can see all the evolutions before they got to the final thing, that’s the artistic process. It’s the same thing with music. That’s just the process of making art. In fact, in a weird way, the end result is almost dishonest, because it’s concealing all the work.”

Upon its release, Synchronicity was a far greater success than any of the band’s previous releases. Of course, the album, and the massive tour that followed it, also marked the end of The Police.

“We definitely got some vertigo with that level of success, even though it’s what we wanted,” says Copeland. “We weren’t afraid of it. But it was a little unsettling; the speed, the altitude. We felt that if we tried to hold onto anything, we’d lose an arm. Besides, I feel really lucky Sting stuck around for five albums. He was clearly on a mission.”

By the end of the tour, Sting was insistent, it was over. He was moving on.

“It was gutting. It felt very empty. Suddenly, we weren’t the band anymore,” recalls Summers. “And we weren't supposed to say anything to anybody about it. It was a very weird moment. We were so successful and everybody loved it. It was terrible.”

Looking back now, however, both Summers and Copeland have nothing but fond memories.

“Big picture, it was all fun,” says Copeland. “The shouting matches, now years later, with band therapy, we now know what those conflicts were all about. There were really no crimes committed, it was just different motivations. But we all really enjoyed The Police. We’re very proud of the work. It’s a very closed circle.”

“The Police wasn't the end, it was the beginning,” adds Summers, who has been on a US solo tour and is about to embark on a South American tour with the his own tribute band of sorts, Call the Police. “The Police was completely, all-enveloping. It was really hard to have any other life, other than The Police. Once we were out of that situation, things changed. I feel like my whole life has spanned out from that moment. I've been able to make so many albums and live well and people always want to talk to me. Most bands just go on and on, and they get more and more dreary, and the audience diminishes.”

“The first thing I hear as I walk in a hotel lobby is fucking ‘Every Breath You Take,’” he continues. “The music has never gone away. It’s as popular now as it’ll ever be. The theory is that it’s because we stopped early on, and we didn’t wear out our welcome. I prefer to think it’s the music that did it.”

Jeff Slate is a songwriter and music journalist who has written for The Daily Beast for over a decade. His work has appeared in ‘The New Yorker,’ ‘Esquire,’ ‘Rolling Stone’ and other publications. He is the co-author of ‘The Authorized Roy Orbison and Guitar,’ rock legend Earl Slick’s memoir, and has written liner notes for The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones, among others.