— Ian Birch
I've never especially liked The Police but I've never really been able to adequately explain why — though, truthfully, I've never really taken the time to think much about it until this past week. I've often thought of them along much the same lines as I do The Who, Eagles and Pulp, bands who may all have very talented singers, musicians and songwriters and who all possess a unique style and image that I might admire but who I just can't bring myself to like. Groups, in other words, who are less than the sum of their parts.
There's more to it than that though. First, there's the name. While Culture Club gave off a vibe of cool open-mindedness about race and sexuality and Wham! was silly but exciting and Duran Duran seemed naff (and still does) but vaguely hinted at the pretension of being named after a book or a film (I can't be bothered to look it up right now but it was probably from something like To Kill a Mockingbird or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, something I should've read or seen by now but is probably too late to bother with at this point), The Police smacked of authoritarianism and rigidity. What kind of young person back in 1981 looking around for music to get into was looking at a group calling themselves The Police and thinking "maybe they'll speak to me." No wonder they — along with Dire Straits, who happened to also be band with a boring name — was the eighties group of choice for baby boomers.
But who cares about their name if their songs hold up, right? Well, The Police don't do so well on that front either. It's not so much the cod reggae of their early work nor the bland MOR of the Synchronicity album that leaves them wanting, more that their songwriter and leader had a lot to say but seemed to fritter it away on songs dealing with cheap hookers and sex with teenage girls and stalking. A more personal, direct songwriter might have made something of value of these topics but when not you're best suited to connecting with the masses. Dammit, Sting, sing about something that matters for once!
"Invisible Sun" comes right in their — in the words of future Smash Hits scribe and pop star Neil Tennant — imperial phase and it was a brave move to put out something of actual consequence as a single. Putting his patented vocalist paranoia to good use, Sting weaves an unsettling tale of getting caught up in a system in which everyone is expendable and no one really matters ("I don't ever want to play the part, of a statistic on a government chart", "They would kill me for a cigarette, but I don't even wanna die just yet"). He drew inspiration from the situation in Ulster during The Troubles; drummer Stuart Copeland saw it being about Beirut. Indeed, it could just as easily be about Warsaw, Johannesburg, Gwangju, Kabul or any other parts of the world that had been living through hell at the time. Rising to their charismatic frontman's challenge, Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers deliver a simple, restrained performance, keeping the atmosphere as bleak as possible. The grainy, black-and-white video features shots of people meandering through desolate, bombed-out streets; they're probably stoic British souls trying their best to get through the Luftwaffe but they could be anyone at any time. We only see close-up shots of Sting's face in little more than silhouette form: don't look at me, he seems to be saying, take a look at what's going on around you.
A number of years later Sting began to get deeply involved in protecting the Brazilian Rainforests. His work drew both praise and criticism and he made the point that he wasn't exploiting the cause by making an album about it — as, indeed, plenty of other artists were happy to do in the post-Live Aid late-eighties. A shame since it may have inspired something as outstanding as this.
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Also of some cop
Squeeze: "Labelled with Love"
Between Nick Lowe's lifelong fetish for the genre, Elvis Costello's occasional dabblage — including his cover of "A Good Year for the Roses", also released this fortnight — and the present number from Difford, Tilbrook and co., it seems that an interest in country music was something that many within Britain's pub rock scene had in common. (Have the likes of Dwight Yoakam, Emmylou Harris and The Dixie Chicks ever considered putting together Canvey Island Country: Nashville's Tribute to UK Pub Rock to return the favour? They really ought to) A good thing too. (But, first, a little context: twenty years ago the airwaves were polluted by Fastball and their catchy but irritating hit "The Way" and when I first gave Squeeze a listen a couple years later all I could think of was the similarly smug armchair psychology at play in their many character sketch songs. And we're back) "Labelled with Love" dials back considerably on the smarminess in order to sensitively tell the tale of a woman at the end of her life. Maybe country music was good for the Squeezed: it hooked them on to everything great about their music while stripping away all the nonsense.
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