When the World is Running Down, You Make the POLL of What's Still Around – ILM Artist Poll #116 – THE POLICE - (Voting extended to Friday, Dec 2, 2022)

We got into double digits over the weekend, there is still plenty of time to vote.

Didn't Sting switch to guitar for Blue Turtles?

He plays guitar on much of the live solo stuff, yes. That said, iirc he played the guitar first, so the characterization may be somewhere between switching and switching back.

(obligatory apology for boring semantic distinction)

yeah, rightly or wrongly, I assume so-called bassists switch often, especially if they're songwriters (and plenty of guitarists switch to bass when needed).

My impression of Sting is that he's a capable guitarist but a terrific bass player. (I don't know enough to assess his lute abilities.)

if I made a list of the Top 10 lutists off the top of my head he would probably be on it yeah

Sting Bring on the Night live CD

Iirc, live CDs; I think it was spread across two!

One of the last times I saw Sting he played "Message in a Bottle" on a classical guitar, replete with food propped up on stand, and ... he fucked it up a bit! It's hard to play, that song. Anyway, he's a great bassist, but only a functional guitarist.

xpost Here's Sting playing the Hurdy-gurdy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg-0KXjGyGE

And here's my brother in law, who looks remarkably like Sting:

https://i.imgur.com/G31S0Qi.jpg

(I don't know enough to assess his lute abilities.)

Oh, I think you know plenty!

uhh he looks like all 3 morphed into 1 person

In other words, Sting's dream.

controp: Andy is an extremely skilled guitar player, among my personal icons, blah blah blah. Mad props to him.

But I don't believe for a second that he wrote or originated the guitar lines of "Every Breath You Take" or "Roxanne" or most of the Po-Pos' hits. Those were the work of mr. tantra ego yoga blondie-bear infuriating sweater guy.

It pains me to grudgingly admit it. But The Stingster, for all his well-documented personal faults, did bring a level of songwriting creativity that the others simply could not match.

The lute shit is boring, so at least we have that to fall back on when we want to tear down the rock icon.

A song like Roxanne, I imagine that was a band taking his pretty basic blueprint and making it more interesting. but Every Breath, if Sting came up with that guitar part, Sting would claim credit for that guitar part.

in fact, guitar part aside, that song is a pretty run in the mill doo wop progression by way of Leo Sayer.

sting did claim all credit for the guitar part, and the rest of the song

he's the only credited writer, including on "i'll be missing you" which prominently uses the guitar

absolutely. but Sting has never claimed to come up with the guitar part.

There's that infamous interview with the three of them c. the reunion where Stewart basically calls Sting on it, and Sting's response is more or less tough shit.

yeah i mean according to the legal standard for songwriting copyright, if you wrote the melody and the lyrics, you wrote the song.

Hate to disagree with the ilx braintrust but.

I am watching the "Bring on the Night" doc right now.

What Darryl Jones is playing is light years ahead of what Sting would ever have played. Sting is a good bass player with a great pocket, but he is not even in Darryl's league technically. Darryl effortlessly does runs that Sting would never even attempt.

Similarly, Sting cannot play the guitar as accurately as Andy. Very few people can.

But who the hell do you think _came up with_ the chuggy rising-then-falling arpeggio of "Every Breath You Take," and its subtle modulation as the verse progresses? Personally my theory is that Sting wrote and it and played it - maybe a bit ham-handedly - once. Andy listened and said, "right, mate" and proceeded to execute it perfectly, for decades, because he is a highly fucking skilled musician. Doesn't mean that he came up with it, or that he could have or would have.

Who deserves more credit is not for me to decide, nor how to apportion credit.

is there a thread where that is discussed? (songwriting / copyright conventions)

always thought that the “play it on a piano/acoustic guitar” model of ownership was pretty uncool and inaccurate in the pop realm

i once read that Roxy Music split their royalties into words / music / arrangements, with everyone who played on a track receiving a piece of the latter

it may be untrue or I misunderstood- but it seems like a much fairer way of doing it

i think i agree with you re: "every breath you take," but summers is a very creative player. that solo from "driven to tears" is advanced stuff

the melody/lyrics convention is very old fashioned and comes from the days when the primary distribution method for music was through sheet

just saying, Andy has told the story of coming up with that guitar part over and over again. If it weren't true, Sting would have called him on it

emsworth, we have totally discussed it but I am not sure in what thread. I will try to find it.

Infamously, the Miles Davis recording of "My Favorite Things" is credited solely to Rodgers and Hammerstein even though each individual soloist improvised their part completely from scratch. ILX came down firmly on the side of the performance being the composition, and the Tin Pan Alley definition of songwriting / copyright is utterly out of date. I do not disagree with that assessment.

That said, I still think that if Andy Summers could have written songs as catchy as Sting wrote, he would have done so. He has had ample opportunity. Apologies for choosing the wrong example. The other policemen are very skilled musicians, and I adore them. But Infuriating Sweater Guy has repeatedly shown that he has a greater ability to create lasting melodies and lyrics. It's okay to recognize that, just as it's okay to recognize similar estimations of other popular rock and roll bands, e.g., the Beatles.

There has been talk of how certain bands divide songwriting royalties on ILX. For example, Radiohead, Coldplay, Chili peppers, u2, I think they all split songwriting credit equally. REM did, too. probably a handful of other high profile acts. probably goes a long way toward promoting longevity if you're not always fighting about money.

IIRC, Sting originated "EBYT" on an organ - stop sniggering - and as JiC noted above, at its core it's based around a bog-standard progression. Summers' big contribution was to add ninths into some of the chord arpeggios - I think he said his inspiration came from listening to Béla Bartók - which made the harmonic structure sound much more sophisticated.

Ferry takes the lion's share of the credit on Roxy songs, with Manzanera and McKay earning credit on material starting on Stranded. Eddie Jobson got credit on one song.

xp Yeah I don't know enough to know, but I've been told by guitarists that the guitar part to Every Breath only sounds simple and is surprisingly intricate to play. Plus of course just the metronomic precision of it.

as an extremely modest guitarist, I can say that Every Breath You Take is kind of a pain in the ass to play, especially if you have small hands.

(modestly skilled, that is)

same thing with "message in a bottle"! lots of four fret spreads, which i cannot do with my stubby fingers

My guitar teacher once pointed out that Message in a Bottle, which also features essentially a song length guitar solo in the background, also has all these subtle harmonic counterpoints to the main guitar riff. it's one of the few Police songs with tons of guitar parts.

(xp)
One thing that's interesting to me is that I assume Summers himself has relatively small hands, because my impression is that he's a small-ish guy. In the band photos, the other two tower over him. Maybe his fingers are unusually long.

xp yeah, Paul Davids did a whole video on that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAp_1vgGWxA

xp he's mentioned that he has small hands, i think he moves his hands on the neck very quickly

Imagine if Andy had run against Trump in 2016!

anyway, just voted. prob could've gone up to 25

I originally had a Top 25 but my research found the Police only released 69 songs. So a Top 25 seemed to be too many and changed it to 20. I think overall it works better but yeah, I'm sure I could have picked more too.

I think the challenge may be that, thanks to Stew and Andy in particular, even their worst songs (or most non-songs) sound great or have interesting things going on.

Never really thought about this song much before because I never feel the urge to pull that album out, but had the Police been listening to Can before they made this one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0k6nXLwZrY

I think I've made this comparison before but a lot of the grief in Mike Doughty's book about Soul Coughing is rooted in this same argument. He wrote the chords, the melody, the words, the "song" as it's defined legally....and yet there is no question that the band never would've made it anywhere if not for the other three dudes in the band. But while I think SC is more like Can where the playing is the whole point - like, who cares who actually wrote "Mushroom" or "I'm So Green" - Sting's songs were fairly well-developed and clever. Stew could write some good tunes, maybe Andy could too (I really love "Omegaman" and placed it quite high, but I don't think he has another song like it in his catalogue), but Sting wrote the hits, so he's the man.

"Every Breath You Take" is a fun example because I could argue that what Andy does to that guitar riff really *makes* the song (which has probably earned the band some 50 million dollars on its own? Or more?), the truth is it would've been huge even if Andy bungled the hell out of it, because The Police were just that fucking big in 1983. But! Why were they so big in 1983? Was it because of the cool & crisp instrumental playing of their first 3 records? Well, Stewart certainly thinks so. He has a point too. It's very hard to say.

the truth is it would've been huge even if

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=837k74c4rHQ

Have seen an interview with Andy where he talks about his guitar playing on 'Bring On the Night' and how he based those lovely arpeggios that you can hear during the verses on stuff that he learned from studying the guitar compositions of Villa-Lobos at California State University, and that atmosphere he creates really makes the song for me. Take one guess who gets the sole writing credit for it?

imo there is no way the Police ever got reMOTEly as big without the things Summers and Copeland do, on every single one of their hits. they're always kicking the energy up more and more, turning pretty good songs into incredible earworms and electrifying toe-tappers, or sketching out all this atmosphere and space and emotional depth. i'm sure when i was a teen i thought of them as Sting and two faceless other guys who got super lucky, but once i really started paying attention to their music it was obvious they were anything but that.

which has probably earned the band some 50 million dollars on its own? Or more?

apparently it earns sting $2000 a day.

Infamously, the Miles Davis recording of "My Favorite Things" is credited solely to Rodgers and Hammerstein even though each individual soloist improvised their part completely from scratch. ILX came down firmly on the side of the performance being the composition, and the Tin Pan Alley definition of songwriting / copyright is utterly out of date. I do not disagree with that assessment.

This problem would be solved if performers/recording artists received royalties in all the same situations as songwriters and publishers, but don't say composing/songwriting doesn't exist when 95% of professionally released music depends on some form of the craft.

split songwriting credit equally...probably goes a long way toward promoting longevity if you're not always fighting about money.

Unless one guy (let's call him Sting) is actually writing (or originating) the hit songs and resents splitting with the others. Anyone feeling aggrieved for Summers and Copeland should remember that they would have shared in album sales (when those meant something) and concert grosses over and above songwriting royalties; and, even their one song apiece on Synchronicity probably made them each six figures with roughly zero airplay.

Also, "official" songwriting credits are sometimes not the entire story. In Jethro Tull, for instance, Ian Anderson would take almost total credit but earnings for certain songs with contributions from other members would be paid "informally" via the Tull management.

Just to be clear (I probably wasn't) I agree 200% with Doctor Casino. The music is the performance done by the people, and that is what lasts.

However- I am kind of also interested in the germ of a particular idea, and that is also salient. No, a Stingian idea is not (on its own) a song by the Police.

But one can also ask - how many songs by the Police would exist without Stingian ideas? Not as many, probably. He is an insufferable asshole and I am sure I would want to punch him in the face more or less constantly if I were in a band with him. But he was a creative catalyst, and that needs to be factored into our assessment of the band.

Upthread we mused about the Police with a different drummer, and how boring it would be.

But to continue the thought experiment: imagine a band consisting of excellent guitarist Andy Summers, exciting drummer Stewart Copeland, and a good bass player like... I dunno, Tony Butler or Kim Deal or John Taylor or Benjamin Orr.

How well would that band do, chartwise? Where would its songs come from? What would be its overall creative direction?

I totally get the impulse to say that Sting would have sucked without the other Policemen. But it's equally true that without him, the other two would have lacked a space in which to work their specific magic.