(Credits: A&M Records)
Tue 5 August 2025 16:30, UK
There comes a point where many music legends can’t outrun their old records.
It’s nice to have a catchy tune that people can sing along with and recognise you for, but when it never fails to keep ringing in your head, anyone would want to pull their hair out whenever they hear their musical children out in public. But for someone like Sting, it usually pays to have music that’s a little more sophisticated to get stuck in people’s heads.
As far back as The Police, Sting was always toying with the idea of what a pop song could sound like. ‘Every Breath You Take’ was probably the most overt pop tune that he ever wrote for the band, but looking back on his entire catalogue of tracks, ‘Walking on the Moon’ sounds miles different from ‘King of Pain’, and neither of them sound nearly as ethereal as ‘Fortress Around Your Heart’ or ‘Fields of Gold’.
That’s partly because Sting never wanted to feel like he was repeating himself. He knew all too well that artists could get put into little boxes whenever they played music, so it was better for him to work on whatever music he felt sounded right to his ears. But looking at his entire solo catalogue, nothing compares to when he had two other musical geniuses to work off of in The Police. Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers knew how to bring a song to life, but they knew Sting was too good a songwriter for them to push for their original tunes.
‘Message in a Bottle’ could have easily been a hit on its own, but looking back on their early records, you can hear them all absorbing influences from everywhere. Punk may have dumbed down what was required of musicians to play, but when listening to a track like ‘Roxanne’, it has all the sense of swagger that you would get out of a punk tune, but with the musical depth of a traditional pop song.
Sting had initially conceived the song as a bossa nova tune, and even with Summers adding those punky stabs to the track, it sounds far too strange to be a straight-ahead pop hit. No one was using the strange suspended chords in the verse, and even if they happened to discover it when screwing around on guitar, hearing Sting’s melody over the top of everything was a lot better than anything The Clash could have come up with.
And while Sting has been grateful to make songs that stick in people’s heads, he freely admitted that ‘Roxanne’ is almost too omnipresent, saying, “It was a subject of a great sketch on Saturday Night Live. I was in an elevator with Dana Carvey, and he starts singing my songs to me and at me. The funny thing is, this happens to me every day of my life, and I really don’t mind. The first time I heard it, we were playing in Stoke, and I woke up and the window cleaner was singing it and I realised ‘I’ve made it.’”
Then again, if any song is identifiable with Sting’s voice, it’s usually ‘Roxanne’. Despite the song being about a hooker that he is falling for, the main thing that everyone remembers is that insanely high voice soaring above everything else, whether that’s Sting doing his version of it or Eddie Murphy butchering it in the best possible way when he’s got his headphones on in 48 Hours.
It might be the nature of the beast to have songs hang over you like that, but Sting knew that it was far from a curse after a while. Most people are usually happy to see someone who made the songs they love, and what’s better than getting a compliment for a tune you slaved away trying to get right?
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