(#282: 25 June 1983, 2 weeks)
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
(Author’s Note: Cassette and CD editions of the album – indeed, Synchronicity
may well have been the first major album to enjoy simultaneous release
on all three formats – included a bonus track, the single B-side “Murder
By Numbers” which, though excellent, does not in my view make for a
satisfactory ending to the album. The above track listing, therefore,
comprises the sequence of this album as I understand it.)
“The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight…”
(WB Yeats, “The Second Coming”)
It is easy to forget just how major an event Synchronicity
was in the summer of 1983, and from a British perspective almost
immediately on the heels of Mrs Thatcher’s second election victory. The
Police could not unreasonably be described as the biggest band on the
planet at that time. Most contemporary reviews were sympathetic, and
then some; interviewing the band in Atlanta later that year for the NME, the late Richard Cook remarked, “...if that record (Ghost In The Machine) was difficult, Synchronicity is like Chinese algebra. Its relentless exposure refuses to obscure that Synchronicity is a deep, complex collection, as profound an achievement as rock is going to throw up.”
Listening
to the record a lifetime later, it is easy to marvel in retrospect at
how easily people were taken in by it. But then, set next to the likes
of War, Thriller and Let’s Dance,
it has to be admitted that the album did seem challenging and
involving. However, divorced from its time, I now view it with
scepticism. It has also become clear to me that Ghost In The Machine
– the Police venturing out to face the world – is the superior record;
better written and played, more thrilling, more of a sense of three
musicians playing together (despite multiple effects and overdubs, as
well as the occasional guest player). Whereas Synchronicity finds the Police out in the world, but unsure what to do with it.
Their
nominal main inspiration was the theories of Carl Jung, although I
suspect that Koestler’s explanation of synchronicity in The Roots Of Coincidence
had a greater effect. By this point the three musicians were hardly
speaking to each other, and indeed recorded their parts in separate
rooms at AIR Studios in Montserrat – Andy Summers in the studio, Sting
in the control room and Stewart Copeland in the dining room. There is
therefore next to no palpable feeling of a group
playing; instead, they all exist at something of a distance from each
other except when they (or, more accurately, Copeland’s drums) turn the
heat up (i.e. both title tracks). It is appropriate that Hugh Padgham
should produce, since this is rock music as a gated community might know
it.
The
two “Synchronicity” songs are fine in themselves; “I” gets the album
off to a rousing start with its beginner’s guide to Jung, even if it
does sound like Yes covering the Fifth Dimension; but then the sag comes
– where Let’s Dance’s hits were all front-loaded, the Synchronicity
hits mostly turn up on side two, so the “experimental” stuff appears
first. “Walking In Your Footsteps” fails to recapture the effortless
spaciousness of “Walking On The Moon” – with lyrics of the calibre of
“Hey Mr Dinosaur/You really couldn’t ask for more,” you wouldn’t really
expect it to do so – although Summers’ increasingly discordant guitar
does its best to retain the listener’s interest, even as Sting muses
about power, extinction and atom bombs. “O My God” is another of Sting’s
Messages To The World – and its pleas to “Take the space between us”
might intimate some familiarity with Avalon – but one of
his more directionless ones, first signalled by an extended paraphrase
of the second verse of “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” but
finally scuppered by a semi-improvised chorale of the great man’s
unlistenable saxophones (I suppose Sting’s saxophone playing might be
quite exciting to anybody who hadn’t heard Ornette Coleman, but it’s no
surprise that when he went solo he immediately hired Branford Marsalis).
Then, the disaster of three-way democracies; Summers’ preposterous “Mother” is in terms of Then Play Long
badness down there with “Ito Eats” and “She Was One Of The Early
Birds.” It is so terrible that it makes Genesis’ “Mama” sound like the
Intruders’ “I’ll Always Love My Mama.” Summers thinks he’s Peter Hammill
(vocally) and Robert Fripp (musically) and it is a complete,
irredeemable, hysterical mess, like Peter Glaze (who had anyway died in
February 1983) impersonating David Byrne; sub-sub-Exposure
stuff. Summers was, at the time, in his early forties. This is followed
by Copeland’s “Miss Gradenko” which musically is a little better and
far more to the point – it lasts only two minutes, and is sung by a
distorted Sting – but its hackneyed noo wave-isms emphasise that it’s
only because of Sting that these songs were released at all. “Once Upon A
Daydream,” the morbid B-side of the “Synchronicity II” single, thereby
completing a somewhat gloomy package (its downbeat thoughts soundtracked
by what sounds like a backwards harmonium), would have been a much
better choice at this point, as indeed would have “Murder By Numbers.”
Matters
are greatly relieved – or perhaps the listener is woken up - by the
appearance of “Synchronicity II,” one of the Police’s great rockers and a
not-too-cringeworthy shaggy dog story about the Repressed Common Man in
tandem with the emergence of the Loch Ness Monster. The mood remains
Yeatsian – the reversal of man into its savage status as described in
“The Second Coming” – and it is notable that “Synchronicity I & II”
are really the only songs on Synchronicity which talk about synchronicity. Nevertheless, as someone said on I Love Music,
it does mark the moment where the band said “Fuck it!” and decided to
be Rush – specifically, the Rush of “Subdivisions,” from their 1982
album Signals (“Be cool or be cast out”). Sting mouths
phrases like “a humiliating kick in the CROTCH!” with real relish, and
there is a feeling of systematically increasing horror, even if the
subject matter does stem from Copeland’s four-year-old “On Any Other
Day.”
Then
come the big hits. I recall watching American television at some point
in the mid-eighties and coming across Marie Osmond and Andy Gibb, in the
midst of some JC Penney's bargain basement Grammy award ceremony,
cooing at each other with lovelorn eyes and waning toothy smiles "Every
Breath You Take," and I took that performance as final proof that most
people simply want the pop song to be a simulacrum, to take their
pleasure from its melodies and atmosphere while placidly ignoring the
words that are being sung.
Inspired
by Sting's messy divorce from his first wife - he sings the song from
Ms Tomelty's perspective, thereby making himself the object of desired
compassion - "Every Breath You Take" was the biggest-selling single of
the Police's career, and melodically achieves the rare knack of sounding
like a song which has been around forever; more than one DJ at the time
mistook it for a reworking of a golden oldie. But as a song it is
determinedly nasty, squalid and brutish; you can see Sting's golden
eyebrows narrowing to the focus of radar as he runs off the various ways
in which he plans to stalk the object of his disaffection. The fact
that he clearly sees himself as the injured party - compare with "King
Of Pain" where we are asked to believe that all the sins of history are
collected up and manifest themselves in the form of Sting's huge golden
field of a face, scowling ruefully over the rest of humanity - becomes
apparent when the piano cascades break the song open in its middle eight
in order to allow Sting to reclaim his "Message In A Bottle"
vulnerability (that last "please" which trails off, unfinished, into the
sizeable ether). But then the song retreats into its guilt-flooded
shadows and the warning is repeated for a fadeout which lasts for nearly
a minute.
Unlike
the close-up attack of their early hits, the Police now sounded as
expensive as any pop group has ever sounded; the haze of Padgham's
polished marble halls of sound putting the band at one distance from the
listener. Where they were once intimate, they had now sealed themselves
off and were gazing down at their audience from a self-constructed
podium, as though about to launch into space.
Sting began to maintain the distance that he kept. Back to Richard Cook: “Ghost In The Machine and Synchronicity
explore a spiritual bereavement in the midst of a rich, overspilling
world that is at these privileged fingertips: Sting, in his splendid
isolation, is looking out as a citizen of a world he can't return to. In
his masterpiece, 'King Of Pain', his soul - his last private possession
- is suspended over the globe. It's a tragedy which they are all rather
enjoying.”
That
ambivalence, I think, nails it. “King Of Pain” has to be one of the
most self-pitying songs in the history of pop or rock. Super Sexy Sting
sees wounded animals, rulers and losers all over the world and points to
them: “That’s me, that is.” To which one could reasonably retort: well,
isn’t this what you wanted in the first place? Apart from emphasising
Sting’s vocal similarity to that other displaced Geordie jazzer, Alan
Price, I find the song uninvolving, pretentious and portentous. “I’ll
ALWAYS be King of Pain!” sings Sting at fadeout with no small exultation
(and with Summers’ incongruously loud and punchy guitar). Underneath
these molten grey skies, he is still Mr Lonely, an ECM Phil Collins;
“Wrapped Around Your Finger” continues to obsess expensively on the
divorce/woe-is-me theme – it sounds like Spandau Ballet for distressed
middle-aged people, though its central keyboard/guitar figure reminds us
that “Decades” is still, three years on, not that far away.
Then
a satisfying, if terminal, end with “Tea In The Sahara.” Inspired by a
Paul Bowles story – you can tell from Sting twice crying “Beneath THE
SHELTERING SKY” – the song does find the group once again inventive and
exploratory, atomising before our eyes into AR Kane land. The story? The
one about the three sisters prepared to wait in the desert to dance and
have tea with an unspecified “young man” in the Sahara desert. But the
man never returns and they end up dead from the heat, their cups full of
sand. Waiting for the miracle that was never going to come. As terminal
endings go, this rivals that of The Final Cut, but
there is an additional metaphor; three musicians, not really
communicating with each other any more, on their way towards three
separate exits.
And
so the Police petered into semi-existence with an album which, in the
final analysis, can only be described as “not bad,” and lacking the
direct engagement of its predecessors. More than anything, you can hear
Sting already mapping out his future route as “Tea In The Sahara”
dissipates into systematic nothingness. They were here, they were a
great singles band who never made a great album, they showed that Men At
Work who was boss, and they finally fitted into the sunburned
glossiness of the early eighties only too well.
Next: The sound of a suburb.
