Listening to the oddly hypnotic covers album, Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police, over Christmas has reignited my love for Sting, Summers and Copeland. It’s even given me a newfound love for this album, the first of two records that fail to live up to the zest of the first three.
I’ve been trying to learn Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic on guitar. As always with Andy Summers’ guitar parts, it’s not as easy as it looks. Summers has a habit of making intricate guitar lines look effortless, but they’re always doing something different to what you’d expect. The opening of the guitar song has delicately ascending guitar part doubled by a piano, all the while underscored by Sting bowing a fretless bass. Damn then and their genius.
But what a song, with one of my favourite middle-eights of all time:
I resolved to call her up / A thousand times a day / And ask her if she’ll marry me / In some old fashioned way / But my silent fears have gripped me / Long before I reach the phone / Long before my tongue has tripped me / Must I always be alone?
While the hit singles illustrate that Sting can still write a decent pop song, the aimless, endless reggae feel of the rest of the album suggests that something had changed in the band. This could be the nature of the recording, at Montserrat’s AIR studios in the Carribean – the first time the band had recorded outside Europe – or simply inter-band tension starting to simmer among the ranks.
Summers later laid the blame at Sting becoming a massive cunt – ‘I have to say I was getting disappointed with the musical direction around the time of Ghost in the Machine. With the horns and synth coming in, the fantastic raw-trio feel – all the really creative and dynamic stuff – was being lost. We were ending up backing a singer doing his pop songs.’
It’s a shame, as each of the three albums that precede Ghost In The Machine feel like the output of a band. Outlandos d’Armour is a fantastic post-punk debut, Regatta de Blanc found them starting to believe in themselves, and Zenyatta Mondatta captures them at the height of their creativity. Ghost In The Machine is something else. It’s also the first of the band’s albums with an English-language title. Something had definitely changed, and not for the better.
Hit: Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
Hidden Gem: Ωmega Man
Vinyl Stylus 