Fact #148412
When:
Short story:
Full article:
OUTLANDOS D'AMOUR by THE POLICE
by Johnny Black
A ménage a trios of strange bedfellows, The Police set off on their path to becoming the biggest band of the 80s with this unusually eclectic album.
Prior to forming the band in 1977, Sting was a free-improvising jazz bassist from Newcastle, Andy Summers was a journeyman London-based rock guitarist whose career stretched back into the early 60s, and American drummer Stewart Copeland was a refugee from early 70s prog-rockers Curved Air.
They came together on a largely pragmatic basis, because the mid-70s punk rock explosion led to a huge demand for new live acts. Masquerading as punks, they hitched a ride on the bandwagon, and attracted enough attention to enable them, on 13 January,1978, to start recording their debut album in Surrey Sound Studios, Leatherhead, UK.
The sessions, in the £10 an hour studio which Sting remembers as, “a cruddy, funky place with egg cartons on the wall,” were financed by £1,500 borrowed from Copeland’s rock entrepreneur brother, Miles Copeland.
The album was unusually eclectic for a band hoping to pass itself off as punks. Next To You, Peanuts and Truth Hits Everybody certainly had enough reckless energy to pull off the deception, but beautifully crafted and executed songs like Can’t Stand Losing You and So Lonely can now clearly be seen as the work of musicians infinitely more sophisticated than the average punk hopeful.
Among the songs they recorded was one that Sting had knocked out in October of 1977, after an eye-popping walk through the Parisian red light district. The song, named after Roxanne, the beloved of Cyrano de Bergerac in the play Cyrano, tells of a man’s love for a prostitute who he hopes to rescue from her seedy existence.
“I was about to sing the first line,” remembers Sting, “when I noticed a stand-up piano. I was tired, I’d been up all night, so I just sat down. I thought the piano lid was closed, but it was open, so I wound up playing this incredible chord with my arse. It was this sort of atonal cluster that went nicely against the G minor we were playing. We thought it was funny, so we left it in.”
The most distinctive aspect of the track, however, is the way in which it artfully combines rock attitude with reggae rhythms. “Bob Marley was the link,” admitted Sting later. “Roxanne has a real Bob Marley feel. He’s half white, so he’s sort of a cultural go-between.”
Even so, no-one in The Police thought much of Roxanne. Only Miles Copeland spotted it as a potential hit, and scored the band a deal with A&M Records on the strength of that one song. British radio wouldn’t play it, deeming the subject matter unsavoury, but a year later it broke out from a small station in Austin, Texas.
Although it never went higher than No32 in America, Roxanne made The Police seem glamourous back in Britain and, by continuing to blend rock with reggae, they went on to conquer the world.
(Source : Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums by Backbeat Books, 2005)
Tweet this Fact
by Johnny Black
A ménage a trios of strange bedfellows, The Police set off on their path to becoming the biggest band of the 80s with this unusually eclectic album.
Prior to forming the band in 1977, Sting was a free-improvising jazz bassist from Newcastle, Andy Summers was a journeyman London-based rock guitarist whose career stretched back into the early 60s, and American drummer Stewart Copeland was a refugee from early 70s prog-rockers Curved Air.
They came together on a largely pragmatic basis, because the mid-70s punk rock explosion led to a huge demand for new live acts. Masquerading as punks, they hitched a ride on the bandwagon, and attracted enough attention to enable them, on 13 January,1978, to start recording their debut album in Surrey Sound Studios, Leatherhead, UK.
The sessions, in the £10 an hour studio which Sting remembers as, “a cruddy, funky place with egg cartons on the wall,” were financed by £1,500 borrowed from Copeland’s rock entrepreneur brother, Miles Copeland.
The album was unusually eclectic for a band hoping to pass itself off as punks. Next To You, Peanuts and Truth Hits Everybody certainly had enough reckless energy to pull off the deception, but beautifully crafted and executed songs like Can’t Stand Losing You and So Lonely can now clearly be seen as the work of musicians infinitely more sophisticated than the average punk hopeful.
Among the songs they recorded was one that Sting had knocked out in October of 1977, after an eye-popping walk through the Parisian red light district. The song, named after Roxanne, the beloved of Cyrano de Bergerac in the play Cyrano, tells of a man’s love for a prostitute who he hopes to rescue from her seedy existence.
“I was about to sing the first line,” remembers Sting, “when I noticed a stand-up piano. I was tired, I’d been up all night, so I just sat down. I thought the piano lid was closed, but it was open, so I wound up playing this incredible chord with my arse. It was this sort of atonal cluster that went nicely against the G minor we were playing. We thought it was funny, so we left it in.”
The most distinctive aspect of the track, however, is the way in which it artfully combines rock attitude with reggae rhythms. “Bob Marley was the link,” admitted Sting later. “Roxanne has a real Bob Marley feel. He’s half white, so he’s sort of a cultural go-between.”
Even so, no-one in The Police thought much of Roxanne. Only Miles Copeland spotted it as a potential hit, and scored the band a deal with A&M Records on the strength of that one song. British radio wouldn’t play it, deeming the subject matter unsavoury, but a year later it broke out from a small station in Austin, Texas.
Although it never went higher than No32 in America, Roxanne made The Police seem glamourous back in Britain and, by continuing to blend rock with reggae, they went on to conquer the world.
(Source : Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums by Backbeat Books, 2005)