Fact #165722
When:
Short story:
Every Breath You Take by The Police begins an eight week stay at No1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart in America.
Full article:
“This is Sting’s best song with the worst arrangement,” reckons Stewart Copeland, drummer with The Police , “except for Andy’s brilliant guitar part. There is an utter lack of groove. It’s a totally wasted opportunity for us. We made gazillions out of it, but when I listen to it I still think, what a bunch of arseholes.”
Sting has dismissed the chord sequence as “generic” and the lyric as “straight out of a fucking rhyming dictionary” but, born of his despair at the disintegration of his marriage to actress Frances Tomelty, this remains Police’s most successful single.
Waking from sleep one night in Ian Fleming’s Jamaican home, Sting wrote Every Breath You Take at the piano in a matter of minutes. He knocked up a demo at Utopia Studios in London, but problems started when The Police attempted a finished version in Air Studios on Montserrat. For starters, at least one other member of the band hated the song.
“This was a difficult song to get,” remembers guitarist Andy Summers, “because he wrote a very good tune but there was no guitar. It had this Hammond organ thing that sounded like Billy Preston. It certainly didn’t sound like The Police , though I secretly liked it. But we’d reached the end of our rope…”
“The band was close to breaking up,” recalls producer Hugh Padgham. “Sting and Stewart in particular were down to fisticuffs and couldn’t be in the studio together. Stewart would lay down a percussion track and Sting would come in later and erase it.“
“Our golden goose was cooked,” is how Copeland sums it up. “We were at each others’ throats.”
“We spent about six weeks recording just the snare drums and the bass. It was a simple, classic chord sequence, but we couldn’t agree how to do it. I’d been making an album with Robert Fripp and I was experimenting with playing Bartok violin duets and had worked up a new riff. When Sting said ‘Go and make it your own,’ I stuck that lick on it and knew we had something special.
By the time sessions had moved to Le Studio, outside Montreal, the track was taking shape. “We knew it was a huge hit, but we had this hole in the middle and no ideas,” says Padgham, “until one afternoon, Sting sat down and kept hitting one note on the piano, a one-finger solo, but just perfect.”
In retrospect, Sting noted that, in an era of paranoia about Reaganite/ Thatcherite government surveillance, the lyric’s ambiguity was as important as the music. “On one level, it’s a nice long song with the classic relative minor chords, and underneath there’s this distasteful character talking about watching every move.”
(Source : not known)
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Sting has dismissed the chord sequence as “generic” and the lyric as “straight out of a fucking rhyming dictionary” but, born of his despair at the disintegration of his marriage to actress Frances Tomelty, this remains Police’s most successful single.
Waking from sleep one night in Ian Fleming’s Jamaican home, Sting wrote Every Breath You Take at the piano in a matter of minutes. He knocked up a demo at Utopia Studios in London, but problems started when The Police attempted a finished version in Air Studios on Montserrat. For starters, at least one other member of the band hated the song.
“This was a difficult song to get,” remembers guitarist Andy Summers, “because he wrote a very good tune but there was no guitar. It had this Hammond organ thing that sounded like Billy Preston. It certainly didn’t sound like The Police , though I secretly liked it. But we’d reached the end of our rope…”
“The band was close to breaking up,” recalls producer Hugh Padgham. “Sting and Stewart in particular were down to fisticuffs and couldn’t be in the studio together. Stewart would lay down a percussion track and Sting would come in later and erase it.“
“Our golden goose was cooked,” is how Copeland sums it up. “We were at each others’ throats.”
“We spent about six weeks recording just the snare drums and the bass. It was a simple, classic chord sequence, but we couldn’t agree how to do it. I’d been making an album with Robert Fripp and I was experimenting with playing Bartok violin duets and had worked up a new riff. When Sting said ‘Go and make it your own,’ I stuck that lick on it and knew we had something special.
By the time sessions had moved to Le Studio, outside Montreal, the track was taking shape. “We knew it was a huge hit, but we had this hole in the middle and no ideas,” says Padgham, “until one afternoon, Sting sat down and kept hitting one note on the piano, a one-finger solo, but just perfect.”
In retrospect, Sting noted that, in an era of paranoia about Reaganite/ Thatcherite government surveillance, the lyric’s ambiguity was as important as the music. “On one level, it’s a nice long song with the classic relative minor chords, and underneath there’s this distasteful character talking about watching every move.”
(Source : not known)