(Also: It’s pronounced nuh-BAH-koff, dammit!)

Also reviewed;

Holger Czukay – Cool In The Pool
Suicide – Dream Baby Dream
Joe Jackson – It’s Different For Girls
The Beat – Tears Of A Clown
Mike Oldfield – Blue Peter

“Sting knows the scenario, eh? All those nubile Lolitas in 3B just itching to get Mr Sumner hot and bothered while he’s marking their geography papers. Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone! Aside from the perils of classroom footsy The Police are still manipulating their formula. And why not? It works. Helluva subject matter, isn’t it? Vladimir’s syndrome. Underneath it they’re lovable, dependable, safe. Sting is the best looking man in the world and The Police are better than The Beatles. I just wish he’d try a different voice for a change, that the band would attempt a different beat. The subliminal dance goes on and on and on.”

Bell makes ‘The Wanderer’ by Donna Summer single of the week. Also reviewed are;

Orange Juice – Blue Boy/ Love Sick
Kid Creole & The Coconuts – Maladie D’Amour
Paul McCartney – Temporary Secretary
John Cale – Mercenaries
Viv Stanshall – Terry Keeps His Clips on

Another line of this song that improves greatly if read as “in character” is “Her friends are / So jealous / You know how bad girls get,” which is a banal filler line on its face, but maybe works if it’s intended as something the teacher offers as an explanation in the staff room. “Your students have been saying WHAT? Oh, those kids! You know how girls get…”

It’s a reach, though. I think the song is okay, maybe not as pretentious and cold as it’s being read here, but certainly a bit dull. It also exposes one of the worst tendencies of The Police: the chorus is just one line repeated over and over. When it’s done with some energy I forgive it (“Canary in a Coal Mine”) but even so, for a guy apparently overflowing with impressions of himself as a writer, Sting really couldn’t be bothered when it came to hooks!

Anyroad, there is another POV:

The Boomtown Rats’ “Mary of the fourth form” was the usual ‘teenbait’ fantasy figure a’la every rockband passim, whereas this was more studied, and seemingly more real for the reactions of the minor characters of the staff in the staffroom, and the friends of the girl, and so on. The story doesn’t end, maybe because in the majority of cases, the story fades out into nothing anyway.

(Answer has to be “No”, dunnit?)

Sting aside, The Police have had an astonishingly easy ride on Popular til now. Taylor, have you checked the Walking On The Moon thread? “I hope my legs don’t break”: I was on my ownsome.

I remember a Behind The Music-style doc on Sting from the early 90s in which he said something along the lines of “I’d hate it if people thought I was preaching and patronising about the future of the rainforest…” It then cut straight to a shot of him, in a lecture room, stick in hand, pointing to a map of the Amazon.

And then there’s Quadrophenia. Where do you start?

He never went near any of them, though (had a thing going on with the PE mistress). In the sixth form another chap showed up, fresh from TTC, who tried to get on “our” side by talking about Tim Buckley and Nick Drake, feigning astonishment that I’d heard of The Crucial Three (actually, that may not have been feigned, as in retrospect it amazes me too). Sadly he was never the friend of the friendless, as we sneered at his Ben Elton appearance and highlighted mullet. He did, however, hoover up the affections of the girls in the year below – i.e. the only ones we ever had a chance with. He was even weak enough to go out for a drink with one of them, although she told me later in a moment of drunken honesty that he’d refused her kind offer of sex, being all too professional.

I look at kids now, with their cocaine orgies captured for posterity on £300 mobile phones, and I know this is paradise everyone old has dreamed of all their lives. I start shaking and barking, just like that old man in that poem by Larkin.

of course the novel in question also apparently evades the moral issue (but to much more powerful and unnerving effect); as invocations often do, this feels as if sting’s simply helping himself to someone else’s achievement, giving us the sign of the thing instead of the thing itself, which is distracting for people who have read the book, and alienating and annoying for people who haven’t — i think he’s trying for something subtler and more interesting than that (but it’s not so well crafted that it gets him off the hook of the lamer error)

obviously everyone who’s saying “hate his voice”, “lame tune”, etc etc, is left unscathed by all this

this is a line delivered in character, so it’s not entirely fair to say it’s sting that’s smugly showing off (any more than it’s fair call him a perve on the strength of this song); the question should really be, might a character have said a line like this (give or take the conventions of distortion re said lines when sung)? has sting realised this character well?

(obviously even with actors we sometimes use the misbehaviour of characters they play as a useful shorthand for the flaws in their craft as an actor — and popstars of course build up their own aura out of an amalgam of the characters they play… but to me it’s one of sting’s good points that he casts himself sometimes in ugly roles, as obsessives or outcasts — so it seems a bit mean to transfer our dislike of these characters, which is surely something he’s aiming for, as cast-iron proof of his failure)

Our Head Boy slept with one of our English teachers. She was very young and new and in the Sixth Form she used to invite us round her flat to smoke and listen to Beatles records.

When I first started working as a teacher there were a few leery male staff who would look back fondly to an earlier age where they could almost exercise ‘droit de seigneur’ over the 6th form girls. I’m sure that it still goes on, but perhaps less overtly.

Objectively speaking, we’ve had far worse Number Ones than “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” this year – but this is the one that gets my goat more than any other (OK, except for “Coward Of The County”, but it’s close). I’d go into more detail, but that would involve listening to the damned thing again of my own volition… no thanks!

“Young teacher, the subject of schoolgirl fantasy” is as good an exposition line as you could wish for, and you’d imagine that Sting knew whereof he wrote (he was mainly a primary school teacher, but handled older classes during his teacher training as I understand it). And as Conrad remarks, the intro is dark and atmospheric. But after sketching out the story (even “strong words in the staffroom” sounds authentic) it does indeed fall away into the clunker to end them all.

Were any of you familiar with that sort of scenario? There was a news story when I was about 15-16 about a female teacher who’d had a thing going with a boy about my age (I remember her name to this day), and I was thinking how he’d spoiled the chances of those like me by boasting about it! I’ve already mentioned how a teacher at my school, Miss Haley, was one of the triumvirate of fantasy figures of my youth alongside Agnetha and Deborah Harry. I never got the chance to show how maturely I’d have handled the relationship, but did get to give her a farewell kiss the summer I left school and she got married. Sigh…

A few years later and the scenario is reversed: I’m an English language assistant at a school in Brittany, not yet 21, and the girls in some of the classes are 17 or so and very chic. The language assistant is closer to the pupils than the teachers are (in Manchester I’d taken both of ours to United matches) and friendships can develop easily – especially in a small town where I’d often bump into the kids at weekends. It never got dangerous, partly because I didn’t exactly look like Sting, but I was popular – when I came back after Christmas a couple of them jumped on me to give me the “bisous”. The kiss on either cheek was a perfectly natural morning greeting, and I rather enjoyed myself that year!

Another unfortunate incidence of a song being massive purely because it came along at the time when the band were going to have an enormous hit, no matter what they released. It was a mediocre single from a (very) mediocre album… and the follow-up was significantly worse.

To their credit, although they remained pretentious after this, I think they must have realised how poor “Zenyatta” was, as they did produce some better work on their remaining albums.

Many bands who made only five albums leave you wanting more, but I think there was a general sigh of relief that the Police called it a day after five. If they could have left out that third album, and made it only four, it would have been much better.

Sting, and “yes we’re playing reggae” issues aside, my problem with this song – also with Invisible Sun – is that the chorus is so weak. The song’s poor dynamics have already been pointed out, but the chorus melody is the same as the verse melody, only desiccated. All that droning tension thrown away. What would a James Last/BBC Radio Orchestra version of DSSCTM sound like? Not as good as D-I-S-C-O or Masterblaster.