THE POLICE – “Every Breath You Take”
I guess the mid-paced slog of a rhythm which dominates “Every Breath You Take” is meant to suggest its narrator’s implacability – the unresting patience of a stalker. Rock is a generally lively medium though and it takes some craft to build a “classic song” out of stony resolution, so credit to Sting and crew for that much at least. It must have been quickly obvious that “Every Breath” was going to be with us for a lifetime, a grey new fixture in the hall of fame.
A shame, though, because I’ve always found it a horrible chore to listen to. It’s cold, unsympathetic, the simplicity of its lyric and clockwork guitar picking has a water torture effect, and even when it rouses from its torpor for the “Can’t you seeeee” segment there’s Sting’s flattened-out moan to contend with. The only part that works for me is the barked anger of “Since you’ve gone…” and that’s not worth hearing the rest for. Yes, the song elegantly achieves the intensity and menace it’s going for, but at the expense of most of what I normally appreciate in pop music.
4
Tom in FT / Popular • Pop • 1,517 views • Share/Save
Another for the ‘was sampled for another #1 later on’ file following ‘Under Pressure’ and maybe one or two more I can’t recall right now, blast…
Yep, have to agree this is a rather unenjoyable plod.
I think that why the measured quality of this works for me is that the song really builds, suggesting a greater and greater expanse of emotion, albeit a rather unpleasant emotion. Other songs that I tend to want to play alongside this are Tears For Fears’ ‘Shout’ and ‘Everybody Wants To Rule The World’ and ‘War’/'Unforgettable Fire’ period U2.
Where I find it supereffective is in the context of the album ‘Synchronicity’. Alongside ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger’ and ‘King Of Pain’, this music creates a tangible sense of the internal thought processes of an isolated individual, placed within a world/ sound that is both clean and tidy and filled with dread. This brooding and serious atmosphere even just about manages to survive a childish song about dinosaurs (‘Walking In Your Footsteps’), and only really breaks down with the two contracturally neccessary songs by Copeland and Summers. It’s the only Police album that I particularly like, though.
I enjoyed this when I was ten for its clarity and simplicity, though I don’t think any of us kids were really old enough to pick up on any subtext of fear.
A guilty displeasure; I’ve always felt ever so slightly ashamed at not liking this. I don’t know why. It’s a dirge and Tom’s review sums up the sense of ennui that sweeps over me as soon as the opening chug rings out.
It’s a million miles from the raucous energy of Roxanne and Cant Stand Losing You. Although not as excruciating as Sting’s solo work.
Aha, so THIS was number one in the week of the 1983 election, thereby ushering in the massive expansion of the powers of the state and security forces to crush the ‘enemy within’ of the unions, local government and any perceived cultural subversives over the next 4 years. ‘I’ll be watching you’ indeed….
No, sorry. Sort of apt, but still not very interesting.
#2 Watch. Two weeks of ‘Bad Boys’ by Wham! (not as good as ‘Young Guns’ and then a week of Bowie’s ‘China Girl’ (not as good as Iggy’s original, which alowed a lot more chaos and delirium into the song)
I don’t really enjoy listening to the song, but there’s something about the “ninths” in all the chords that makes them a hoot and a half to play on the old acoustical guitar. Resurrection Watch: a “mash up” with Ben E King – http://www.transbuddha.com/mediaHolder.php?id=1888
sting was clearly pretty self-important from the beginning, but the police tended to chuck in enough pop thrills to successfully distract you. here though everything seems designed to convey significance and, worse, maturity, the video broods, the washed-out sound pallette broods and the plodding tempo broods. as tom identifies, this is clearly what they were after and it makes sense in the context of the song, but it doesn’t mean it’s fun to listen to – i wouldn’t want to be stalked by sting, so there’s no particular reason why i would want to spend three minutes listen to him pretending to stalk me either.
#5 yes, on the unearned sociological significance too – i’m pretty sure there have been attempts (including by dave marsh) to claim this as a great cold war paranoia statement, but i don’t really buy it myself.
Yeah Dave Marsh has a good riff on this in his Heart Of Rock And Soul but it rests on the vaguely unbelievable premise of him hearing this for the first time on the radio and not recognising that it’s Sting singing.
yes, isn’t he so shaken he has to pull over to the side of the road? this always seems to be happening to music writers (greil marcus particularly), it must get inconvenient at times.
This is a song that demands to be listened to on its own terms – cold and unsympathetic and stalker-like because that’s precisely the effect it’s aiming at, even though it’s been misunderstood by many down the years – haven’t some people even used it as a wedding song?! Its quiet, unrelenting insistence on wearing down its subject and the minimalist video show a huge degree of confidence on the part of the band, and it was richly rewarded with not only 4 weeks at number one in the UK but a remarkable 8 weeks in the States, the longest run between 1981 and 1992.
Meanwhile, at the start of its run at least, I was having a ball. At the end of the best nine months of my life I had to get my stuff back from Vannes to Manchester, which I did in two trips, hitching back to Brittany in between with virtually no luggage and a light heart. Managed it in just over a day, with the help of the longest lift of my hitching career, some 300 miles from Abbeville to Nantes in the hours of darkness. A few days of saying farewell to good friends, enjoying brilliant long sunlit evenings at the western edge of the European time zone, and wandering around the town I’d come to love – then home.
There’s a sci-fi short story (I think it was by Ray Bradbury but others here will no doubt enlighten me) in which a company runs time travel tours: you can explore a primeval forest walking on a raised platform, which you mustn’t step off because if you kill anything it can have unforeseen effects on evolution. One man steps off and kills a butterfly, but returns to the present to find nothing seems to have changed. Except he took the tour during an election campaign, and the vicious right-wing party which was a fringe contender when he left is now heading for a landslide win. It was a bit like that returning to the UK in June 1983. I’d not been totally isolated from British politics during my year abroad, but the size of the approaching Tory landslide was startling.
Dude! Not only was it by Ray Bradbury, it was featured in Freaky Trigger’s world-famous podcast series A Bite Of Stars, A Slug Of Time, and Thou
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2008/05/a-bite-of-stars-a-slug-of-time-and-thou-episode-6/
[emerges from bunker, blinks, and looks around to see if it's safe]
Well I like it! I get the sense of menace in it (which those who request it at weddings presumably don’t). It fits in with a thread that runs through other Police records, of the unbalanced and jealous loser in love out for a messy revenge (“I see you’ve sent my letters back, and my LP records and they’re all scratched”). This time the tongue is out of the cheek; it’s serious and the flesh creeps.
Oh, and I like Sting’s solo work, so tough!
[crawls back into bunker and unwraps bar of chocolate]
you can divide oldskool rock critics stunned by new songs on the car radio into
(a) the ones who pull over (marcus & marsh)
(b) the ones who shout excitedly and jam the accelarator down (bangs), and
(c) the ones who reach round the driver from their prone position in the back seat to seize the wheel and steer the vehicle across the central reservation into the oncoming traffic stream (meltzer)
I agree that this song is not particularly enjoyable to listen to. “King of Pain” and “Wrapped Around Your Finger” are significantly better. I don’t have any particular dislike for this song, it’s just kinda boring.
It was quickly obvious to me that this was a really boring record and I was stunned that it got to No.1 and has since achieved “classic” status. I can hear why now but the hook just gets buried by it’s plodding.
Just so you don’t think this is one of those sweeping “Sting is a prick” opinions, I did like ‘King of Pain’
one of my biggest pet peeves is hack lyricists fooling with sentence structure in order to force an awkward rhyme. thus i cringe whenever i get to the line “i look around but it’s you i can’t replace”. brilliant poetry, gordon.
Yes, Sting is a terrible lyricist in the sense that’s he’s constantly forcing awkward, meaningless rhymes in order to show off his vocabulary. (Morrissey would do it much better.)
I’ve gone on record as saying that the Police are the worst-ever biggest band in the world, and this song among their prime offenses….
But it also never fails the sing-along-with-it test, whether it’s in the car, at a game, karaoke, or simply at a party. “Every Breath You Take” is simply loads of fun to sing (at least for me; I guess I have a similar range to Sting), especially the “I keep crying baby baby please” bit. Half the fun is making fun of Sting’s, uh, stylized vocalizing.
I already voted this a five, but I may have just talked myself into a higher mark. *Listens to the song again* No, I was right. The little shrivel of resignation I feel when the drum hits and that monotonous guitar figure starts doesn’t lie.
My main problem with Every Breath I Take, and the reason that (rather differently to Dave Marsh) I burst out laughing when I first heard it, is the outrageous corn of the lyric. Can you imagine any other major act coming up with this?
“Oh can’t you see
You belong to me?
My poor heart aches
With every step you take”
Even Perry Como would have snorted and summoned Mitch Miller to tender his resignation. The idea that Sting was imbuing this misanthropic dirge with a political subtext is plain daft. (The weakest entries in the Heart Of Rock & Soul are the eighties ones – Marsh should have had a cut-off point in the mid 70s to be true to himself). Sting is no great thinker. He’s just a bad loser in love is all.
Funny: the most bothersome technical thing about this song, as far as I’m concerned, is the very pat and comfortable melody in certain places, e.g., the “every step you take” quoted in #19 there — everyone’s talked about this song being somehow monochromatically stalkery, but there’s this element of washed-out soul in that little turn (and in lots of other spots) that goes against that, and for some reason gives me a bit of a sickly feeling. A song that wants to be steely-eyed probably shouldn’t have those things, I don’t think.
Still better than most of Sting’s solo singles at least.
Very specific memories of this week, actually, my first election as a voter (aged 18-and-a-quarter), experienced with a sinking sense of having chosen the wrong side to support which has set the tone for pretty much everything since, staying up til about 4am, staring at the tv, pointlessly gorging on misery as the scale of defeat sank in. (then getting up the next day for a maths a’level exam). My favourite, sort of, moment of the election coverage – a defeated labour candidate in bristol, trying to make a dignified resignation speech in the face of jeering hecklers, finally snapping and shouting ‘I don’t listen to the baying of the tories! You’ll be baying on the other side of your faces in 4 years time!’ It was incoherent (and historically inaccurate, obv), but somehow this just made him all the more right. whoever he was.
This beat “Total Eclipse of the Heart” to the #1 spot in the year-end Top 100 countdown with Casey Kasem on New Year’s Eve, which I will never forgive it.
#19 Sting himself – according to Wikipedia – apparently now claims he must have been subconsciously channeling the political mood when writing this.
Also according to Wikipedia, he’s trousering $2000 a day in royalties for this song alone.
#9 While I don’t think I’ve ever been confused about Sting, I can relate to Marsh; I constantly am having to ask myself who this very familiar voice on my iPod is whenever I shuffle, especially if I’ve been deeply buried in one narrow subgenre for a while.
f%#k tha police
haven’t some people even used it as a wedding song?
This has been massively overstated, I reckons.
Certainly, no-one does now, right? Not when there’s Angels, Celine Dijonmustard, or Spandau Ballet’s True to misuse…
We wanted “Fields of Gold” at our wedding but the DJ didn’t have it and we’d forgotten to bring our copy :(
Dean “Lucky Stars” Friedman described once on Radio 1 how he was driving along with the radio on when he heard Paul Evans’ “Hello This Is Joanie” for the first time, and paid less and less attention to the road as the song went on. When it came to the last verse and the news that Joanie’s car had crashed, Dean Friedman’s very nearly did too.
Re 20: I think in the parlance of doo wop, or even musicology, EBYT’s chord progression is the classic turnaround ballad. Which is why the “oh can’t you see…” lyric sounds particularly ghastly, taking the most obvious chord sequence and dolloping moon/june stuff on top. “Washed out soul” is spot on, which probably accounts for why it hit so big in ’83 (see also True and a couple of half-assed soulboy entries to come).
I wonder if Sting and Berlusconi ever swap notes (oops – is this common knowledge?). Sorry to Stingbash, but this may be our last opportunity.
For all that’s been said (most of it true, lord knows I’m no fan of Sting), the clipped way he sings ‘I’ll be watching you’ does come across as genuinely quite creepy.
Silly bugger pretends to play a double bass in the video too!
The idea that Sting was imbuing this misanthropic dirge with a political subtext is plain daft.
Hey, any Resurrection Watch worth its salt has to mention the “aaaah”/”not ah” Spitting Image re-recording, where The Very Sting Himself deigned to sing for the programme but it was all like Every Bomb You Make, like gosh.
One other Resurrection which the Bunny do allow is, then, the outro of Sting’s Love Is The Seventh Wave (“Every cake you bake, every leg you break”) – haha look I can even very self-consciously laugh at myself!!
Did anyone else see the programme about the recording of Dream Of The Blue Turtles, incl footage of Sting “winning” a game of inter-rehearsal chess. “Check mate”. Huh.
I’m sitting here, looking at a 7″ single picture sleeve identical to the one pictured (a little scratched from being jostled during so many moves), and noting that the vinyl inside looks pretty clean after all these years; if only I’d bothered to get my old turntable repaired, I would be listening to it right now. Unlike some key singles from 1983, this is one I never sold or swapped.
When this first came over the radio, it stopped me cold; I’d never heard anything like that progression of classical bass notes in a pop song. This was undoubtedly because I’d paid next to no attention to musical history in my decade and a half on the planet, but so what – it sounded new to me, and I wanted to hear it again and again. I phoned in a request to the station, as a lot of others must have, because they played it four or five times that afternoon. I remember this being the first time I knew, knew that a song was going to number one. (Which again shows how much I knew; in Australia it peaked at number two.) I bought the “limited edition” picture-sleeve single the very next time I was up in town.
I was too new to popular music to be bothered by contrived or convoluted lyrics (not that I pay them too much mind today), and too naive in love to realise how creepy their theme was. At fifteen, I was three years into an unrequited obsession with the prettiest girl in my grade, who had done nothing to deserve it other than be pretty. She was way out of my league, even though it was a small-town league, and I really should have known better, but at that age the mind doesn’t have much say in such matters. In hindsight, it was probably an unconscious defence mechanism, removing any need to deal with the possibilities offered by other girls at school who might have been interested; I had been the class brain on the margins for too long to notice any signs of interest, or to know how to deal with the complicated romantic manoeuvring that other kids seemed to take in their stride. (Seemed. You always assume you’re the only one.)
After years of keeping the secret between me and my friends, who were doubtless sick of hearing about it, I was starting to test my boundaries in the most painfully tentative manner by letting the girl know that I liked her (where “liked” meant the unthinking infatuation that only a flood of teenage hormones can unleash). She was a good sport, choosing not to turn me into a school-wide laughing stock. No, that was left to me, because I didn’t stop with letting her know.
Everyone in school listened to the AM station where I first heard “Every Breath You Take”, and every night kids from all over the south phoned in their requests to Bill the DJ. Getting on air was a rare coup in the days before mobiles and speed dial: it meant monopolizing the family phone (fortunately in an empty hallway in our house) and dialling the numbers repeatedly on a rotary dial – bad luck if it had a lot of 9’s and 0’s. Nineteen times out of twenty you’d get the engaged signal, and I gave up for the night more than once; but eventually I got through.
A friend and I had a plan for when we did. We were our grade’s biggest Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fans, and were going to speak to Bill in character: him as Marvin, me as Zaphod. (The irony being that I was definitely a Marvin at that age, and never a Zaphod.) The challenge was that the station had a ban on silly nicknames for their phone-ins; my friend could plausibly claim that Marvin was his actual name, but Zaphod was going to be tricky.
Bill must not have been Hobart’s biggest Hitchhiker’s fan, or else he took pity on me, because when I swore to him off-air that Zaphod really was what everyone called me, he put me on.
“And on the line we’ve got… Zaphod. How’s it going, Zaphod?”
“Heyyyyyyy, BILL baby!”
Of course, my best Zaphod voice was still instantly recognisable to everyone in my grade, especially when it slipped once or twice during my improvised Hitchhiker’s-themed banter, as were the names of all my friends, duly name-checked in the traditional roll-call before my request played; and as was the name of the girl I dedicated it to.
I pray that the song I requested wasn’t this one. But it could well have been. If not on that first call, then on one of the subsequent calls where I kept up the shtick and kept the same dedication. (My friend got through as Marvin, too, and for a while we were a regular feature of the phone-in. The no-nicknames policy pretty much collapsed after that, which can only have been a good thing.) The themes of “Every Breath You Take”, in all their unhealthy glory, hold too much obvious appeal to timid teenagers in the throes of unrequited love. Which is a lot of teenagers.
Although I had guaranteed myself instant notoriety in the classroom, the fall-out actually wasn’t as embarrassing as I’d feared; I still had No Chance, but my peers weren’t going to think less of me for fancying someone half of them did as well. What the girl concerned made of it, I can only speculate, and cringe over.
Given that the song was such a personal milestone (millstone?), it’s odd that I never bought Synchronicity; I guess I was burning through too much cash with my new record-buying habit, and there was a 3-in-1 stereo to save for as well. I resisted the urge even when Fopp was knocking it out recently for three quid, because I couldn’t see it being what I’d once imagined it must be (a Masterpiece! Five Stars! Breathtaking!); not after a quarter-century more of exposure to comfy ol’ Sting. (Not a fan, really, but a copy of The Soul Cages moulders away on my CD shelves.) Some things are better left in isolation, and “Every Breath You Take” feels like one of them. Funny, that.
Back in the day I would have given this an 8 without hesitation, but age has wearied it to a six or seven; even if the memories it invokes are embarrassing, they’re intense, and that’s got to count for something. As for those lyrics and the message they send to hapless dedicatees, at least it wasn’t the b-side, “Murder by Numbers”.
I’m in two minds about this song: 1: because it’s Sting; 2: because it sounds so smugly superior (see 1); and 3: because, despite that, I still find it quite compelling.
I don’t mind the lyrics too much – I think they come across as deliberately generic and it is the performance that makes a more sinister interpretation of them. Perhaps his experience of singing ‘Spread a little happiness’ for ‘Brimstone and Treacle’ had suggested the idea. Another performance, another arrangement could make this sound quite anodyne.
The pace and sound of this performance reminds me of Libertango from Grace Jones’ Nightclubbing, which, given she covered Sting’s Demolition Man on that album, I’m sure he would have been aware of.
I’m not really sure that the rather literal Sting has the smarts to do “deliberately generic” – this is a man who had a dream in which he looked out of his window to see three turtles on their backs, turning blue, dying, in his garden. It was a dream about The Police, you see, Sting soon told us while promoting his first solo album. I wonder if Fish had a dream in which he was keeping a vigil in a wilderness of mirrors? I think he probably did.
Like Rosie, I too have been in my bunker lately – emerging from it to win a nice little packet on Roger and Serena, as advised by friend Waldo, and doing other bits and bobs to no financial reward at all.
I like EBYT now much more than I did back in the day when I considered it more than a little trite, something which Sting had knocked out in about five minutes for his own delectation rather than for those simpletons who would worship at his shrine however poor the output. I can recall being more impressed with the version delivered for “Spittin’ Image”, which was far more evocative than the original. I now look more kindly upon it once I have dismissed the “stalker” aspect, which seems to bother some commentators. If Sting was indeed trying to be mysterious, it doesn’t really matter, especially all these years later and especially since Sting has become such a righteous knob in the interim.
Erithian – I remember seeing an interview with Dean Friedman, who mentioned that he was something of a hate figure at college amongst the boys as he began his “career” as a songster. This, Dean opined, had everything to do with his corresponding popularity with the girls on campus and nothing whatsoever to do with his totally punchable face and his femmy, whiny little voice, which made Neil Sadaka sound like Scott Walker. Certainly “Lucky Stars” was a capital offence, especially when Friedman asks the uncredited female singer to “slide over here”, and his other two offerings I can think of – “Ariel” and “Lydia, Lydia” were similarly annoying.
Erm, unlike most, I really liked it in 1983, and I still do. I think its the bass line that hooks, and the veneer of menace in the song… I am surprised to see this being panned as remorselessly as it is.
#31 “Did anyone else see the programme about the recording of Dream Of The Blue Turtles, incl footage of Sting “winning” a game of inter-rehearsal chess. “Check mate”.
i missed this gem the first time round but can imagine this EXACTLY. i just bet he was barefoot at the time too.
This is one of those songs I loved back then and do not like so much now. That said, it is one of the great creepy stalker anthems.
I’m with Tooncgull # 36: I liked it then and I like it now. I love it in fact. Unlike him the dislike on here really doesn’t surprise me. Million and millions of people bought it, but the ‘musos’ just wanted to hate Sting. The lyrics are simple? Who cares. The tempo is ‘plodding’? Who cares. Seriously, there has been some utter tosh go through here with people giving it thumbs up. This is a 4 – like ‘Aneka’?!?!
Yes, I know; this is one of those songs that was everywhere then and hasn’t gone away and Sting is a lunkhead. But regardless of that; this song is everything a great pop sing should be; unforgettable, and with a hook that most musicians would cut off a finger for. ‘4′ my arse. Whatever I was going to give it I’m now giving it a 10 just to spit at every single threadbare criticism of what is one of the most famous songs of all time. Oh, and Puff Daddy’s mediocre rhyme would have gotten nowhere without using that selfsame irresistible riff, thus the song generated two of the biggest hits of all time. I call the ‘Spandau’ defence; two huge songs from one riff make the song critic-proof. You know that you can throw all the rocks you want; they’ll just bounce off.
There are times when it feels like people criticise things just for being too popular with the masses. This feels like one of those times. I posit a hypothesis; if this song had been the same but done by a different band, 50% of the criticisms here would simply disappear. Is it really the song you dislike, or is ‘Sting’ + ‘Popularity’ that bothers you?
As for people using this for their wedding and not “getting it”; first of all, ’stalker’ is a term that has been popularised post-internet (like many others). Second, maybe the people that chose it for their wedding can hear what the song is about, but like it anyway? The song is about obsessive love, which is no different to obsessive devotion; whether it is a good or bad thing depends on whether it’s reciprocated. At a wedding people are presumably dedicating themselves to each other for life (in theory) so the sentiment of the song would be an appropriate sentiment of devotion, rather than simply a threat of potential murder.