So Lonely: The Police’s Outlandos d’Amour at 45
Looking back on the band’s blueprint for future success
“And [when] the three of them made music, it sounded like seven or eight people were playing,” Herb Alpert once said about The Police. “They all had contributed to this great sound, but you can’t deny that Sting writes a great song.”
The arrival of punk created a whirlpool effect on the music scene, sucking in chancers and musos alike and spitting them out, sometimes splattering them onto the charts.
Not unlike the Bad Brains – at least on paper – who journeyed from jazz fusion to a kind of punk combined with reggae, The Police were one such band. Here you had three musicians who combined the opportunistic and the virtuosic in an unlikely recipe for world-dominating success.
In order of age, first you had Andy Summers, a journeyman guitarist who had scrabbled around the R&B scene as a member of Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band and Eric Burdon & The Animals, to whom he contributed a painstaking and rather tedious solo for their version of Traffic’s “Coloured Rain,” before bouncing over to the U.S. to study classical guitar. Upon his return, his finely honed chops made him an in-demand player for live gigs and sessions. By the time he was invited to join The Police he was nearing 35, an advanced age for any era of rock and roll.
Then there was Gordon Sumner, an aspiring bass player who worked odd jobs around Newcastle and jazz in the evenings. Picking up the nickname Sting, he almost got somewhere with a fusion band called Last Exit. Moving to London put him in contact with Stewart Copeland, the spy game’s version of an army brat whose father’s CIA career had his family moving from Virginia to Cairo to Beirut, where he took up the drums, and finally to London. After going to college in California, he returned to the U.K. and found himself in the prog-rock scene as a member of Curved Air.
“One day I lent Sting some Bob Marley albums for a party, and suddenly he wasn’t listening to anything else,” Copeland once explained. “He came down to the next rehearsal having sussed out the bass lines, and how it actually works, and suddenly I was able to achieve that intake of breath that you get from the weird reggae dropped beat, and it worked. So the turning point was when I had a bass player who could play the bass line, I mean it doesn’t happen unless those two elements are working together, you king of push and pull each other.”
These were inauspicious beginnings, indeed, and when entering the studio to record their debut album, Outlandos d’Amour, which was released 45 years ago this month, even Copeland’s brother Miles, who was funding the recordings and later founded I.R.S. Records, poked fun. Until he heard “Roxanne.” With an arresting intro that combined Summers’ guitar skanks with a skeletal rhythm track that led to a dramatic flourish to introduce Sting’s vocals, which started with that indelible refrain: “Roxanne/You don’t have to put on the red light/Those days are over/You don’t have to sell your body to the night.” The stop-start reggae-influenced section was combined with a driving and repetitive four/four chorus that drove the name of the song into your skull.
VIDEO: The Police “Roxanne”
On this side of the pond, the song threw off some confusing signals. There was the vocal style that, even with Sting’s high-pitched voice, was indebted to Bob Marley — not something many would attempt — and a louche sexuality that reeked of sophistication, at least to this 14-year-old. But along with The Cars and Dire Straits, there was also the sense of a traditional pop sensibility invading what many hoped would be a revolution. Not that The Police cared. The next single, “I Can’t Stand Losing You,” drove home the reggae-rock formula, with the verse and chorus alternating genres and a nice, dubbed out instrumental that showed more mastery. Lyrically, the desperation of a suicidal spurned lover was like the flip side of “Roxanne,” as if she had gone back to the streets or found another sugar daddy, leaving our hero high and dry.
The third single, “So Lonely,” was another uber-catchy rock-reggae blend, but “Hole In My Life” and “Born In The 50s,” both of which also received airplay here, showed more dimensions to their sound. Summers employed a heavily chorused guitar on the former, pointing to a defining sound of the eighties, and also played a short, sharp solo that showed how far he had come since his time in The Animals. “Born In The 50s” might have made Andy Partridge of XTC a little jealous, with a soaring chorus and lyrics that acknowledged the roots of a generation. Sting’s unappealing growl on parts of the song hinted at his limitations as a vocalist.
VIDEO: The Police “So Lonely”
With the radio delivering half of the album’s ten tracks to my ears, I never saw fit to buy the album. Listening to the whole thing now, I can see why early critics roasted Outlandos D’Amour. The other five songs are weak, starting with “Next To You,” which opens the album with what sounds like an actual, and unbecoming, attempt at punk. Then there’s “Peanuts,” which critiques Rod Stewart’s trade-off of artistry for fame but as a song goes nowhere, despite Summers’ galvanic solo. “Truth Hits Everybody,” while energetic, lacks inevitability, and “Be My Girl – Sally” starts off with a promising brightness and an appealing nursery-rhyme simplicity, yet quickly devolves into a silly monologue about a blow-up sex doll that only serves to show how great Roxy Music were at that sort of thing. Finally, there’s “Masoka Tanga,” a nonsensical, noodling track that could serve as the dictionary definition of filler.
While those first reviews were less than complimentary, with Tom Carson in Rolling Stone lambasting Outlandos d’Amour for “its mechanically minded emptiness masquerading as feeling,” in recent years the album’s reputation has risen considerably, likely due to The Police’s later success casting a retrospective halo over an uneven album.
But for those who, like me, thought the band reached their peak on Regatta de Blanc – which I did buy, finding the reggae deeper and the pop more powerful – Outlandos d’Amour at this late date sounds like nothing more than an unfinished blueprint.
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