{"id":26962,"date":"2024-09-01T00:11:33","date_gmt":"2024-09-01T07:11:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/?p=26962"},"modified":"2024-08-24T11:09:04","modified_gmt":"2024-08-24T18:09:04","slug":"the-police-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sandiegotroubadour.com\/the-police-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"The Police, Part Two"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Outlandos d\u2019Amour<\/em> is deceptive at first blush. The listener is initially assaulted in the debut album\u2019s leadoff track\u2013\u201cNext to You\u201d\u2013by an uptempo barrage of rapid-fire Copeland snare flams and brutal tom work congruent with the prevailing punk ethos (though still technically over the heads of most of the scene\u2019s drummers), and an aggressively sung verse from Sting. The lyrics are the first element to give them away; they\u2019re centered on the author\u2019s lovesick desperation for a distant paramour (or perhaps they\u2019re a pre-diaspora love letter to brass-ring London?), not Thatcher-era oppression, classic-rock-dinosaur rejection (though the eventually hypocritical \u201cPeanuts\u201d addresses the subject a few tracks later), or generation gap maintenance (\u201cBorn in the Fifties\u201d is arguably more \u201cUs\u201d than \u201cThem\u201d). This and other Outlandos<\/em> songs are Beatles-esque in the sense that the Liverpudlian outfit\u2019s early lyrics were an implicit attempt to seduce young listeners into buying their records, and The Police would have fallen flat on their faces had Sting looked anything like his punk peers (if they can even be called that).<\/p>\n

All bets are off once the chorus arrives, though. For a start, Summers\u2019 guitar part, mostly line-toeing, muted eighth-note downstrokes in the verses, shifts to broad-swath power chords paired with open strings that shimmer in upper harmonic, space-filling contrast to the maniacally chugging rhythm section (one wonders why Summers ever abandoned the easier album parts and tried to keep right-hand rhythmic pace with the coke-tempoed Copeland at the live shows). And Sting is suddenly accompanied by several clones singing close, rich vocal harmonies, a punk-alienating overdub practice he would not only carry out through the rest of the album, but throughout the rest of the band\u2019s catalog as well. Andy\u2019s solo, also a punk-defying anomaly, is played with a slide on an open-tuned guitar over a temporary key change from E to G Mixolydian, ramping up the tension release with its archaically bluesy, borderline countrified hoedown feel. Finally, the track commits the cardinal sin of fading out, the halfhearted ruse of proletariat rebellion all but entirely abandoned.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo Lonely\u201d reveals the first semblance of ingeniously modified reggae. In addition to filling melodic space between the verses\u2019 vocals, Summers\u2019 guitar like-mindedly accents the offbeats but doesn\u2019t omit the surrounding eighth notes as is common to the genre. On the verses, Copeland puts the kick and cross-stick-replacing full snare hits back on 1 and 3, and 2 and 4 respectively, and does his tastily nuanced, soon-to-be trademark hi-hat work over the top (Peter Gabriel would eventually tap him for that kit piece alone on at least one solo album track), which punches up the beat into more of a lurching hip-hop groove. The choruses engage the double-time afterburners, with wide-swath whole-note chords by Summers and Sting\u2019s three-part harmonies (in the early days, when Copeland and Summers would join in on those live, especially on this song\u2019s pre-choruses, it was a record-emulating treat). Summers\u2019s guitar solo (\u201cAnother solo?!?!<\/em>\u201d you can almost hear the indignant punters shouting\u2026sorry, but another fade-out as well) is off-the-beaten-path pentatonic, and occurs after an upward modulation from C to D major, a dramatic top 40 device the majority of London\u2019s punk bands also wouldn\u2019t be caught dead attempting, much less have any foreknowledge of (though The Ramones had been hip to it). In addition, Sting shows off his absurdly high, precise, and inimitable vocal range throughout, but especially on the post-solo breakdown vamp, which feels so rhapsodic and joyous as to transmogrify the song\u2019s title into an ironic exaltation.<\/p>\n

\u201cHole in my Life\u201d comes the closest to overt jazz, with a like-minded swinging eighth rhythm and Summers\u2019 college chord stabs on the downbeats offset by a cleverly syncopated toms-on-2 and snare-on-4 groove by Copeland. Sting has been quoted as saying something to the effect that the bass note determines the tonality of the chord played over it; he proves it somewhat true in his creation of tasty inversions and \u201cslash\u201d variations\u2013chords with a non-root note in the bass\u2013in many songs, including the chorus of \u201cHole in my Life,\u201d which, coupled with doubled and harmonized vocals, Sting\u2019s legato octave bassline, Copeland\u2019s symphonic crashes, and Summers\u2019 splendiferous strums, gives this and other Outlandos<\/em> songs a cinematically orchestrated, greater-than-the-sum-of-its-three-parts grandeur. And the lyric for this track (notwithstanding \u201cSo Lonely\u201d) actually expresses the author\u2019s dark state of mind unrelated to heartbreak, the kind of inconsolable isolation that would go on to conspicuously inform songs like \u201cMessage in a Bottle\u201d and \u201cKing of Pain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Below is a video of a stellar performance of \u201cHole in my Life\u201d in the middle of the band\u2019s live appearance on the German TV show Beat Club<\/em> in 1978; especially noteworthy is Sting\u2019s \u201cFixing a Hole\u201d McCartney quote at 16:19, his show of solidarity in \u201cSo Lonely\u201d at 1:42 (\u201cWelcome to this three-man show!\u201d), and the genuinely corroborative, early-days smile he gets from Stewart at the top of \u201cBorn in the Fifties\u201d (8:53):<\/p>\n