The Police - Zenyatta Mondatta
Writer: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 03.10.1980
After releasing two albums less than a year apart, and after setting out on a world tour in March 1980 in support of their second album, "Reggatta de Blanc", it seemed that "The Police" were in constant motion. Their success was also marked by the release of "Six Pack", a box set containing 7-inch editions of the six singles the band had released up to that point.
But A&M Records wanted to strike while the iron was hot. The workload was barely taken into account, and the expectation was for another album roughly a year later. The creative well was no longer flowing quite as effortlessly as it had at the beginning, yet "Zenyatta Mondatta" became an important midpoint in the band’s career: an album that delicately balances the reggae and punk roots of the first two records with the new wave and more sophisticated rock that would define the next two.
The result brought "The Police" both critical and commercial success at the dawn of the decade and established them as one of the era’s biggest rock bands. Behind that success, however, was an especially pressured recording process. The album was co-produced by Nigel Gray and the band and recorded at Wisseloord Studios in the Netherlands during a brief break in the touring schedule. Because of tax considerations, the band did not record in Britain, and the tight timetable left them only a few weeks to complete the album.
The band members later expressed disappointment that the album had been completed in such a rush, but perhaps that very sense of urgency is one of the reasons for the energy and dynamism that can be heard throughout it.
"Don't Stand So Close to Me" opens the album and was also its first single. Sting, who had worked as a teacher before becoming a musician, wrote a story about a teacher who becomes attracted to one of his students, explicitly referencing Vladimir Nabokov’s "Lolita" in the lyrics. According to Sting, the song was not autobiographical but a work of fiction.
In Britain, the single became a massive hit. It spent four weeks at number one and was the best-selling single in the UK in 1980, with estimated sales of around 808,000 copies. It later earned "The Police" the Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal at the ceremony held in 1982.
The album’s title also became part of the band’s mythology. Sting later described a working method in which he would pull a phrase out of thin air and only afterward search for the story or meaning that might fit it. Years later, Jerry Moss, co-founder of A&M Records, named the champion racehorse Zenyatta after the album.
"Driven to Tears" reveals another side of Sting and "The Police". It is one of Sting’s early protest songs, written in 1979 after he saw television images of starving children and people living in extreme poverty. The song confronts the gap between comfortable life in the West and the suffering shown on the screen, asking what responsibility we carry once we are exposed to a truth we can no longer ignore.
Looking back, Sting’s answer at the time sounds almost helpless. In the years that followed, he himself would demonstrate that musicians with public visibility and influence can also act, draw attention to causes and affect the world beyond simply writing a song.
"When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around" continues that sense of anxiety. Sting imagined a lonely future in which a man is left with canned food, a video recorder and old tapes of James Brown and Otis Redding, a kind of modern Robinson Crusoe fantasy in which personal survival collides with the realization that real survival is a collective effort.
The video for the song, directed by Derek Burbidge, was filmed at Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro, in keeping with the band’s fondness at the time for exotic locations. In 2000, a remix by Different Gear returned the track to the charts, reaching the UK Top 30 and the Irish Top 10.
"Canary in a Coalmine" brings the band back to its familiar reggae flavor. Sting describes an especially anxious person, but the metaphor of a canary in a coal mine gives that anxiety a more complex meaning: perhaps this is simply someone who recognizes danger before everyone else. The phrase comes from the days when miners carried caged canaries underground as an early warning against poisonous gases.
"Voices Inside My Head" may suggest inner voices in a psychological sense, but Sting does not explicitly write about schizophrenia. The minimalist, repetitive lyrics are better suited to a feeling of indecision, obsessive thoughts and choices that keep circling inside the mind.
"Bombs Away" was written by Stewart Copeland, and it is one of the album’s most overtly political moments. Copeland described it as a song with a nihilistic view of war, and the lyrics include a direct reference to Afghanistan in the period following the Soviet invasion. Copeland’s own experiences, having grown up in part in the Middle East, gave the subject an additional personal background.
The second single, "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da", focuses on the power and exploitation of words. Sting explained that the idea was to criticize banality and the way politicians, religious figures, entertainers and other people in positions of power use language to influence and manipulate. The irony is that, in trying to criticize simplicity, he wrote one of the simplest, catchiest and most addictive choruses in the band’s catalog.
The album includes two instrumental tracks. "The Other Way of Stopping" took its title from a line in Bob Newhart’s sketch "The Driving Instructor". "Behind My Camel" was the first piece written entirely by Andy Summers. Sting refused to play on it, so Summers recorded the bass line himself and layered the guitars over it. Sting disliked the track so much that he later said he took the tape and buried it in the garden behind the studio. The irony was perfect: "Behind My Camel" later won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.
"Shadows in the Rain" nearly closes the album’s darker circle with a dense, threatening atmosphere. More than a direct statement about nuclear war, it is a song of paranoia, shadows and a sense of danger, wrapped in a spacious dub-influenced sound that gives Andy Summers room to build layers of guitar and atmosphere.
The band finished work on "Zenyatta Mondatta" at around four in the morning, and within hours they were already on their way to Belgium to begin the next world tour. It is difficult to imagine a more fitting ending for an album born entirely under the pressure of time and constant motion.
Despite the band members’ feeling that the work had not been completed exactly as they wanted, "Zenyatta Mondatta" reached number one in the UK and became the first "The Police" album to enter the Top 10 in the United States. It captured the band at the precise point between the lean sharpness of the late 1970s and the ambition that would later lead to "Synchronicity". Sometimes an album made too quickly manages to capture a moment that could never have been recreated if it had been given more time.
For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music
"Face/Off" - Israel's Rock Blog
Comments