Free Republic

Widely regarded as one of new wave’s key albums, ‘Outlandos D’Amour’ introduced The Police as virtuosos with enough aggression to appease the punks.The Police’s debut album, Outlandos D’Amour, boasts an enviable reputation. Widely regarded as one of New Wave’s key records, it’s racked up multi-platinum sales since its release, and is rightly cited as the disc which set the band on the road to superstardom. The Outlandos D’Amour sessions came at the end of 12 months of hard labor for The Police. Having already masterminded the group’s name, manifesto, and even some material, drummer Stewart Copeland had the blueprint in...

The album topped the charts in the UK, France, and Australia and became their first platinum disc in the US.On October 3, 1980, The Police delivered an album that Rolling Stone described as “near-perfect pop by a band that bends all the rules and sometimes makes musical mountains out of molehill-size ideas.” It was their third LP, Zenyatta Mondatta. A No.1 album in the UK, France and Australia, it featured two more signature hits for Messrs Sting, Summers, and Copeland, “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” and “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.” But alongside the nonsense lyrics...

Topping the charts in the UK and reaching No.3 in the US, The Police’s ‘Ghost In The Machine‘ included several of the band’s most enduring hit singles.The Police’s multi-platinum-selling third album, Zenyatta Mondatta, stayed on the US Billboard 200 for almost three years and included “Don’t Stand So Close To Me”: not only the band’s third British No.1 hit, but also the UK’s biggest-selling single of 1980. A phenomenal success by anyone’s standards, the record set Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland on course for its follow-up, Ghost In The Machine, and the global superstardom they’d attain when their fifth...

Everything you have been taught, all your life, about the police and the courts and the justice system is a lie. Take all your mental images, everything you learned in primary school, every episode of "Perry Mason" or "Law and Order" or "The Rookie", crumple them up, throw them away. Banish them to a corner of your mind prominently labeled "fairy stories for little kids". That is not how any of this works. The police do not exist to protect you from criminals. Detectives do not exist to investigate crime and find the offenders. Courts do not exist to find...

The album will be massively expanded in a deluxe box set, marking 40 years since its release.The Police – Sting, Andy Summers, and Stuart Copeland – became one of the greatest and most successful bands to emerge from the frenetic 1980s, off its deeply danceable sound, buoyed by Sting’s deeply heartfelt and literary instincts. The Police were at their peak when the trio hit the studio to record Synchronicity, having arrived to the new decade with the massive 1979 hit “Message in a Bottle” under its belt, then continuing through the early years of the decade with three follow-up No....

The Official Music Video for Wrapped Around Your Finger. Taken from The Police - Synchronicity.

40 years after it was first released, it seems the Police guitarist still doesn’t feel he got his due for the iconic guitar part.Andy Summers has hinted that he might take legal action against Sting over the songwriting credits for Every Breath You Take, 40 years after The Police’s classic track was first released. When asked about the 1983 hit on the podcast The Jeremy White Show, the former guitarist for The Police (as transcribed by Ultimate Classic Rock) says, “It’s a very contentious [topic] that is very much alive at the moment. That song was going in the trash...

Stewart Copeland ruled out another Police reunion for “honorable reasons,” saying the trio will remain great friends as long as they don't try to work together again. Frontman Sting, guitarist Andy Summers and Copeland split in 1986 after a hugely successful nine-year stint, reconnecting in 2003 and 2007. In a new interview with the Daily Express, the drummer surmised that the Police's original run lasted longer than it might have without Sting’s loyalty to his bandmates. “It was poisonous,” Copeland said of their ‘80s experience. “We were as big as a band could be, and everyone thought we were three...

The Police's journey toward fame began on April 7, 1978, with the release of their first major-label single, "Roxanne." That's not to say the song was an overnight hit – far from it. It took a long time for the track to eventually find its place among the most recognizable rock songs of all time. The inspiration for "Roxanne" can be traced back to October 1977. The Police were in Paris for a performance, tirelessly trying to make a name for themselves. "We were supposed to do this X little gig with the Damned," guitarist Andy Summers recalled to Classic...

Stevie Nicks was very clear on what she wanted to achieve when she turned her attention to recording “Edge of Seventeen.” She later admitted that she’d never heard a dove’s call, even though the Fleetwood Mac icon represented it in her vocals. There was also a song by the Police that she wanted to imitate: “Bring on the Night,” from 1979’s Regatta de Blanc. Guitarist Waddy Wachtel was lost. “I had never heard ‘Bring On the Night,’” the Bella Donna sideman told Musician in 1999, “and at that session they told me they were going to do this song based...

The Police’s debut album, Outlandos D’Amour, boasts an enviable reputation. Widely regarded as one of New Wave’s key records, it’s racked up multi-platinum sales since its release, and is rightly cited as the disc which set the band on the road to superstardom.

YouTube video -- very well done transposition to a minor key, and really creepy.

“Ho, hum, what else is new?” That was my first reaction when I saw a report that Susan Douglas, a professor of communications and department chair at the University of Michigan, had published an article titled “It’s Okay to Hate Republicans,” in which she stated: "I hate Republicans. I can’t stand the thought of having to spend the next two years watching Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ted Cruz, Darrell Issa or any of the legions of other blowhards denying climate change, thwarting immigration reform or championing fetal ‘personhood.’" According to the professor, Republicans exhibit the following “psychological characteristics”: "[d]ogmatism, rigidity...

On their first U.S.tour in early 1979, the three members of The Police arrived for their first interview at my Memphis ROCK 103 radio studio in a station wagon. Barely 15 months later they returned to take me to lunch, except this time they were in a limousine.

In the first test of the county’s new rules for reviewing police-involved deaths, officers connected with the Dec. 11 death of a suspect who was shot with a Taser are refusing to cooperate with investigators. Their refusal to make voluntary statements to Metro’s Force Investigation Team is on the advice of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, said Chris Collins, president of the officers union. From Collins’ standpoint, not only is the officers’ refusal to cooperate the right thing to do, it marks the beginning of the end of the coroner’s inquest system. The system, in use for 40 years,...

NEW YORK (AP) - Sting isn't a religious man, but he says President Barack Obama might be a divine answer to the world's problems. In an interview, he jokes that Obama was "sent from God," but in a serious tone, he also said that Obama was the best person to handle the world's "mess." The English-born Sting says he's fascinated by American politics and those opposed to Obama. He says Obama's opponents are "aggressive and violent and full of fear."

The drummer for The Police has apologised to the Chilean president after apparently implying that he found her less attractive that her Argentinian counterpart. Stewart Copeland's coarse remark risked overshadowing the Santiago leg of the band's comeback tour of South America, after his comments were picked up by the local press. In an interview given to a Chilean magazine he reportedly said: "Look, the future President of Argentina would be good for one beer; yours (would be good) for four."

Maybe Sting should start writing more instrumentals. The school teacher-turned-rock star topped Blender's list of the worst lyricists, thanks to lines that betray "mountainous pomposity (and) cloying spirituality," the music magazine said. The survey, contained in the November issue that hits newsstands next week, placed Rush drummer Neil Peart at No. 2, Creed frontman Scott Stapp at No. 3, Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher at No. 4, and soft-rocker Dan Fogelberg at No. 5. Blender assailed Sting for such alleged sins as name-dropping Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov in the Police tune "Don't Stand So Close to Me," quoting a Volvo bumper...

LONDON (Reuters) - An employment tribunal ordered rock star Sting and his wife Trudie Styler to pay 24,944 pounds in compensation on Tuesday for wrongfully dismissing their former chef. Jane Martin, who cooked for Sting and his family at their country estate in England, filed a claim in July last year saying she had been sacked by Styler after revealing she was pregnant.