I grew up with the Sting of the 90s, the messianic, humanitarian spiritual guru singing orientalist dance songs and talking about the impact of tantric yoga on his sex life. So it came as a bit of a shock to discover that he started his career as the rather Aryan-looking frontman of a sparse, sometimes gloomy-sounding punk band. Though, come to think of it, I suppose there is a consistent tendency toward postcolonial appropriation that runs from the reggae of “Roxanne” to the worldbeat of “Desert Rose.” Always nicking stuff off the Global South, like everyone else who attended a British public school in the last 500 years. Synchronicity, though, saw a considerable toning down of the Police’s early reggae influences. It was their last and biggest album and, to me, it sounds a lot like the early U2 records, before they copied Simple Minds and started making the euphoric synth-rock of Unforgettable Fire. Synchronicity, like October or War, presents us with slightly eerie, disconsolate sounding, intermittently frantic and explosive post-punk with prominent basslines and anguished-sounding vocals. In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine that this kind of thing filled arenas…
But I digress. The key thing to note at the outset of this review is that Synchronicity’s sequencing is downright bizarre. The first half is, to say the least, a mixed bag. It starts strong, with the skittish, Billy Idol-like synth-pop of “Synchronicity I”, which introduces one of the album’s so-called ‘key themes’ (though, really, it only pops up twice); that there’s no such thing as chance or coincidence, that everything is interconnected, that “psychic energy” drives events in the material world. The idea is taken from a book by Carl Jung; Sting was apparently preoccupied with it while recording this album. Probably he was in search of a satisfying explanation for the discombobulating experience of skyrocketing to mega stardom and meeting the love of his life in Trudy Styler, a two-bit actress who most likely brought out his latent penchant for new age Californian fluff, the tragic leitmotif of his solo career, as alluded to above.
“Synchronicity I” is a fantastically restless opener, but the lyrics are laced with the suggestible spiritualism of middle-class bohemia. Its partner song, “Synchronicity II”, comes at the end of side one and it’s also an enjoyable, though strange and rather affected entry. Its lyrics tell the tale of a depressed family man, bamboozled by his mundane homelife and unrewarding job. Nothing to see here – rock bands have been lampooning the Worried Well of white suburbia since the advent of the genre. But then the song takes an unexpected turn; it is revealed that, due to the power of synchronicity, our hero’s ostensibly unremarkable middle-class misery has been – if I understand this correctly – serving as spiritual nourishment for the Loch Ness monster which, in the second half of the song, rises from its lair to attack a lakeside cottage. So be careful, for everything is interconnected – synchronous, if you will – which means that your depressive ruminations while driving to work on the M6 could induce the abominable snowman to leave his cave and devour a group of mountaineers. This is basically the plot to a 1980s horror B-movie and it’s perfectly stupid, though the song itself is a nice slice of driving post-punk.
The rest of side one of Synchronicity is equally perplexing, but musically less enjoyable. Two songs – “Walking in your Footsteps” and “Miss Gradenko” – are firmly rooted in the twilight years of the Cold War. The former is a bizarre number, even by the standards of this album; a kind of tribal, world music ode to – I shit you not – a brontosaurus. It sounds like something a Kindergarten class would sing on a day trip to the Natural History Museum. Of course, it’s a reflection on the fragility of the human species at a time of nuclear escalation; the dinosaurs may at one time have ruled the earth, but they didn’t last – the message being, if it could happen to them, it could happen to us. Very clever. “Miss Gradenko”, meanwhile, is an amusing anti-communist song about the stultifying deadness of life in the Soviet Union before Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary and personally opened 25 branches of McDonalds in Moscow. Our bored and cynical narrator embarks on an affair with a foxy apparatchik, thereby rendering her loyalty suspect and bringing her into mortal danger with the Nomenklatura.
Both of these songs are odd but, on the whole, likeable, if only for the sheer incongruity of one of the biggest rock bands of the 80s filling the number two slot on their bestselling album with a nursery rhyme about a dinosaur. Odd-but-likeable, however, is not a term that can be easily applied to track 4, “Mother”, a deranged, Dadaist cacophony about how men date their mothers. It’s Andy Summers sole, catastrophic contribution to Synchronicity, and it’s hard to understand how it made the final cut, let alone why they put it so close to the start of the record, thus forcing defenceless listeners to navigate its choppy waters before finding themselves washed up on the hit-strewn shores of side two. Maybe the Police were just taking the piss out of the kind of primal scream-inspired art rock then being peddled by the likes of Tears for Fears, but even if it’s supposed to be a sendup, it is thoroughly unamusing and borderline unlistenable.
Overall, then, the balance sheet at the end of side one is far from encouraging. We have two energetic, though rather pretentious, meditations on Jungian spiritualism; a love affair with a bored Soviet bureaucrat; a kid’s song about a brontosaurus; and a man screaming about his mother. “O My God”, a nasty little post-punk number about a toxic relationship, unfortunately gets rather lost amidst this chaos. But side two is an entirely different kettle of fish. It’s where Sting takes the album by the scruff of the neck with a series of exceptional and surprisingly dark pop-rock songs which became radio hits despite their eminently disturbing lyrics. “Every Breath You Take” gets us underway and there’s not much left to say about it that hasn’t already been said, except that people apparently still get married to and teary eyed over what is, in essence, a song about a stalker. At one point, Sting implies that his own sense of self ceases to exist in the absence of the (m)other, the classic and unresolvable dilemma of the psychotic personality structure.
After this million-selling sociopathic mega-hit, the rest of side two signally fails to lighten the mood – on the contrary. The horrifying and darkly catchy “King of Pain” reels off gruesome, Ted Hughes-esque images drawn from nature and folklore, and likens them to the state of Sting’s psyche in the wake of his traumatic divorce. The rhythm of “Wrapped Around Your Finger” carries the doleful echo of the Police’s lamentable past as a reggae band but, fortunately, it is saved by the icy synths of the verses, the anguished and bombastic choruses, and some extremely bad-tempered lyrics about an abusive relationship in which a servant turns the tables on his erstwhile master. It’s one of many Police songs in which Sting – a trained schoolteacher – betrays his errant fascination with the inherently erotic power imbalance at the heart of the student / teacher relationship. Oh dear.
After the anarchy of side one, followed by the brilliant trilogy at the start of side two, Synchronicity ends in thoroughly and fittingly uncanny fashion with “Tea in the Sahara” and “Murder by Numbers”. The former is a plodding, eerie, almost Joy Division-like post-punk song which draws on an Arabic legend of three sisters who wait in vain for their beloved prince to join them for tea in the Sahara – a projection, surely, of Sting’s own anxieties about the cloying expectations of the growing number of women in his life. Remarkably, the noirish swing of “Murder by Numbers” is perhaps the only moment of real levity on the entire record – remarkable because it quite literally describes how one can become habituated or even addicted to committing murder, and then ends by implying that our political leaders are in fact the most prolific killers of all.
Overall, then, Synchronicity is pretty fucked up. The first half is utter chaos, the second a succession of deeply disconcerting radio hits, while the ending leaves a very bad taste in the mouth indeed. Overall, it’s one of the maddest records of the 80s, which I wasn’t expecting, given the Buddhistic reputation cultivated by Our Lord and Saviour in his later years. I suppose there’s a case that Synchronicity doesn’t quite merit the level of acclaim that it commonly receives, on the grounds that too much is merely passable (“O My God”, “Miss Gradenko”), perplexing (“Walking in your Footsteps”), or simply pish (“Mother”). But the two title songs are great, and side two is a triumph from start to finish, so on balance, it deserves the acclaim, in my opinion. It’s also worth pointing out that, by referring to a brontosaurus and to the Loch Ness Monster, two of the album’s songs invoke long-necked, monstrous, extinct lizards with walnut-sized brains.
8/10
Highlights: “Every Breath You Take”, “King of Pain”, “Wrapped Around Your Finger”