Re: The Police a few pages ago. These two paragraphs I read in a book called "Yeah Yeah Yeah" by Bob Stanley are funny and observant:
"It was easier to see how the Police got away with it - three moody blond dudes, not that ugly, and a pared-back sound that was instantly recognizable. Singer Sting had a high, mewling voice that, appropriately, sounded a little like the whine of a police siren. They hit their stride on their fourth single, "Message in a Bottle,' economical and irresistible, enthusiastic whoops not out of place, in the summer of '79. But the feeling that something wasn't quite right crept in early. Sting's faux-Jamaican accent was always problematic, and he did himself no favors in a 1979 Smash Hits interview. Did the Police have a master plan? Yes, said Sting. "We'll try and beat the Beatles. I'm interested in appealing to a great mass of people without going for the lowest common denominator, which is dead easy - you become Gary Glitter.
The dumb lyric to "Walking on the Moon" was compensated for by impressively spacey dub holes in the production. With "Don't Stand So Close to Me", the lyric wasn't lazy but tortured: former teacher Sting drew on his experience, relating the story of an illicit classroom affair, and shoehorning in a reference to Nabokov to show us all how well read he was. Sting seemed to wind up his bandmates up as much as his detractors. In 1983 he had a dream in which he looked outside his bedroom window to see three blue turtles, stranded on their backs, gasping for air. He interpreted this as the death of the Police, quit the group, and called his first solo album The Dream of the Blue Turtles. This wasn't meant to be funny.