Police Stories #3—Sting: The First Record

Putting together each tribute, I come across more stories than I can possibly tell in a single concert. Thank goodness someone invented the internet so that I have a place to share them. There'll be plenty more tales to tell when we take the stage at SPACE in Evanston on August 7th.

—bandleader William Lindsey Cochran

Our first album as the Police was recorded piecemeal in a run-down studio above a dairy in Leatherhead.  We had been together as a band for roughly a year by then.  Some of the songs had been written for my previous band and adapted for the new one.  Others had been composed while touring, and some were created during rehearsals or while recording.

We weren't signed to a record company yet, and none of us had any money, so we used some secondhand tapes that we found in our manager's garage and recorded very late at night, for an even cheaper studio rate:  moonlighting only after another band had left.

We'd work until the coffee ran out and we were bleary-eyed and delirious with exhaustion and the absurdity of our arguments.

I was happy because I'd dreamed about this, this making of an album, for as long as I'd owned a guitar, strummed my first chord, and rhymed my first couplet.  It was almost too much to absorb.

There's no grand concept at work [on our first album], just a loose collection of dreams, fragments and fantasies, low doggerel and high dudgeon, sense and nonsense, anger and romance, all welded together by the bluff and bluster of a new band.

We were insane in our optimism, and we were never happier.

—excerpted from Lyrics, Sting's annotated collection of the words he'd written for his songs