For Fans of The Police

By 1983 most bands in The Police's position would have coasted. Instead, Synchronicity is austere, almost uncomfortable: the arrangements are stripped back, the lyrics borrow from Arthur Koestler and Nabokov, and the closer is a meditation on isolation disguised as a pop smash. Every Breath You Take is not a love song. Wrapped Around Your Finger name-checks Scylla and Charybdis. The album rewards attention the way the best literary fiction does, and it sounds just as good on headphones at 2 a.m. as it did in a stadium.

The Police's rhythm section is the engine that made everything else possible. Copeland's style is a genuine innovation: ska-influenced hi-hat patterns, reggae ghost notes, and military-school precision, all at tempos and densities no one else was doing in pop. Summers's open-tuning guitar voicings left space. Sting's bass lines were melodic and driving simultaneously. The trio format was not a limitation -- it was a discipline that made every part count.

Stewart Copeland shot Everyone Stares on Super 8 throughout the Synchronicity tour, and the result is unlike most authorized rock documentaries. There is no hero narrative, no crisis-and-triumph arc. Instead it is just the grind and the strange comedy of being enormously famous in very small rooms -- airports, hotels, soundchecks, the boredom between the spectacle. It demythologizes without being cynical.

Dream of the Blue Turtles divided opinion in 1985 precisely because it was not The Police. Jazz musicians, ambitious arrangements, lyrics about Russians and nuclear anxiety. It is uneven and occasionally self-serious, but Ten Summoner's Tales from 1993 is genuinely excellent: accessible, warm, melodically rich, and the kind of album that rewards long-haul listening in a way Sting's reputation for pretension has unfairly obscured.