One Train Later: A Memoir (30 page)

Returning from the Fatherland, having actually worked and gotten paid for it, we go back to Pirnlico feeling more confident and quickly realize that Alex Riahi is achieving nothing at all for us and that we are losing time. A few afternoons later, almost on cue, we look at one another and say fuck it, pack up, and leave. Although we have nothing else, we feel better, as if we have taken our power hack. We never hear another word from the Iranian pop king.

We carry on practicing and like rats pass through a series of sewers that are laughingly called rehearsal rooms, each one more like the Black Hole of Calcutta than the last. Smelling of shit, piss, and vomit, they're all painted from floor to ceiling with black paint and filthy graffiti. If you make the mistake of looking up at the ceiling, you will see a huge asshole graffitied taking a shit in your direction. But there is a rose in Spanish Harlem, and from the wound grows the flower, and somehow in the gloom of these caves we move toward the light, groping our way toward the music that is a hidden seam in this subterranean gloom.

In the middle of this intensive practice period Sting gets left on his own for a few days when his wife, Frances, goes home to Ireland; Kate and I offer to let him stay with us in the interim and make sure he gets fed. Sting sleeps in the living room, and one night as Kate and I are finally disappearing off to bed we hear a softly strummed nylon-string guitar and a song about a girl named Roxanne. It's pretty and I like the chord sequence, but Kate immediately picks up on it and, turning to me in bed, says, "This is great, this is really interesting."

The experience in Paris has been turned into a song-in fact, a perfect pop song with a gritty lyric and interesting harmony. We lie in bed and listen to "Roxanne" for the first time. This song will one day take the world by storm, put us on the map, and change our lives irrevocably. We roll over and drift off to sleep as the germinating seed of "you don't have to put on the red light" caresses the last embers of consciousness and makes a lullaby for the baby that grows in Kate's belly.

A few days later Sting, Stewart, and I are in the half-constructed basement of a gay hairdresser's flat up on Finchley Road in North London morosely banging about and not really having a good time. The room is damp and the air thick with the stink of plaster, concrete, and paint. We are about to chuck it in when either Sting or I suggests that maybe we try out his new song "Roxanne." At the moment it's a bossa nova, which is a problem-not because it doesn't work that way but because in the prevailing climate it would be suicidal to go Brazilian, and we already have enough problems. So, how should we play it? We have to heavy it up and give it an edge. We decide to try it with a reggae rhythm, at which point Stewart starts to play a sort of backward hi-hat and tells Sting where to put the bass hits. Once the bass and drums are in place, the right counterpoint for me to play is the four in the bar rhythm part. Now we have three separate parts, and with the vocal line over the top, it starts to sound like music. We are all pleased with it but have no idea just how important this song will become for us. Smelling of powdered cement, sand, wet concrete, and oil-based paint, we emerge onto the High Street in Finchley at the end of the afternoon feeling good; we have a song called "Roxanne."

Christmas arrives, and other than our rehearsals, we still have nothing happening. It's a bleak end to the year, and Kate and I go the U.S. to see her parents while Sting and Stewart stay in London. While I'm away Sting has a party and Stewart lends hiin some of his Bob Marley records for the event, with the result that he starts picking up on the bass lines of the reggae grooves. After I return we still have nothing to do but rehearse, and we find an upstairs room on Jeddo Road in Shepherds Bush, one of the few not painted black-which makes it hard to adjust to.

One day Sting brings in a new song he has written called "Can't Stand Losing You." He picks up my guitar and plays it to us. Stewart and I are both knocked out; this is good, a real pop song. We work it out, playing it over and over. It acts as a guide to the territory that we have been looking for, and almost magically we seem to change gears and pick up momentum. "So Lonely" comes a short while later, and this too gets the treatment and becomes a song with our signature. Something is starting to happen. Under the influence of Bob Marley and the groove of reggae, the bass parts move away from the thumping eighth-note ;pattern into a sexy, loping line that is as much about notes not played as those struck. Over the top of these patterns I begin playing high, cloudy chords that are colored by echo and delay, and Stewart counters this with back-to-front patterns on the hi-hat and snare. From a dense in-yourface frontal assault, the songs now become filled with air and light. This is gratifying; material is now appearing that I can really bring something to. Sting is emerging as a songwriter, or at least that's what we think; the truth is that he has been writing songs for years, and some of the songs we imagine he has just written this week have in fact been knocking around for quite a long time. But it doesn't matter, because with this material and the way the three of us play it, we are moving into an identity of our own.

Sting incorporates more reggae into his writing, and we flow with it. I find that I can play exotic chord voicings behind his vocals and it doesn't throw him at all-in fact, he likes it. The minute we hit anything that we agree to be a cliche, we throw it out. We have long diatribes that now, as if faintly glimpsing the possibility of a future, extend past the music and into a group manifesto: the way we look, what kind of gigs we should do, record releases-we dream together and basically are as one, tossing out anything that sounds like the past or another band.

We rehearse for a while at Manos on the Kings Road in Chelsea. The guy who runs the place tells us one night as we are packing up that there is something about us that's different from the other bands. "You boys are going to be famous," he says. For some reason this remark is almost enough to make me cry, as if we are being tossed a very small bone. I drive back up the Kings Road with a tiny glimmer of hope.

Stripping away the conventions of standard electric rock also means dropping guitar solos. As a lot of the new bands are incapable of delivering a guitar solo, its absence in the current climate has become an arrogant hallmark, the extended virtuoso solo now being regarded as a symbol of the old guard and people like Eric Clapton. So, any solos are brief, which is irritating when you've spent most of your life trying to be good at them. But there are other ways to make the guitar parts effective, and this is what I turn my hand to.

I get hold of an old Echoplex, which is basically a device to create echo by using a piece of quarter-inch tape that revolves in a spool around two tape heads. You can speed up or slow down the number of repeats by sliding a little metal arrow up and down the length of a metal bar that runs along the top of the spool. It's crude but it works and adds a rich harmonic sound to the guitar and a spatial dimension to the group sound that sets us apart. I begin to use it all the time and create a churning double-rhythm effect with it-in other words, I can play a rhythm in eighth notes against the drums and get a sixteenth-note pattern, which, colored by dissonant harmonies and accented syncopation, results in a guitar sound that becomes huge and prismatic, like a rainbow arcing over the band.

The use of this device is seminal in changing and pushing the group into a unique direction. Creating a curtain of space, it appears to act as a catalyst to set us free. Sting is able to wail and vocalize over the ambience as if he is Miles Davis brooding his way through a solo-and with Miles being a major influence, it's a natural result. Against these jams the reggae bass line is held in place, while Stewart inverts the rhythm, and I add biting little dissonances that are not standard rock. Suddenly a set of natural responses converge to bring about a sound that no trio in rock has possessed before, but we are too buried in it to hear it ourselves. Strangely enough, other people recognize it before we do. But eventually we raise our heads and begin to see the territory we have arrived in and recognize it as if we have known it all along. With this information in place, we are able to codify it to the point where we can take almost any song and, as we say, "policify" it-even a piece of material by Noel Coward or a folk song from the Scottish Isles. From an instinctive and unself-conscious journey, we discover a sound for which there is no previous formula, a space jam meets reggae meets Bartok collage with blueeyed soul vocals.

After a few months we wonder if we can rise to the almighty task of making an album, but as usual we have no money to pay for a studio and no record company to get us one. At this point Stewart's big brother Miles steps into the picture and gets us into a studio a few miles south of London. It's called Surrey Sound and is in a town called Leatherhead. Miles makes a funky deal with the owner, a local M.D. with aspirations to be a record producer. His name is Nigel Gray.

Twelve

In January 1978 we start going out to Surrey Sound whenever the studio has an afternoon free, or if some important rock stars like Godley & Creme cancel their session. We begin with the material we have in hand, but as we listen back in the new environment of the studio, we recognize flaws and imperfections and begin the process of abandoning songs and writing new ones. Gradually we find our feet in the studio. Though arguments are a feature of our sessions, they are always about how a song should go down on tape; this friction is a contributing factor to the tension that is part of the Police sound-it might be described as the sound of tight compromise.

Over a period of about six months, borrowing days and jumping in when other people's sessions are canceled, we cobble together an album that ultimately is the distillation of about three albums' worth of material. Miles pays an occasional visit to see how we are progressing, but most of his remarks are of a caustic nature. Although visionary, he is not loaded with small talk (or tact, for that matter), and often we are afraid of playing for him what we have recorded because we know in advance what he is going to say. Like Stewart, Miles too has the punk light in his eyes and can't really hear anything else at this point, or so in our paranoia we think.

One night he turns up wanting to hear what we have been doing, and as usual we play him the fast and furious stuff, thinking that's what he wants to hear. Finally after he offers a series of grunting responses but no enthusiasm, we play him a new song we have recorded that day. We are scared to play it because we are certain that he will hate it; for all intents and purposes, it's a ballad and about a million miles from the current party line. The track plays and the three of us stare off into the distance as if slightly embarrassed. The song ends and for a few seconds there is a pregnant silence, which seems to confirm our worst suspicions. And then Miles stands up, smiling. "That is fucking great-I'm taking it to A and M tomorrow, gimme a tape." We're stunned. He loves it. We were sure he would hate a ballad, but Miles-like one of the old-time kings of Tin Pan Alley-hears it, smells money, and begins plotting. The song is "Roxanne."

We drive back through the night into London, jabbering away at one another like maniacs, very excited that one of our tracks is actually going to make into the office of A and bloody M, a real record label. It's fucking miraculous. Feeling expansive, we celebrate our vision of the future by dropping in at the Happy Eater for a sausage sandwich and a cup of tea.

A&M are enthusiastic, and "Roxanne" is released in early April '78. It gets reviewed by John Pidgeon in Melody Maker. The general consensus is that we are a band to watch. It's a great track but it's not a hit, and our excitement fizzles like a dying party balloon. We have indulged in dreams of glory, but right now "Roxanne" isn't going to give us the ladder we thought she would.

We read the reviews. The critics think we are good, but it seems that we are still suspect; despite the classic pop brilliance of "Roxanne," the myopic partyline concerns of the hacks override the ability to hear the incisive edge and ultimate staying power of the song. However, one of the side effects of getting a single released by A&M is that we get into a relationship with the office on the Kings Road. It turns out that our timing is propitious, as A&M has just recovered from a nasty and highly publicized moment with the Sex Pistols. Like everyone else, the label has tried to jump on the punk bandwagon and has managed to get its hands on the Pistols, who are signed to great fanfare outside Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately, one week later the group went into the Kings Road office and terrorized the entire place by pissing on the furniture, ripping gold records off the walls, and overturning desks in a lurid moment colorfully illustrating the punk credo. Derek Green, the head of A&M UK, immediately tore up their contract, and that was the end of the deal.

Shortly after the Sex Pistols debacle we arrive like good little boys able to engage in a more reasonable discourse. We are struggling, and having a single out with a major record company means a lot to us. We want a situation in which we can develop, actually have albums released and he a band. "Roxanne" hasn't made it, but after what it has just been through, A&M breathes a metaphorical sigh of relief and gives us an unusual amount of latitude. We begin to develop enough of a relationship to get a second shot with another single, "Can't Stand Losing You."

An interesting situation develops with this song. The record company thinks that it's a great track but that it needs remixing-and they know how to do it. There is a slight attitude of "let the professionals take over now, boys, we'll get this right for you." We are slightly miffed, but there isn't a lot we can do: they are the almighty label, and we need them more than they need us. They disappear with the track for three weeks but eventually come back to us looking mildly embarrassed, saying that they have tried five different mixes but can't get it better than ours, which is honest at least. This is a minor triumph for us and establishes a precedent that proves of considerable worth over the next few years because from this moment on, A&M never interferes with our recording process again.