One Train Later: A Memoir (40 page)

I wave at Mrs. Keohane across the narrow street and rush back inside to struggle with coal and wood in the grate and wonder if the flue is open as smoke billows into the room. Living in Ireland suddenly feels like a booby prize; instead of the sybaritic pleasure of popular success, we are faced with the harsh reality of grey weather; bone-chilling, damp, biting wind; and bad food-all to beat the taxman. Life here seems to be about the ability to make it through to the next day, keep the damp out of your bone marrow, pass the long grey hours. We try to be a family and embrace the new situation, but it is a strain. I can feel that my head is elsewhere, out there on the road; the unfamiliarity of Ireland, the cold, and the quietness of village life don't suit me. Kate and I begin a slow slide into estrangement. My attitude and the continual glare of the spotlight and the relentless press are beginning to wear on Kate, who did not move to England with me to be deserted.

In our new tax-exile status, Sting and I go with Stewart to Holland to begin recording our third album. The expectation of another hit album is enormous, the pressure not to disappoint with us all the time. In what seems like a flash we have reached a stage where a large number of people are dependent on us: we are their living, their future, their survival. Everyone holds his breath and offers a silent prayer that we pull off another number one. It is as if we have became like a racehorse that has become a surefire bet; as much as we and everyone else enjoy it, it is a situation of inherent fragility.

I have wondered ever since we completed Regatta de Blanc how long Sting would play this game, because it doesn't seem natural to him. He is not a team player, doesn't really want to share credit, and makes comments in the press to that effect, as if foreshadowing the ultimate event. I understand, and it feels like a small interior abrasion that is quiescent at the moment but may one day become a wound that will hold the residual pain of being deserted by someone you love. In the classic distortion that always happens with bands, we might already be reaching the point where we think we don't need one another, can go it alone, pull apart like the Beatles. It seems that each one of us really would like to run the whole show or be out on his own. Stewart, brash and outspoken, bulldozes his way through things, Copelandstyle, but achieves his goals. If left to our own devices, Sting and I would probably get too subtle, too esoteric; Stewart counters all that and gives things a fuck-you rock-and-roll edge. There is no doubt that Miles is effective as a manager, but sometimes the style grates and is embarrassing as if we are winning through intimidation. But, I reason to myself, we are lucky to have such a character because that is what it takes; subtlety and politeness don't cut it in the rock music world. We have an alliance, but it's uneasy.

We enter the studio at Wisselord with Nigel Gray again in charge of engineering. We notice that Nigel has changed. He has morphed from the local M.D. in Leatherhead to a rock star. His hair is now shoulder length; he wears cowboy boots and a long fringed leather jacket. We have been given a month to make the album, which-considering how much is riding on it-is an incredibly short time. Amazingly enough, this month gets shortened to three weeks when we are informed that in the middle of recording we will spend a week playing Milton Keynes in England and Leixlip Castle in Ireland.

Things are changing fast now that we are a "big" rock band. It appears to be the moment for other people to ply us with as many drugs as possible. But in this situation it makes us anxious because we are here to work, not take drugs; we need this third album. One of the problems of sniffing coke in the studio is that, apart from the illusion it creates whereby you think everything you do is just "absolutely fuckin' great," it affects your hearing, with the result that the more stoned you become, the more you turn up the high frequencies in the mix. The end result often becomes something that would make a dog howl.

Large piles of white stuff are placed in front of us, but we don't want to do this-we are short of time, need this album, can't fuck around. Further compounding this problem are Nigel's disappearances to the red-light district in Amsterdam, and he wants us to go with him. We are pissed off by all of this because we have to get this album recorded, and the process is being jeopardized. It feels as if we have switched roles and are now merely providing the soundtrack to a rock-and-roll party that other people are enjoying. This will become a hallmark of the next few years, a place where boundaries are often blurred as the line between work and being high as a kite softens.

We get on with the music. Sting has brought in a few good songs to provide the meat of the album, "Don't Stand So Close to Me," "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da," "Driven to Tears," "When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around." We get the basics of the songs in the studio and begin the process of giving them Police-style arrangements, and this time I introduce a Roland guitar synthesizer into the sound of the band. Gradually something like an album emerges, but we are short of material. I have an instrumental tune I want to do, a quirky piece with a sort of haunted Middle Eastern theme called "Behind My Camel." There is some resistance to this. Granted, it's not A-list pop song material, but it's interesting. Sting refuses to play on it, which is a drag, but Stewart is willing, so I put down the backing track with me playing bass and later I add the guitar parts. Somewhere in the middle of this action Sting-half joking, half serious-hides the tape in the garden at the back of the studio. I get what's going on and a day later manage to dig up the tape, and the song ends up on the album. We carry on, still warming to this new place, but just as we are hitting our stride, we are pulled out of the studio. We have the two big concerts, the first one in England at Milton Keynes. They are calling it Regatta de Bowl.

The Milton Keynes concert is another marker on our climb. As we arrive in the late afternoon the excitement cuts through the air like a buzz saw. This is the biggest concert we have played so far in the U.K., but ironically, having now attained tax-exile status, we cannot be paid and our fee goes to charity. By the time we hit the stage the outdoor arena is a sea of mud and hysteria. Miles manages to compound things by trying to make the press photographers sign a three-page contract guaranteeing a percentage of the sale of photographs to the band. Sitting in our protective cocoon, we don't find out about this until much later. But it is distressing to discover that Miles and others have begun making decisions on our behalf that we feel don't represent us. It comes with a slight feeling that we are babies incapable of dealing with such realities. We should just be left alone with our music. There is a nasty backlash to Miles's imprecations, with an attitude of "we made you on the way up and now you're trying to charge us for it, well fuck you." Funny, I think, the press hated us on the way up and now in their normal parasitical way, they are coming to ,feed.

The best thing about the Milton Keynes show is that I acquire my ownroadie, a little Scot by the name of Tam Faigrieve. I notice how fast and efficient he is onstage, how all of my guitar leads, etc., seem much more orderly; nothing phases him. We hire him that night. He also stays the course.

From Milton Keynes we fly over to Ireland to play the big festival held on the grounds of Leixlip Castle, the home of the Guinness family. When we arrive at the castle in the afternoon there is a line of people standing in front of the gates to greet us. It is the Guinness clan, along with several retainers. To my amazement, standing with them is none other than Jenny Fabian, whom I have not seen since before she wrote Groupie. We don't play that night but sit by the fire in the dining room, sipping expensive brandy and enjoying the hospitality of Desmond Guinness and his family. Jenny and I catch up with each other's lives and laugh about the strangeness of meeting here. She has left London and now lives in Ireland, breeding greyhounds, and is as charming and down-to-earth as ever. The next afternoon we perform on the castle grounds in front of 35,000 people. We get a great reception, marred only by a group of vicious-looking kids who work their way to the front and scream abuse at us for being British and eventually hurl a bottle at the stage, which hits Stewart-the only non-British member of the group-and we have to fix him up before we can continue and finish the concert.

We return to Holland and the stark naked fact that we have a week left to finish our all-important third album. On the last day before we leave on a European tour, we come to the conclusion that the mixes aren't right and on a kamikaze mission remix the entire album in one night. This is like rolling the dice blindfolded, accompanied by the queasy feeling that you might be blowing your future. But this is how it is; everything we do seems crammed into a tight space. Nevertheless, we wind it up at six A.M., and Zenyatta Mondatta is ready to go out into the world.

The summer tour is of the north and south coasts of France, and I will remember it as being the most fun of any Police tour. We travel in a large bus, a laughing and carousing entourage. We have the band XTC along as the support group, and with me I have Kate and Layla.

We pull up in front of the Atlantic Hotel-Biarritz's finest-and Kate, Layla, and I are shown into a beautiful suite that hangs precipitously over the pounding waves of the Atlantic. With a four-poster bed and a pink marble bathroom, the setting is ultraromantic, and Kate and I lie together on the bed as our two-year-old buzzes around the suite like a hummingbird. We order champagne, and I hold Layla up to the window to watch the waves below pound onto the rocks. On the beach a kid in a red swimsuit performs somersaults for his laughing parents. Thick waves crash on the sand like cello chords, and I remember sleeping on that same beach when I was seventeen and hitchhiking into Spain. The gold of the late afternoon creeps through the shutters, and I slip my arm around Kate's waist; it is a moment when we can reset our course and divert the razor edge of fame.

The next set of events we have to confront is the release of our new album and another tour of the United States to back it up. "Don't Stand So Close to Me" is to be the first single, and we make a silly video at a dance school in Clapham in which we prance about in black gowns and mortarboards in the already dated conventions of pop song videos. I find these video shoots frustrating because they seem a too literal translation of the songs. Why, I wonder, can't we make a different kind of video, something that has some level of ambiguity, a hint of darkness? Something more fucked upparticularly on this song, with its subtext of sex with a minor. But the record company doesn't like this sort of thing yet. They like us to be presented as cheerful, outgoing, nonthreatening, innocuous-something for the mums and dads. I am thinking, what about Godard, Truffaut, Bergman, Kubrick's Lolita-am I the only one who has seen these films? But it's too early-that will not be for another ten years-so we keep grinning and prancing.

The single and the album both enter the U.K. chart at number one, but the press give it a good slagging anyway. It seems as if our ongoing success gets right up the nose of some critics. A journalist by the name of Lynden Barber gives us a grade D failure in his book; another writes a protracted piece of shit full of convoluted phrases and nonsense but mentions that Leonard Bernstein, in a letter to The New York Times, has proclaimed us better than the Beatles. Julie Burchill, with her histrionic screech, declares us the worst band of all time. But Derek Jewell, on the other hand, reviews a live concert and eulogizes about the brilliant weaving of jazz, reggae, and pop; the beautiful harmonies; the rhythmic interplay.

I begin giving interviews to guitar magazines on almost a daily basis. This one about the song "Shadows in the Rain":

The way we are playing it live now is turning it into a seminal piece of Police music. A lot of people are being pulled up short by it. I found the guitar part after we recorded it. We started more or less from scratch in the studio. Sting had this old jazzy rhythm, nothing like the version on Zenyatta and we tried a lot of things, I put on two guitars which complemented each other and made a weird reggae rhythm which we decided was an improvement, being slower and more funky. Then I went in and laid the pseudo psychedelic tape echo part all the way across, and everybody liked that. I did it by playing through an Echoplex with Stewart moving the tape speed up and down so it sounded like it was bubbling, twisting, and turning the whole way. Obviously I couldn't do that live, so I started working out this more orchestral part; chords with the echo and repeat wound all the way up so that when you hit the guitar the original sound isn't heard. All you hear is the echo, and I swell that up with the volume control, shhh hhhhhh, and its like a string section coming in.

You've got to hit it just before the beat so that you don't hear the repeat of the echo, you only hear that great cloud of sound emerging. Combined with that, I fragment all the chords. The chord structure is fairly basic, but I play them all in flattened ninths and invert them so that it all sounds much more modern.

I mean, the riff at the end when Sting sings "shadows in the rain "over and over is a basic a minor, but I actually use a strange inversion of an a minor sixth chord. It's high up on the neck, and as it starts to feedback I hit a high harmonic on the top string, which echoes against the feedback, and then you start to get this whole new effect. You enter another world. I really like the dark brooding quality of it. I think it's a good way for us to go.

The fans, who simply like the music, make us number one on both charts. Meanwhile, in the Far West-Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and California-we have work to do, and with unerring accuracy, and once again leaving our wives and children behind, we fly to Canada.

Twenty

Winnipeg sits in the infinite plains of Saskatchewan, and with synchronic winks coming from the wings, we bump down on the runway as if we have slung ourselves into the void. Who are we going to play to, wheat farmers? I imagine rosy-checked girls with legs like young oaks, farmers with checked shirts and combine harvesters, great sheaves of wheat on every corner.