One Train Later: A Memoir (46 page)

For this recording, after sadly letting go of Nigel Gray because of the debacle of Zenyatta Mondatta, we have a new engineer/co-producer in the person of Hugh Padgham, a soft-spoken middle-class sort of chap who is confronted with three raging egos. The drums, the bass, and the guitar are going down onto tape, but his voice is faint as we battle it out. There is a humiliating episode in the studio one day when as a result of all this tension and loss of perspective, Sting goes berserk on me, calling me every name under the sun with considerable vehemence, leaving everyone in the room white-faced and in shock. It's an excruciating moment. I don't know whether I feel my pain or his pain more, but it is a deep wound, an outward manifestation of the frustration Sting must feel on the inside.

We get past it later with "sorry, man," and "I love you-sorry, mate," because underneath the layers of tension there is genuine affection. But I feel pain because-why? Why the fuck why? How long, [ wonder, how long?

The next morning I get a call from Kate, who tells me with hardly a breath that she wants a divorce. The buzzing flies and drifting palms become a roar in my ears as I sink to the floor. I argue on the phone with her, but it is useless. She is intractable; she has made her decision, that's it. I walk outside into the white light, feeling numb. Gone? She's gone? I can't imagine not waking up next to her-the pyramid of golden hair, the slender waist, the soft voice, the subtle humor, the incisive intelligence, the relationship, our child. The smell of paradise fills my head like a sour perfume, the bushes a few feet away across the small manicured lawn staring back at me like a hellish vision, and it feels as if a beautiful object has just slipped through my fingers and smashed. I feel the urge to return immediately to Ireland to try to rescue the situation, but she doesn't want me to come hack, says she'll see me in Canada to work things out. I stare up at the burning disc of sun and shiver, feel like throwing up.

I go back to the studio as usual that day, but with the sense that I inhabit a different world. I don't feel free, I just feel fucked up. I don't want this, don't want it. Love is the ultimate cruelty.

We work our way through the rest of the new songs: "Invisible Sun," "Hungry for You," "Too Much Information," "Rehumanize Yourself," and "One World." In the studio Sting is going through a phase of playing alto saxophone, and on many of these songs he adds little sax riffs that give the album a more blustery rhythm and blues feel than we have had in the past. One of my favorites this time is "Secret Journey," a song he has extracted from the pages of Gurdjieff's book Meetings with Remarkable Men. In spirit, this one is very much of the sixties, and as if returning to an earlier stance, I try to create the sound of the Himalayas with my Roland guitar synthesizer. In the middle of all the banter, bullshit, and brutality that are par for the course, I fight the desolation in my head with a facade of bonhomie and camaraderie, but it feels thin and I find it hard to concentrate as if I am trying to ignore a bad dream. I know I will have to say something eventually. I can't think of anything except the telephone call with Kate, and I keep going over it in my head. The nights are stifling and now sleepless as my brain races from the song we have just recorded to Kate's voice to the dive-bombing whine of mosquitoes in the oppressively close heat.

Stepping away finally from the Police-speak of the first three albums, this one will be called Ghost in the Machine, inspired by Sting's reading of the Arthur Koestler hook of the same title, which is an essay on the urge to selfdestruct-a hand-in-glove fit with my brand-new life.

We finish up the album with a sense that maybe it is a good one, but we're not entirely sure. Everyone around us seems to like it, but these days people tell us what we want to hear. Personally, I like about half of the album and hate all the tin-Police saxophone shit.

We pack up and head back to the airstrip. We are going to Caracas, Venezuela, for two concerts. The flight across the Caribbean is about two hours, but the only plane we can find to fly us and our equipment is an ancient-looking prop plane. Looking as if it has been repaired with elastic bands and chewing gum, it doesn't appear that it will last one hour, let alone two. Standing on the hot tarmac, we have serious misgivings about getting into this antique, but with a "live fast, die young" attitude, we climb in. With a death rattle the old dear sputters to life and rises like a parrot with a broken wing into the sky. We slowly climb to about ten thousand feet and turn toward South America.

We begin to enjoy it, as it feels as if we are in an old World War II movie. Eventually I get up and plop myself down at the back of the plane, resting against one of my Marshall cabinets casually chained in with the rest of the gear at the back of the cabin, since there is no cargo hold. One thing the Caribbean is known for is hurricane weather, which occurs with some frequency; although we don't exactly fly into a hurricane, it starts to get fierce and from nowhere the plane starts to buffet about, lose altitude, rise again, take sudden dips. It's frightening and it seems certain that we are going to go down. I crawl up the plane from my relaxed position and pull into a seat next to the emergency exit, strapping myself in with a face pale as ash. Seconds later the emergency exit door blows off the plane completely and sails down into the Caribbean. Luckily, I am strapped in-but still only about two inches from a large hole in the side of the plane with the sea ten thousand feet below. The roar of the wind outside is like the scream of death, and I have to move. With a chain of hands and arms gripping me, I unbuckle and crawl away from the gaping banshee mouth until I reach a comparatively stable spot on the other side.

We hurtle on across the Caribbean to Venezuela with the howl of wind drowning out all our voices-though we have gone very quiet as, white faced, and white knuckled, we grip our seats. Finally we cross the coast, but as we gaze down through the gash, the mountains appear like pinpricks and we feel even sicker. We drop down to the runway and shudder to a halt. One of the pilots gets out and kneels on the ground, making the sign of the cross as the other wipes perspiration from his brow. They have both been terrified by the experience, and we wonder what the hell we were thinking. I suddenly see the appeal of believing in a higher power.

That night we play at El Poliedro de Caracas, an arena on the outskirts of the city; it is a wild show, with the warmth and energy typical of South America. After the concert as we walk across the parking area to the transport we become aware of a commotion going on at the entrance to the auditorium. Soldiers in brown and green army fatigues are rounding up teenage boys and shoving them at gunpoint into army trucks to be taken off to the Venezuela-Colombia border to fight in the war. Most of the boys look about sixteen or seventeen years old, and in their bright T-shirts and spiked hair, they look like butterflies being carried off by carrion crows. A few young girls stand on the tarmac, watching and crying as their boyfriends and brothers are hustled off into the night. I trail across the tarmac and throw my stuff in the back of a purring limo and feel useless in front of this. It is a chilling display of the realities that exist in countries outside of Europe and the United States.

In North America Reagan is God and his presidency sets a new scene that will lead in twenty years to an administration that will become servile to polluters, fossil-fuel extractors, and fanatical religious fundamentalists of every stripe except Islam; be hostile to science; embrace fiscal insolvency; and transubstantiate worldwide solidarity into worldwide anti-Americanism. But the eighties will be looked back upon as a golden era. A few years from now as the presidency of Hugo Chavez is challenged, I will spend desperate hours in the airport as a military coup takes place and my equipment gets ripped apart in search of a bomb.

From Venezuela we fly up to Canada, where we are to mix a live album. This time is marked for me by Kate's arrival to discuss the divorce. I nurse a hope that maybe when we are together she will relent, maybe we'll be able to talk it through. But despite my efforts, divorce is what she wants. My attempts to talk her out of it are useless. We lie in the dark, with the wind gently soughing through the pines outside, and I go to pieces. It is a bitter lesson and I bury my head in the pillow, flooded with remorse, devastated that I won't see my daughter as she grows up, gutted that they won't be in my life anymore. But for Kate the marriage no longer exists; I am not there, I am adrift, elsewhere. She wants a genuine supportive relationship-a husband, a father, a partner-but in this gilded moment of excess and the carousel of rock touring, I am not providing it. We do not get specific or even accusatory, but the subtext is that as well as being forever absent, I am succumbing, indulging in all the temptations. It's over, and two days later she leaves, taking Layla with her. I fragment.

We finish mixing the live album and return to the U.S., where we play a couple of shows and then return to England. Because of the ever increasing whirl of activity around the group, the live album gets put away somewhere and sadly is never seen again, never sees the light of day. In London our old flat without Kate and Layla feels empty of everything but memory, and I hate being in it, hate going to the local shops, hate buying groceries just for me, and I take to eating out and being out all the time. I decide to move out of the flat, and I buy a larger house at the other end of Putney.

Twenty-Four

In October Ghost in the Machine is released. With a collective sigh of relief that we haven't blown it, the press give us rave reviews. Zenyatta Mondatta came in for some mauling, as most critics considered it to have one or two singles and a lot of filler. To an extent, they may have been right. We rushed through that recording without time to really think about it. "Invisible Sun" is the first single off this album, and the video is immediately banned by the BBC for political content they don't want to show on the grounds that it is too controversial. Once again the institution shows that it is living in the Stone Age and with a double standard. Our video contains no violent imagery but shows kids in Belfast-the lives of people in Northern Ireland and what they are subjected to. The BBC shows violent newsreels all the time, but when the same subject matter is expressed artistically they prefer to ban it-and by doing so promote it. We make various comments to the press and take a stand, but clearly the BBC does not approve of it as Top of the Pops material. Nevertheless, it reaches number one on the British charts within two weeks.

This album and the video mark a shift away from the three spiky blond heads and the cheerful demeanor of our earlier incarnation. The press interviews contain remarks like "Thank God for Adam [Ant]," who can now take over that part of the market, which is a subtle put-down of his efforts. The album cover is black with a set of red marks that are supposed to represent a digital version of us and the title. Many people don't get its abstraction. None of it matters, though, as the album and the single both hit the top of the charts in the U.K. In the U.S. "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" goes to number one while the album climbs rapidly to the number two position on the Billboard chart. It stays there for six weeks while we all hold our breath; frustratingly, it does not hit the fabled number one spot. But "Magic" goes to number one everywhere else in the world (except Britain).

To support the release of Ghost in the Machine, we play four nights at Wembley Arena, and again we are all over the U.K. press like a wet rag. Now we sell newspapers, have moved to the center, and fired the English imagination, but already the pictures have a smoky edge. As if throwing fuel into the flames that will eventually consume us.. the press looks for the dirt, sex, money, power, conflict-the human drama that sells papers. Now that we are ensconced in the spotlight, it's time to expose our fragility, time for the breakup, the fits of rage, the petty jealousies, the other woman. "You've made a new record, boys-that's nice, but let's get to the real stuff. Gimme the underbelly, the temptations, how you're fucking it up." You imagine a whole country oohing and aahing, gasping with incredulity at your exploits, and muttering, "And I thought they were so nice," or, "I knew they were no good-bloody pop stars." Along with the tits of the page-three girls, we have become perfect fodder for the machine. I imagine a fifty-five-year-old bastard with grey hair and a potbelly who has trouble with his sex life, with a name like Wackford S9ueers: he leans back from his gothic desk above Fleet Street and sends the hacks out the door with orders to get us.

My broken marriage is still under wraps, but still I get whole pages in the tabloids with titles like "Red Hot Summers" in which I make pious noises about my wife being very understanding--which of course is laughably untrue. Another in the Sun-what was I thinking?-with yet more smutty half-truths about how difficult it is and how you need an understanding partner, etc.

This is the mating dance, the courtship ritual between us and them, but it's the little sips of poison that sustain our tango partner as they slip down its hungry gullet like nectar. "Here you go, weakness; here you go, infidelity; here you go, whopping lie; here you go, divorce, betrayal, ambition, excess, narcotic abuse. Lovely--thanks, boys, we can put this next to the tits."

To the press, we have morphed from a trio of smiling blond heads into three maniacally driven, egocentric individuals who do nothing but row with each other, lizard tongues flicking like angry flames. Sting in his corner begins portraying himself as ruthless with his headline in the Sun, WHY I MAY QUIT THE POLICE: "I'm out for myself and they know it." At home I practice and attempt to carry on with my own inner discourse, which I try to never have subsumed by outer events. The biz is not the music, the cesspool of the tabloid press seems like a weird payoff to the nutrients that sustain this popular success. Adding fuel to this daily fire is the newsworthy fact that Sting is also breaking up with his wife, Frances, and has a brand-new relationship with the actress Trudie Styler. Trudie, who now always appears with Sting, is funny and has a raunchy and sardonic sense of humor that fits in nicely with the three of us.