One Train Later: A Memoir (50 page)

I feel reassured by his strength and experience, wonder if he has been a naval commander. Suddenly he appears to me as Obi Wan Kenobi. Yeahwe can get past this. We chat for a while longer. I thank him and, with my jaw pushing forward, start marching back toward the studio. I imagine that I hear Sir George calling out behind me, "May the force be with you."

By the time I get back, it was if he has waved his wand across the valley, the air seems to have cleared-maybe we had to go all the way down before we could come up again. We glide back together with a crisp new courtesy toward one another and continue on toward the completion of the album.

The linchpin of Synchronicity is a song called "Every Breath You Take." When Sting first plays us his demo, it sounds not unlike the group Yes with a huge rolling synthesizer part. It needs work, needs the stripped-down guitar and drums treatment, but it has something. More obvious than some of Sting's material, it has a classic pop song chord sequence with a dramatic C section but it needs clarity. This song is the one that gets the most argument. Sting and Stewart go on endlessly about the drums and bass-how they should underpin the vocal-but after a couple of weeks we get a track down with just bass and drums and a token vocal to give us some perspective.

Feeling slightly numb, we sit on the couch at a creative standstill. Sting leans over and says, "Go on, go in there, make it your own." This is either a beautiful example of trust between partners or is tantamount to being told to jump off a cliff, prove you're a man, or walk the gangplank. But there she is, a nice naked track, waiting to be ruined or trimmed with gold by yours truly. "Right," I say, "right," and heave my bum up off the deep plush and toward the direction of the big room. In the engulfing loneliness of the empty studio I am hyperaware that everyone is watching and listening. This will be the naked truth.

I pick up my Strat and stare out across the gloom. It's a simple chord sequence and shoudn't prove a problem, depending on one's imagination, inspiration, and context. What are the criteria? It should sound like the Police-big, brutal barre chords won't do, too vulgar; it has to be something that says Police but doesn't get in the way of the vocals; it should exist as music in its own right, universal but with just a hint of irony, be recognized the world over, possibly be picked up by a rapper as the guitar lick to hang a thirty-million-copy song on in eleven years or so. "Yeah, okay," "roll it," I say. The track rolls and I play a sequence of intervals that outline the chords and add a nifty little extension to each one that makes it sound like the Police, root, fifth, second, third, up and down through each chord. It is clean, succinct, immediately identifiable; it has just enough of the signature sound of el Policia. I play it straight through in one take. There is a brief silence, and then everyone in the control room stands up and cheers. It is an emotional and triumphant moment, and it will take us to number one in America.

With this lick I realize a dream that maybe I have cherished since first picking up the guitar as a teenager-to at least once in my life make something that would go around the world, create a lick that guitarists everywhere would play, be number one in America, be heard at weddings, bar mitzvahs, births, funerals, be adapted into the repertoire of brass bands in the north of England, and make my mum and dad proud. Do you ever really get beyond them? Maybe not and maybe this is where the story should fade out, with me standing there, grinning like an idiot, feeling like a hero and just happy to have pleased.

"Every Breath You Take" will go to number one on the Billboard charts and stay there for eight weeks. I will be asked, "How did you come up with that? Where does it come from?" as if one sits down and works out a formula for these things. My poker-faced answer is usually along the lines of "God spoke through me, I'm merely the vessel." But in fact as a guitarist, with the bloody thing hardly ever out of your hands, the fingers build their own memory and I think that you go along with pockets of information, things that you tend to play or go to when you pick up the instrument, and then they slowly morph into another set of responses. During the summer I had been playing through the forty-four Bartok violin duets, thinking I might do some of them with Fripp. They are well suited to the guitar and with their intervallic structures and modal ambience are not a thousand miles from the Police guitar sound, hence the ability to immediately lay the fitting part to "Every Breath." It was already there, even if by way of Eastern Europe.

Laying down the guitar part for "Every Breath You Take" clears the air and increases the chances that we have a hit album. Whether it will reach number one is not a certainty, but we all hope for it. From Montserrat we return once again to Le Studio in Canada to mix the album. Generally we let Hugh Padgham prepare the mixes to a point, and then we come into the control room to fine-tune the mix ourselves. But I receive a nasty shock when sitting down to hear the mix of "Every Breath." The thick creamy Strat sound I had in Montserrat has been reduced to a thin over-reverbed whine. I become extremely upset and tell Hugh to go back immediately to the rough mix from Montserrat, check the sound, and get it back. Luckily, we still have the rough mixes. It takes a couple of days, but we get the guitar sounding almost as good as the rough mix. But to my mind, it is not quite the same. The track is almost stillborn, but it has a future to fulfill.

After the heat and light of the Caribbean, the deep snow and subzero temperatures of Quebec are brutal, but we have to finish the work. Tension continues to run high among us, as if our time is already up. We have made the album and are committed to touring behind it, but a fatalistic air seems to hang over us. We are not talking about the years to come, the rosy future, the path ahead, the next album; instead, we are separating like oil and water, even though Synchronicity will bring us our biggest success yet. I realize that Sting thinks that he doesn't need either Stewart or me and that he can go on alone, but this well-worn path is nothing new. We don't talk about it, but along with abrasive ego clashes, there is the desire not to be confronted, not to be challenged, have it all your own way; what makes us will eventually destroys us.

We struggle on through the mixing and end the sessions with a ridiculous scene in which we toss a coin to see which tracks will go onto the album. Will Stewart and I get our songs on? Is it fair to let the whole album be only Sting's songs? Miles valiantly tries to hold some sort of democracy together so some of us don't go away feeling pissed off and alienated. What will the final sequence be? I finally solve that one by suggesting that maybe we put all the softer songs on one side and the up-tempo stuff on the other. Sting likes this idea, and thus it is ordained.

Twenty-Six

We leave the snow and ice of Quebec, the new album, the tension, ego, and confrontation to follow our own pursuits until we begin touring. I go to New York in January 1983 to live for a few months in the American Stanhope hotel. I negotiate a rate for an extended period in a large, sunny suite at the back of the hotel and, away from the band, settle into a regal existence as I begin work on a book of photography. New York is a powerful drug that insulates you if you want, protects you from the sad jewel of loneliness, fills you with emanations from outside your own room. The metropolis seems like an escape from reality and even a place to find a kind of spiritual sustenance. For as I arrive in and embrace living in Manhattan, that is how I feel about it, a place of renewal and a reward for the rigors of the past few years. Here the chances are endless and as I get caught up in the thrill of publishing my first book, the implausibly huge success of our group, and the forthcoming album, New York feels like a bull's-eye.

My two powder blue rooms become a studio, with amps, guitars, and a sea of black-and-white photographs strewn across the carpet and bedspreads as I try to order and edit several hundred pictures. Within a short time I meet up with Ralph Gibson, a great photographer whose work I have admired for some time. He knocks on the door one day, and after a few moments of introductory chat, he picks up the Stratocaster lying on the bed, begins to play, and also remarks on the music playing through the speakers-Brian Eno's "On Land." Ralph loves music and plays guitar. I play guitar and love photography. We connect and decide that it's time for lunch and that we should produce my book Throb together. Thus starts a groove that will continue on through the next twenty years with an ongoing dialogue of music, photography, and jokes of a dubious nature. Later that afternoon we go down to Ralph's loft in lower Manhattan, where we drink Armagnac and begin laying out my pictures in a thirty-foot strip. The friendship with Ralph takes me deeper into New York life, and I wonder why anyone would want to be anywhere else. This is the world capital, the city of final destination.

The heat in my head and the internal engine that races me around the city is a brew of ego powered by the elixir of success and the new feeling that I can do anything, buy anything, have anything. But in the bathroom of Area 51, with a head full of champagne and marching powder, I stare into the mirror with a face that looks numb and strange, and from the small sliver of perception that is not doused in intoxicants, I hear a small, steely voice intoning a warning message. But I step over a body and go back out into the club, grinning like an idiot as I pass by the evening's art piece-a near-naked female suspended by straps in a glass case. Maybe I need the band after all, the discipline and structure of musical performance-I miss the others. As I return to the hissing silence of the bedroom I know that these nights are bullshit, that the only thing that really matters is the work, the music; although I love New York, I am living in it as an authentic fake as I live out the requisite narrative. Maybe I am missing something, the anchor, the balance, the weight that holds you in place while you play out the lunatic side. But, I stupidly console myself, this is rock and roll. Somewhere beneath the surface of this hedonism lies the truth that I am not truly self-destructive, because I love making music-and that is the thing that keeps you one step from the edge. But for a few months and for what seems night after endless night, I almost forget it as I take to the streets of Manhattan at midnight and cruise in a limo with a couple of pals to Area 51, Limelight, the Mudd Club, or Studio 54wherever there's a scene. It becomes a game to see how many girls we can get into a limousine in one night as we pick them up along the way. They practically line up because being in the city now is like being beneath a hot public light, and it seems that everyone knows you and wants to get next to you. Our image is everywhere. I get stopped on the street, accosted in restaurants, yelled at from cabs, and importuned by doormen. I pretend to find it tiresome, but secretly I enjoy it. This fame thing? It's fun-like a dessert slipping down your throat, and with about as much nutritional power. I walk into Charivari and the sales assistants in the groovy emporium all nudge one another, trying to act cool but instead tripping over themselves in the attempt to be the first to offer you a Perrier while bringing out some Japanese designer's trifle for a few thousand dollars. Some innocently ask you your name, as if they don't know who you are, and you answer, "Raskolnikov," or with a thick Madrid accent, "Jesus." Resistance is low, and if you casually ask a beautiful female salesperson what she might be doing tonight, "Oh, nothing" is always the reply. "Dinner?" you murmur....

I go to Los Angeles and visit a woman I am interested in. We go for a walk on Venice Beach among muscled and bronzed beach types in shorts and tank tops. I wear a baggy suit made in a lurid red-and-blue check, my hair is spiked, my skin chalky white. Someone suddenly yells out my name. A crowd gathers behind me. It grows larger and larger as we walk down the boardwalk, with everyone singing "Roxanne" under the curving sky and spindly palms of California. I feel like the Pied Piper, and it is hard not to smile.

Maybe Sting, Stewart, and I all feel the sensation of being in a pressure cooker, and need to get out. Sting goes to Mexico to film his part in Dune; Stewart works on the soundtrack to Rumble Fish; I work on my book and music for another album with Fripp. It seems that we are writing our future scripts.

Some weekends I fly from Kennedy Airport to Shannon in Ireland to visit Kate and Layla. From western Ireland I take a train to Cork and then a taxi to Kinsale. After the intensity and sophistication of New York, rural Ireland is like walking into a thick wooden door. I feel as if I have just dropped in from another planet. With the thrum of New York glitter, and cuttingedge nightclubs roaring in my head, the sound of wind laced with the cries of gulls and the acrid smell of a coal fire hits me like a powerful memory that almost knocks me over. I want to stay close to Layla-be her father, not a stranger. Kate allows me this; for a few days I try to fulfill the role, but I feel like an intruder as I sit around on the floor with her and a scattering of children's books with bright simple pictures and big letters, with dolls and teddy bears. "Pat the bunny, pat the bunny," I croak as the wind rattles the windows and storm clouds gather over Kinsale Harbor.

In this time-off period we continue to do interviews and are constantly in the press. The starmaker machinery is cranking once again, and everything is set up to encourage the worst in you-the childish behavior, the arrogance, the self-indulgence-and the weird thing is that all these traits seem to be in opposition to the quality of making music, which is spiritual. But how do you become a successful musician in the exterior world without all of thisthe press, the media, music television, lawyers, accountants, managers, hype?

It almost feels that the main job now is talking about what we do rather than doing it. If the time were added up, it would be so. Meanwhile, our fifth album is being manufactured, complete with thirty-six sleeve variations. For this record we have each been photographed separately, choosing our own images to illustrate our idea of synchronicity. We won't see one another's pictures until the album is released, but it seems sadly symbolic of the inner life of the group-much as playing in three separate rooms did at the time of recording.