The Police's new Synchronicity box set balances the band's egos

Few rock albums from the early ’80s experienced the kind of blockbuster success The Police enjoyed with their final studio LP,  Synchronicity, upon its release on June 17, 1983. Its title comes from Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s study of coincidence as the driving factor of external world events as opposed to causal circumstances. The theory opened up a whole new realm of songwriting possibilities for frontman and bassist Sting that would support the thread stringing the album’s original 10 songs together, and those themes are explored in even more depth in the new six-CD deluxe edition of Synchronicity released on July 26.

As Sting said in A Visual Documentary at the time, the song “Synchronicity II” provides the matrix of his approach to crafting these tunes around Jung’s principle of acausal connections that seem to defy logic. “There’s a domestic situation where there’s a man who’s on the edge of paranoia, and as his paranoia increases, a monster takes shape in a Scottish lake, the monster being a symbol for the man’s anxiety. That’s a synchronistic situation. They’re not connected logically, but symbolically and emotionally they are.” 

Delving into such matters also served as a reprieve for Sting, who was coping with the burn of a blazing spotlight cast upon him following the success of the group’s fourth LP, 1981’s Ghost In The Machine. He sought solace in the Jamaican estate of James Bond author Ian Fleming, which was owned at the time by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell. It was there he wrote hit songs like “King Of Pain,” “Wrapped Around Your Finger” and, of course, “Every Breath You Take.” 

“My original intention was to make it a seductive love song,” he wrote of the single in the 2007 book Lyrics By Sting, “but what I ended up with was something much darker. My life had invaded the song.” Indeed, the invasive press—especially in England—tested Sting’s mettle beyond the breaking point, giving way to a flood of creative projecting perceived through that Jungian lens, giving him an outlet for his fears and grievances. 

Guitarist Andy Summers, also a student of Jung’s theory of synchronistic happenstance, has one song that made the album in the frenetic, Captain Beefheart-channeling “Mother,” while drummer Stewart Copeland delivered “Miss Gradenko,” a two-minute Iron Curtain love song that no doubt caught the ears of a primordial Primus in their youth. 

“[The Police are like] a Prada suit made out of razor blades: It was extremely cool, but not very comfortable,” Copeland proclaims in the liner notes of the deluxe edition. “Each of us had a completely different concept of what music is for, how to make it and why … For me, it’s a celebration of all that’s noisy and exciting and fun in life. That’s why I bang shit. For Sting, it’s an escape into a beautiful, serene place of harmony and creativity … And since all three of us are quite forceful, and have a high regard for our own artistic wisdom, compromise was difficult.”

“Part of what made the band was that we all have big egos,” Summers adds. “It’s the ego that gave it that power, that tension, and that’s what went out and translated to the public.”

And if this box set celebration of Synchronicity is proof of anything, it’s the fact that those egos coalesced into a singular sound—one born of a combination of punk, pop, reggae and jazz—that reached supernova by the time the three men entered Sir George Martin’s AIR Studios in Montserrat to construct the album. 

If any record defines the state of rock music in 1983 on a macro level, it’s undoubtedly Synchronicity. As the sprawl of 55 previously unreleased tracks reveal, there is nary an act from its day who could express themselves on an Oberheim DSX sequencer as deftly as they can cover Chuck Berry and Eddie Cochran in the same session. Every little thing they did during this time was indeed magic, and all six of these discs from this limited edition set take you into the Police vault like never before.

The first disc contains the remastered version of the original LP. And for those of us who had Synchronicity on cassette or CD in the old days, the inclusion of the “Every Breath You Take” b-side “Murder By Numbers” adds a nice touch. Co-written by Sting and Summers, its jazzy, Mose Allison-esque sway makes its subject matter, which Sting says is about “the cynical manipulation of large numbers of people” on a live version of the song included here, go down a little smoother. 

WME

As for the rest of the b-sides, including the Summers-penned “King Of Pain” U.S. flipside “Someone To Talk To” and “Once Upon A Daydream,” another Sting/Summers co-write from the “Synchronicity II” single, you can find them on the second disc. Also featured here are a series of live tracks from a pair of gigs at the Omni in Atlanta, GA on November 2 and 3, 1983, which were filmed by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme from 10cc for Synchronicity Concert, released on VHS in 1984. Additional bonus goodies are tossed in here for good measure, namely a live rendition of the Zenyatta Mondatta deep cut “Man In A Suitcase” from Los Angeles in 1981 and “Every Bomb You Make,” a parody performed by Sting for the classic British puppet show Spitting Image in 1985. 

Discs 3 and 4, meanwhile, are where you’ll find all of the previously unreleased studio material. Similar to the John Lennon Ultimate Collection series, these two CDs take you through the evolution of each track from Sting’s ready-made demos to eye-opening alternate takes that will make you rethink the way Synchronicity has sounded these last 41 years. Real Police geeks will appreciate the inclusion of some serious randomness on CD 4, namely an early version of “Someone To Talk To” in its 1982 from when it was called “Goodbye Tomorrow” and a Stewart Copeland demo called “I’m Blind” that would be renamed “Brothers On Wheels” and used on the drummer’s soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s Rumble Fish. There’s also the aforementioned covers of Cochran (“Three Steps To Heaven”) and Berry (“Rock And Roll Music”) as well a never-before-heard first take of the song “Truth Hits Everybody” from the trio’s scrappy 1978 debut Outlandos d’Amour. 

The last two discs capture an entire show from the Synchronicity tour. The night in question: September 10, 1983. The place: The old Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum in Oakland, CA. Quite honestly, this concert blows away any previously released live Police recording clean out of the water. They just sound so together despite their differences at the time, the embellishments utilized in the studio translating seamlessly onto the arena stage. And not just the Synchronicity songs, but the way “Tea In The Sahara” segues into “Spirits In The Material World” and “Every Breath You Take” fades into “Roxanne” like it was being DJ’ed on a pair of turntables. This is the live Police album we’ve been waiting for all these years. 

“I think the best music the band makes, we make by accident. Like ESP,” Sting told Sounds in 1983. “Sometimes, when you’re playing as long as we have, you can do something which has an immediate response from Stewart or Andy, which we don’t discuss.”

With its sonic spoils, expert writing, and data dump of era-appropriate photography and visual memorabilia, this definitive version of Synchronicity serves as a living testament to that connection the three members of The Police possessed on their final missive.