THE POLICE – "Don't Stand So Close To Me"

there seemed to be a few school based songs around at this time – I don’t like Mondays – Baggy Trousers – Another Brick in the Wall. The latter also stimulated a long post which was mildly offensive, but also impassioned, erudite and sincere. #1 doesn’t manage the first quality let alone the rest. so much effort to so little effect

Probably their weakest number 1, cold is about the best description of DSSCTM and much else by the Police by this stage; smug would be another. Sting must qualify as one of the most narcissistic performers in pop – which given it’s probably an essential quality for the job is saying something. You feel you can never admire Sting’s work as much as he does – even when it deserves admiration.

Straight in at Number 1. The second record to do so in 1980, after “Going Underground.”

It was also the best selling single of the year, which given the record is nowhere near the best record in this week’s chart, is a bit of a disappointment. I don’t care much for this, although I like the intro – the atmosphere it generates promises much more than the song itself delivers.

“Baggy Trousers” was THE record of Autumn 1980 at school, the arrival of DSSCTM at Number 1 provoking derision from my friends. The Police also had the nerve to keep the magnificent “Masterblaster” from claiming its rightful position at the top.

Long time lurker and enthusiastic follower of Popular emerging to give it one of these:

5 sounds about right to me. A part of me wishes my birthday number one was something I felt a bit more strongly about, one way or the other, but oh well.

Another one of those “top of the world, ma!” singles from a newly-super group that didn’t live up to what they’d done before. It’s also where Sting became STING in all his annoying glory. The scene in the video where he takes his shirt off may have been some very meta- and post-modern commentary on the pop sex/commerce nexus (as I think Paul Morley claimed in the NME) but it just made me want to slap him. Talk about wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

So hard to de-program yourself. When you know the driving force of this record is pop’s least appealing ego, and you’ve seen the poison flower in full bloom, it’s not easy (and it makes me uneasy) to give this music the benefit of the doubt. I can stomach the previous Police no.1s, up to a point, because the words are simple and silly enough to be inoffensive, and the music has a certain curiosity value at least (almost like an infantile Talk Talk, diluted/polluted by The Boomtown Rats, dressed up in what we’re told is reggae, like a mum tells her son that the clothes she’s bought him are trendy). This though, as Lee pointed out above, is Sting as Sting, the irritant, the very worst thing.

I did try – played it four times. After all, as I said on the comments page for “Start!”, I can enjoy a lot of The Jam’s music, despite its fundamentally farcical nature, and despite the spectre of Paul Weller as he would become (and to an extent Paul Weller as he was then – I read about someone’s dream the other day, in which the Paul Wellers of 1978 and 1996 were beating up the Paul Weller of 1985, and it made a lot of sense to me). Weller has never been as outrageous an embarrassment as Sting, of course, but on the other hand Sting has always had an edge on him technically, if not in terms of inspiration, so perhaps there would be something to admire in here, if not something to love. Strawclutcher me.

In fact, not only is it as cold as Tom suggests, and in no way endearing, DSSCTM is a bit of a pig’s ear. It’s a very poorly balanced song in terms of its construction, and the flatness of its sound deflates what I imagine were supposed to be dynamics (the clickety, building riffs in the instrumental break, and the spin back from the break to the final chorus). Incredible to think that people were still digging The Police in 1980 in conscious opposition to someone like Fleetwood Mac, whose records are so sharp and vivacious by comparison.

The lyrics bother me a lot – even before Sting’s mix of pomposity and clumsy inarticulacy swelled to the size of “Russians”, he had a certain arrogance in his lyric writing. I’m ALL for songwriters tackling difficult, interesting subjects, even if they don’t have the skills of a Joni Mitchell or even a Momus, but there’s something about Sting’s self-importance that makes me sick: he’s enough of a piece of work to think this is a Piece Of Work. What do we actually learn about this teacher and this jailbait? What does this song tell us about discomfort, or inappropriate desire? All we get is sketchy cliche, but worse, delivered with this looming seriousness – as though by writing anything other than pledges of love or exhortations to dance, Sting has blown our minds, and we are in the palm of his hand… look, he doesn’t even have to try. Even Morrissey, long after his lyrics had slumped into self-satisfaction, took on a similar scenario and managed the far-more-interesting “Alsation Cousin”.

Anyway, this became a deodorant advert, didn’t it?

I hate Andy Summers’ guitar sound. What is that, a stereo smooth-jazz effects pedal, or is that how that guitar sounds everyday? After their first couple singles pulled reggae into the scene for a lot of people, Why couldn’t they have just gone away? I so despise them smug bastards.

Re: clunker. In search of a rhyme, it forces the song’s best line from Sting: “It’s no use, he sees her, he starts to shake and cough” would be a moment of sweaty, obsessive realism if you didn’t know where it was heading.

Sting, and “yes we’re playing reggae” issues aside, my problem with this song – also with Invisible Sun – is that the chorus is so weak. The song’s poor dynamics have already been pointed out, but the chorus melody is the same as the verse melody, only desiccated. All that droning tension thrown away. What would a James Last/BBC Radio Orchestra version of DSSCTM sound like? Not as good as D-I-S-C-O or Masterblaster.

Sting’s enunciation is also less than clear on this one. I had a slightly younger friend, not familiar with the literary influences of this, who argued that the line referred to a book by “Neville Carr” and he wondered what the book was.

Another unfortunate incidence of a song being massive purely because it came along at the time when the band were going to have an enormous hit, no matter what they released. It was a mediocre single from a (very) mediocre album… and the follow-up was significantly worse.

To their credit, although they remained pretentious after this, I think they must have realised how poor “Zenyatta” was, as they did produce some better work on their remaining albums.

Many bands who made only five albums leave you wanting more, but I think there was a general sigh of relief that the Police called it a day after five. If they could have left out that third album, and made it only four, it would have been much better.

Like vinylscot at #15, I agree that Zenyatta Mondatta marked a creative slump for The Police, after which they recovered and produced much of their best work. Sting’s arrogance had really started to grate on me by now, and this single’s horrendous follow-up “De Do Do Do De Da Da Da” made me want to chuck things at the telly. All the boring people in residence hall loved them, and I was still enough of a snob to factor that into my dismissal.

Objectively speaking, we’ve had far worse Number Ones than “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” this year – but this is the one that gets my goat more than any other (OK, except for “Coward Of The County”, but it’s close). I’d go into more detail, but that would involve listening to the damned thing again of my own volition… no thanks!

For a supposed educated man like Sting the Nabokov name-drop seems annoyingly autodidatic. I’m all for literary allusions in pop songs as long as they’re done smartly, this one just seems like blatant showing off – look, I’ve read a book! I’m too smart for this pop song nonsense! Which he went on to show in his earnest solo work. Look, real jazz musicians!

Our Head Boy slept with one of our English teachers. She was very young and new and in the Sixth Form she used to invite us round her flat to smoke and listen to Beatles records.

I don’t think the character is delivering the lines exactly (so they’re not designed to be said/sung), but the line – its pretension and clumsiness – is coming from the character rather than the singer.

Point taken, but Sting has the sort of personality that’s hard to separate from his songs. He seems to be there a lot of the time.

The heart-throb teacher at my school was the deputy head of music, a bland-faced man with a short, fluffy centre-parting, who wore grey shirts and big baggy M&S cords. He had less raw sex appeal than anyone I’ve ever seen, I think, and it troubled us boys greatly, as we’d spent a year or two watching “Rebel Without A Cause” and listening to The Birthday Party, thinking the (heartfelt) moody rebel pose was foolproof. No – this was the mid-to-late 1980s, when 16 year old girls dressed like Washington Wives, anyone who wore a leather jacket or listened to non-chart music was “weird”, and the number one sex symbol was this young Conservative dick. I still remember a painful night at a party, standing in the cold with my dream girl, having it explained to me that she couldn’t kiss me because she was in love with Mr ******. Dear God. Another great memory: two girls choosing a certain 1985 number one by Elaine and Barbara (dodges bunny to avoid double-pronged bite-mark) as their Music GCSE performance piece, sung with REAL EMOTION right into the fool’s face. Of course, nowadays I find this rather touching. At the time, their rendition was followed with much guffawing from those of us behind the door, and a gruff run-through of “Like A Virgin” as the blushing teens emerged into the corridor. Rotten days.

He never went near any of them, though (had a thing going on with the PE mistress). In the sixth form another chap showed up, fresh from TTC, who tried to get on “our” side by talking about Tim Buckley and Nick Drake, feigning astonishment that I’d heard of The Crucial Three (actually, that may not have been feigned, as in retrospect it amazes me too). Sadly he was never the friend of the friendless, as we sneered at his Ben Elton appearance and highlighted mullet. He did, however, hoover up the affections of the girls in the year below – i.e. the only ones we ever had a chance with. He was even weak enough to go out for a drink with one of them, although she told me later in a moment of drunken honesty that he’d refused her kind offer of sex, being all too professional.

I look at kids now, with their cocaine orgies captured for posterity on £300 mobile phones, and I know this is paradise everyone old has dreamed of all their lives. I start shaking and barking, just like that old man in that poem by Larkin.

Q-style, or the Feb ’95 Mojo cover story, “The Fugitive: is it time Sting was forgiven?”

(Answer has to be “No”, dunnit?)

Sting aside, The Police have had an astonishingly easy ride on Popular til now. Taylor, have you checked the Walking On The Moon thread? “I hope my legs don’t break”: I was on my ownsome.

I remember a Behind The Music-style doc on Sting from the early 90s in which he said something along the lines of “I’d hate it if people thought I was preaching and patronising about the future of the rainforest…” It then cut straight to a shot of him, in a lecture room, stick in hand, pointing to a map of the Amazon.

And then there’s Quadrophenia. Where do you start?

Just wanted to chime in and note for interested parties that we got rather well into the Nabokov discussion way back on “Baby Jump”. (I am staggered and amazed to realize that this was two years ago.) Sukrat in particular gets some good observations in!

Another line of this song that improves greatly if read as “in character” is “Her friends are / So jealous / You know how bad girls get,” which is a banal filler line on its face, but maybe works if it’s intended as something the teacher offers as an explanation in the staff room. “Your students have been saying WHAT? Oh, those kids! You know how girls get…”

It’s a reach, though. I think the song is okay, maybe not as pretentious and cold as it’s being read here, but certainly a bit dull. It also exposes one of the worst tendencies of The Police: the chorus is just one line repeated over and over. When it’s done with some energy I forgive it (“Canary in a Coal Mine”) but even so, for a guy apparently overflowing with impressions of himself as a writer, Sting really couldn’t be bothered when it came to hooks!

Baby Jump, I realised just a week ago, is basically a jugband cover of Vince Taylor’s Brand New Cadillac. Even the lyrics (Lolita and Da Vinci aside) are nicked. Vince, by ’71. would have been too far out to sea to notice. And then his life story was regurgitated as Ziggy Stardust a year later.

NMEWatch: Max Bell, 20th September 1980.

“Sting knows the scenario, eh? All those nubile Lolitas in 3B just itching to get Mr Sumner hot and bothered while he’s marking their geography papers. Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone! Aside from the perils of classroom footsy The Police are still manipulating their formula. And why not? It works. Helluva subject matter, isn’t it? Vladimir’s syndrome. Underneath it they’re lovable, dependable, safe. Sting is the best looking man in the world and The Police are better than The Beatles. I just wish he’d try a different voice for a change, that the band would attempt a different beat. The subliminal dance goes on and on and on.”

Bell makes ‘The Wanderer’ by Donna Summer single of the week. Also reviewed are;

Orange Juice – Blue Boy/ Love Sick
Kid Creole & The Coconuts – Maladie D’Amour
Paul McCartney – Temporary Secretary
John Cale – Mercenaries
Viv Stanshall – Terry Keeps His Clips on

Well, I’m back at my parents’ house for the weekend. Tottering piles of newspaper and magazines in the attic vie with walls of books, heaps of records in my bedroom… The heaps do at least tend to be in order, though!

Something I’ve always wondered: What would someone think if they heard this song and the only Nabokov novel they knew was Pale Fire?

(Also: It’s pronounced nuh-BAH-koff, dammit!)

you’re costing me a fortune on amazon, Punctum!

I would agree with the 5/10 from Tom on this.