How The Police’s Biggest Album Nearly Crashed and Burned
“We fall into the trap of finding someone we think we love and then locking it up, or being locked up ourselves by that,” Sting told Playboy magazine in 1985. And I think we have to be bigger than that. I think our souls have to be larger. Of course, I’m as jealous and small-minded as anybody else.”
While not particularly fair to the wife Sting had recently abandoned, that point of view had been fertile ground for his songwriting. In 1983, with sessions for his band The Police’s fifth album looming, Sting and his new partner Trudy Styler decamped to Ian Fleming’s old Jamaican hideaway Goldeneye, where he wrote the bulk of the songs that would make up Synchronicity: “King of Pain,” “Wrapped Around Your Finger” and, of course, the worldwide smash he was referring to in that Playboy interview, “Every Breath You Take.”
“The song is very, very sinister, and ugly,” Sting would later tell the BBC. “And people have actually misinterpreted it as being a gentle little love song, when it’s quite the opposite.”