Synchronicity: 1983/84

Faded blue knights - Police show only glimmer of talent at end of national conquest...

The three golden gods arrived ready to complete their conquer and plunder of America after a month tour of the coveted empire's fair cities.

Weeks before their performance in the grand coliseum called Assembly Hall, they had amassed vast hordes of platinum and gold with sales from their number one single "Every Breath You Take." from their much-hailed 'Synchronicity' album.

But a chink in their seemingly impenetrable armour developed just days before the grand occasion. Synchronicity was wrestled out of its No. 1 position-which it held for 17 weeks by a daring gang of knaves dubbed Quiet Riot.

Yet the Police went on with their show Monday night in the face of such adversity, feeding the almost-capacity crowd a potpourri of 20 (count 'em) songs from various stages in their career while proving, if anything, their mortality in the process.

Together bassist/vocalist pop phenomena Sting, guitarist Andy Summers and drummer Stewart Copeland form one of the most po tent and innovative forces in music, which was evident only in isolated instances Monday night.

The Police's best numbers that evening were off of their first album, 'Outlandos D'Amour', and 'Synchronicity'. The remainder of their songs, with a few exceptions. fell noticeably short of what these men are capable of.

'Wrapped Around Your Finger', a calypso-sounding melody off their latest, was the one point of the one-hour forty-minute concert where Sting, Summers and Copeland jelled into a pure essence of what the group is about.

It had an rich and airy texture, which seems to be a contradiction, but the Police have often ventured beyond the bounds of What Should Be In Pop Music. 'Wrapped Around My Finger' effectively used what Sting called "creative space" in a June 1983 Musician Magazine interview. There were no tape loops, no solos, no individual virtuosity - it was just the Police and their three female back-up singers relying on the power of a hauntingly simple yet powerful melody woven within white space.

In contrast to 'Wrapped Around My Finger', were 'Invisible Sun' and 'Every Breath You Take'.

'Invisible Sun', which on the LP 'Ghost In the Machine' appears as a dreary offering from songwriter Sting's apparently unlimited library of anguish, was almost danceable Monday. I'm sorry, but I can't dance to mankind's funeral dirge, even if it is pepped up.

To top that off was 'Every Breath You Take', which on 'Synchronicity' was an obsessively yearning ballad of a man's love. I guess the band thought the "mellow" approach was not appropriate for a crowd with an average age of about 17. So they played it upbeat and sickeningly sweet.

Instead of being an anthem of isolated wanting, it was more like a group exercise in attempted harmony. With all those young voices singing so nicely, I thought I was encircled by a ring of schoolchildren chanting at the playground.

Sting's worn-out voice was another problem area, as this was the last date of the tour. His efforts to find any kind of sustain in the higher vocal ranges were in vain, so he would conspicuously phrase around the same note the next time he came to it. The Stingman's vocals were especially cold on the opening numbers of 'Synchronicity I and II' which otherwise acted as a wonderfully jolting introduction.

Another thing that troubled me was the locomotive endings the Police used, cranking each song up to an artificial finish monotonously climaxed by all the members employing the typical live rock ending-all instruments riveting the final note or chord of the song ("We're finished kids, time to give a rousing ovation.")

To be sure, there were good things. Funky ska renditions of 'One World' and 'De Do Do Do'. An honestly excitable version of their newest Top 40 entry 'King of Pain'. A bouncy, burlesque piece-o-fun called 'There's a Hole In My Life', and the one encore, 'I Can't Stand Losing You', which came off superbly as a lover's final, desperate plea.

I guess one just tends to demand too much of real, live superstars.

(c) The Daily Illinois by Warren Karlenzig

The Police go home after making history...

"See you in London."

Stewart Copeland waved to his crew backstage Monday night and headed out into the saucer-shaped assembly hall at the University of Illinois.

It was the end of the beginning. The Police were finishing the most lucrative tour in their history before heading to New York yester day and on to England.

Along the way it brought the new wave to middle-America.

"The Police made the new wave safe this year," says one music analyst. "They got the world ready for Boy George." They were also part of one of the most deeply rooted changes in the music industry's recent history.

A great roar from 17,000 kids, scruffy-but-not really, drowned out the drummer as he set up. Just this week 'The Police Around the World' entered the top of Toronto's video rental sales. The concert, filmed this summer at Le Spectrum in Montreal to start this tour, will be on the First Choice pay-TV network New Year's Eve. In Toronto, the band's video is in the mainstream of the MTV music television network.

Here in this chilled dormitory town we heard as finely-tuned a performance as rock allows. It began sleek and smooth in overdrive with 'Synchronicity' and kept the slipstream pace as Sting led one vast sing-a-long with 'Message In a Bottle'.

It was a night of silver and golds the bright gleam of the spotlights playing on their dyed blond hair. There was Andy Summers always the professional sidesman guitarist, deferring to the band's real star, Sting, happy and generous in the spotlight.

The dust had barely settled yesterday when the band's record company, A & M, started sorting out what had happened. The band's Police Picnic at the CNE Grandstand this year won't be repeated in 1984. "We've phased that out," said Kim Turner, the band's road manager. But 'Synchronicity', an album compared with The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper and which uses Carl Jung as source material, has sold 780,000 copies in Canada alone.

World-wide sales are estimated at 5.7 million. According to Billboard magazine, it was the No. 1 selling album for 17 weeks in a row, "becoming one of the five longest-running No. 1 albums of the past 20 years."

But it was buoyed by a broad wave of change in the music industry itself. Think of it as the year the single replaced the album in importance. Albums sold well, certainly. Michael Jackson's 'Thriller', which out-sold 'Synchronicity', stayed in the No. 1 spot for 20 weeks, selling around 16 million copies world-wide (over 1 million copies in Canada alone.)

What the two have in common with each other - and with other top selling albums Men At Work's 'Business As Usual' and 'Flashdance's' movie soundtrack recording is that they are basically compilations of singles.

Synchronicity has yielded three hit singles: 'King of Pain', 'Every Breath You Take' and 'Synchronicity II'. Thriller resulted in six hit singles. "So you can understand why single sales are up over 15 per cent this year," said David Farrell, who publishes the music industry trade magazine The Record.

In fact the measly little single may be what the new wave has been all about all along. The battles of young versus old, between over-produced albums and the under-produced, between the punks and the "corporate rockers" could very well have been the battle between the album versus the single.

"Years ago the album was the hot medium," Farrell said yesterday "Then it became the concept album. But a lot of groups didn't have the musical resources to carry an entire album off and as a result a lot of weak albums were produced. I think this alone caused part of the music industry's recession.

"The Police are very much part of its revival."

(c) The Toronto Star by Goddard