Or more accurately, assassinates it. I listened to the record for the first time for a while the other day and though it's an album that holds a really good personal memory for me of a friend bringing it round at the time of its release and listening to Invisible Sun booming through the walls while Seb Coe ran in an athletics championship on the TV in the next room, aside from that, thirty five years on I think Murray for the most part is right. It's an unrealised album with an awful lot of filler. Also deeply pretentious of course, but that's Sting for you. Intelligent granted, but not a very giving intelligence and genrally outrageously smug. Strange move of the band to front the album with all three of the records hit singles. The heavy layers of synths that wash all over the record certainly do Andy Summers in particular no real favours and though there are four or five pop gems, Murray's relish at taking it apart is not unwarranted.
'O Sting, where is thy depth? And whoever suggested that it was necessary or desirable to plumb it?
The Police have run a fair old racket since 1977, when their collective stock was so low that the idea of The Police ever becoming massively popular was only fractionally less ludicrous than the notion that Adam And The Ants could do likewise. Through deafening storms of approbation in every country in the world where Coca Cola is sold, three well-padded albums and enough decent singles to fill most of one side of a greatest hits album, Sting - The Most Beautiful Man In The World - steps forward to answer your question 'Who's your favourite philosopher?'
Well, Lynn Hanna gave the game away last week, and the answer must come as a one hell of a shock to the Watsonian Behaviourists in the Police's audience. One imagines a contest somewhat akin to a cross between the Deputy Leadership and the Oscars: Bette Midler rips open an envelope and announces, "The winner is... Arthur Koestler!" as B.F. Skinner, lips trembling, complexion ashen, does his best to applaud like a good loser should while choking on the fact that the new Police album will not be entitled 'Beyond Freedom And Dignity'.
To support the weight of their current subject-matter, The Police have come up with A New Sound: they've ditched the sharp, cool interlocking fragments of texture and rhythm with which they pioneered New Wave in America and created a sonic blancmange involving hundreds of guitar-synthed, effects-ridden Andy Summers overdubs, a lot of saxophones and several harmonising Stings. They now sound like a cross between The Bee Gees and a reggaefied Yes which I'm sure everybody will agree is one hell of an advance. Only Stewart Copeland's clattering, bustling drums - as audaciously busy and showy as ever - hew to the original blueprint, and Copeland is consistently the most interesting player throughout.
The album's best moment comes halfway through the second side with 'One World', a swaggering upful call for unity which almost certainly meets with Miles Copeland's full approval. Even there, Summers guitar sound is muffled and spongy, but the song's feel and sentiment carry a genuine warmth which is unambiguously appealing.
Its worst arrives at the end of the first side: The Police unveil their version of 'Demolition Man', the song that Sting wrote for Grace Jones. This rendition of the song pretty much is a 'walking disaster': Summers plays an extended Heavy Metal solo all the way through the song, and well. I thought my razor was dull until I heard the bass line.
Everywhere else is blancmange (maybe a better title for the album would have been 'Blancmango De Trop', which would have at least preserved conceptual continuity with their first three efforts): whether Sting's being "sexual" on 'Hungry For You', metaphysical on 'Spirits In The Material World' or concerned and aware on 'Invisible Sun', he and his colleagues combine a woolly sound with woolly thinking to minimum effect. Even when they briefly return (via a song for which Stewart Copeland wrote the music) to the punky-trash vein which they mined before the Big Skank hit them, 'Rehumanise Yourself' - the album's second-best track, as it happens - is still weighed down by too much paraphernalia.
It's all good humanistic stuff and if rock bands are going to push their favourite philosophers I'd rather take a reggae-ish pop band promoting Arthur Koestler over a pomp(ous)-HM group pimping for Ayn Rand any day of the decade. The fact remains that - as far as this particular listener is concerned - 'The Ghost In The Machine is AMAAAAAAAAAZINGLY DULL. Sting is obviously a decent, intelligent chap and if we were debating politics and philosophy I'd probably find large areas of agreement with him, but dull music with worthy sentiments attached is, ultimately, no more rewarding an aesthetic experience than dull music with foul sentiments.
Koestler's book is available in a Picador edition for considerably less than the cost of The Police's album.'
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