Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,658 Sting - Dream of the Blue Turtles

 

Check out the brains on Sting ? What a big head. Listening to this record again for the first time since it came out in 1985 when frankly it was ubiquitous for a year and my brother and best friend played it all the time.. I loved The Police. Certainly their early records but Ghost in the Machine too. At .the time and still. 

I played Outlanders a couple of days ago and it still stands up as truly great Pop Music if verging on the  preposterous in terms of its wordplay. Never mind the Reggaeisms which sometimes move towards slightly questionable cultural appropriation. The kind of impressions you shouldn't really make. Ones that cross lines . Hey. Mick Jagger was there fifteen years earlier. .Pop Music is supposed to be daft. And reward theft.  

But Sting took the ludicrous aspects of his personality, particularly his gargantuan narcissicism up a mountain track of his own devising as The Police grew and he began to think 'do I really need these guys'. I could have this whole pie to myself'. He decided he not only wished to be an enormously rich Pop Star at the wheel of a Rock & Roll  juggernaut. He wanted to be considered a Literary Artist too with not only a considerable intellect but a fabuous sense of humour. Not to mention a fairly enviable codpiece (see Dune)

By 1985 I was off to university and Sting's ego was off into orbit. The Police had split and he wished the world to know that he was not only incredibly erudite and sensitive and even  understood Jazz. He wanted to take ownershop of it. He was more than just Pop now. He was a seer. So he recruited a troup of top class players to prove it  and drifted off into orbit, Meglomaniac.

Don't get me wrong  Dream of the Blue Turtles is a really good record.A lot of the tunes are really great toetappers and masterfully and inventively crafted pieces for the chattering classes. It's beautifully presented. So polished. But boy does it preen.It never stops preening for a single moment. Stand still Sting ! He can't. Each song takes up a different academic dilemma. Sting is clearly stung my his own myriad, fantastic qualities. He juts his jaw at a different critical horizon for each song he tackles and slays each one in turn. What does love mean? Are the Russians good people? Why do people go to war? Why am I so cool and hunky? OK I made that last one up. He never bloomin' stops. I still like it though.