100 Best Albums of the Eighties

17. The Police, ‘Synchronicity’

The last Police album was the best Police album ”” musically and thematically. Synchronicity was as good as thinking man’s New Wave ever got. On it, singer, bassist and chief songwriter Sting applied Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s theories of the collective unconsciousness and mystical coincidence (a.k.a. synchronicity) to personal, embittered studies of pain, vengeance and the agony of love’s labors lost.

The material was dark but well suited to the group’s method of interaction in the studio: “violence,” according to Sting in a 1983 interview. “I’ll argue till the cows come home about something I believe in, and so will Andy and Stewart,” he said, referring to guitarist Andy Summers and drummer Stewart Copeland. “Synchronicity went through all kinds of horrendous cogs and gears to come out, emotionally and technically, the way it did.”

It was the last album by the fractious Police, who quietly dissolved after a half-hearted and unsuccessful attempt to reunite in the studio three years later. Yet there was little evidence of battle on Synchronicity. Sting’s bracing tenor was dramatically framed by the subtle third-world inflections in Copeland’s drumming and Summers’s delicately serrated guitar. The band displayed a refined sense of pop drama in “Every Breath You Take” ”” a chilling ode to obsession heightened by a haunting guitar riff ”” and the gothic strains of “King of Pain.”

Closer to the surface were Sting’s own wounds suffered during a messy divorce in 1982 from actress Frances Tomelty, his wife of seven years. Afterward, he went to Jamaica, staying at novelist Ian Fleming’s old house and writing a large chunk of Synchronicity ”” including “Every Breath You Take,” “King of Pain” and “Wrapped Around Your Finger” ”” at the same desk Fleming had written his James Bond novels. The recurring images of entrapment and pain in Sting’s lyrics dovetailed with his interest in Jungian theory, which he set to music in “Synchronicity I” and “Synchronicity II.”

“The title of the album refers to coincidence and things being connected without there being a logical link,” he said. Sting has continued to psychoanalyze himself in song as a solo artist, but Synchronicity captured him at a particularly vulnerable and eloquent juncture in his career. As he himself said, “I do my best work when I’m in pain and turmoil.”