Outlandos d'Amour - The Police

A fitting place to start is with The Police’s debut album. A lot of ink has already been spilled about the importance of The Police now that they’ve re-formed and held their mega-tour, but besides all the nostalgic return of a fantastic body of hit songs, there is something more important about this record.

Released in 1978 (when I was too young to notice by the way) this first full length album was a pivotal record. Punk still reigned in England, and the raw anti-aesthetic was the dominant artistic gesture for musicians. The newly formed Police were not exempt. Their first few singles were raw, undisciplined attempts at a sneering pop-punk anthem. But here was the strange part – punk was the music of the untrained, un-refined, and some would even say un-musical. As quickly as it exploded into the public discourse, it quickly was veering into a kind of antithetical nihilism. The Sex Pistols themselves were the ultimate object lesson of Punk’s self-destructive dead-end trajectory. What could be the point of releasing A Great Punk Album, when the aesthetic itself was bent of de-throning the enshrined standards of greatness? And indeed, what was the point of musicianship, songwriting and or technical prowess when the genre had decreed that the ultimate artistic (or anti-artistic) expression was the raw squeal of feedback? But The Police were very different: Sting was an experienced, and highly educated jazz musician. Stewart Copeland was a wealthy expatriate with considerable training and technical skills at the drums. Andy Summers was an experienced (and surprisingly old for the punk scene) guitarist with a pedigree from Art Rock bands. Yet these three came together and tackled the energy and attitude of punk, as if only to subvert it from within. In hindsight, the pseudo-gibberish title of their first album seemed almost to hint at this agenda – in a musical scene where being anti-establishment was de rigueur, not only were the Police outlaws, but worse yet, they were Outlandos of LOVE. For all of Punk’s rejections, sentimentality and love were at the top of the list. But The Police were to reject even the standards of an aesthetic built on rejections. In this record they wed punk’s energy and attitude to a new emphasis on emotional lyrics, tight disciplined song-writing, and (horrors!) and expansive and refined musical technique.

Sting’s lyrical content and songwriting prowess is at the surface of Outlandos’ and almost needs no further elaboration. His skill for the tightly rhymed lyrical couplet was applied to themes both base and sublime: from lust (Next To You), unrequited love (Cant Stand Losing You), prostitution and redemption (Roxanne), teen obsessions, to existential examination (Hole In My Life, Truth Hits Everybody). While there was nothing particularly original or groundbreaking about his songwriting approach, the glint of his cleverness beneath the swagger of the traditional pop song and the punk-angst sneer, paired up with truly unique musicianship to create timeless songs.

But Sting has reaped more than enough accolades – onto the music. The brilliance of Outlandos D’Amour is how it melded so many disparate musical styles and transformed the Punk era into something new. Within the grooves of this record there lies reggae rhythms, chord progressions ripped from blues and jazz standards, Beatle-esque vocal harmonies, tied together with the raw punk energy that infused the late 70s.

Genre bending/melding aside, there’s true innovation in the musical techniques many listeners never notice. First is Stewart’s drumming. Drummers everywhere champion Copeland as one of the greatest rock drummers of all time. But why? The remarkable thing about his drumming is how he walks the fine line between restraint and indulgence. Outlandos opens with the thunderous drum beat introduction of “Next To You”. The listener has no question that this song is going to be loud, energetic and in your face, but as the song progresses the percussion is a tour de force, not of the force implied in the opening measures, but of percussive style. Copeland varies the beat not only through out the song, but within the very verses, chorus’s and bridges, he changes from tom rolls, to clattering snare and cymbal rides, and beyond even the diversification of the beat, Stewart shows incredible sensitivity to the character of the sound making the listener hear the difference between where on the cymbal bell he rides the rhythm by the different character of the sound. But behind the variety of every ornamentation he applies to the song, is a strong undeniable precision. Later in the Police’s work, what I call ornamentation evolves in the full blown polyrhythmic drumming, but here in Outlandos it is more the form of a sonic spectrum that makes the listener feel the true love of his craft that Stewart obviously lavishes on his drum kit. But the true greatness here is that the highly ornamented percussion, never totally eclipses the simple rhythmic precision of the song, giving Sting’s clever songwriting the room for its nimble dynamic gymnastics. But even more importantly, gives the breathing room for Andy’s guitar work, never competing with Andy’s guitar intricacies, and providing the textural fill where the guitar hovers in a wash of sound.

Andy Summers may well be one of the most under appreciated guitarists in recent history. The guitar work on Outlandos shows incredible breadth of style. While the songs are often built on the blunt crunch of punky power chords, and the occasional wailing rock-solos, there’s something more there when you listen closely. What the hell is a punk band doing playing diminished 3rds, and augmented minor 7ths?! And what’s with those short staccato jazz chords that Roxanne is built upon? Andy’s experience in art rock bands prior to The Police shows through, lurking under the surface. And while this style will forever be one of the signatures of Andy’s art, there’s something else just starting to surface in the guitar work of Outlandos d’Amour. Andy used effects unlike others before him – he used the guitar to evoke atmospheres. There’s echoing swells of sound on this record that sound like the wind; a train; glaring sunlight; glimmering moonlight; sounds that seem to have come from a dream; backward sounds, volume swelled swooshes of sound – sounds that seem to be anything but a guitar. I often say without Andy Summers there would have been no Edge; no Radiohead; dare I even say no Kevin Shields? Hyperbole? Perhaps. But it get’s my point across. Andy Summers was one of the first guitarists to transform the guitar into a new kind of instrument – one beyond chords and arpeggios, into an instrument of abstraction and evocation. This becomes more and more evident in the later Police albums, but the beginnings of it are captured here in Outlandos.

OK, so enough waxing ecstatic about this slab of wax. Despite all this high brow noodling, my point is simple. Outlandos d’Amour is a landmark album because it marks the point in where punk’s death throws and self-destructive aesthetic were infused with new life and resuscitated into a new style of music. I’m not sure I like the labels, “post-punk”, “new wave”… I just call it the foundation of 80s alternative music. Music that transformed it’s current genre by infusing it with both a historicity of music by introducing and melding it with other genres, as well as pure innovation with no agenda other than it’s own creativity.