the Police

the Police, British-American new wave band that blended reggae, jazz, funk, punk, and world music influences into hook-laden pop-rock. Five best-selling albums, a bevy of hits, and aggressive touring—including stops in countries usually overlooked by Western pop musicians—combined to make the Police the world’s most popular band in the early 1980s.

Founding and early recordings

Unlike most of their punk contemporaries, the Police were skilled musicians when they came together in London in 1977. Drummer Stewart Copeland played with the progressive rock band Curved Air, bassist-vocalist-songwriter Sting performed with jazz combos in Newcastle, and Andy Summers (who replaced the group’s original guitarist, Henri Padovani) was a veteran of numerous British rhythm-and-blues and rock bands.

Having dyed their hair blond to play a punk band in a commercial and thereby established their signature look, the Police charted in both Britain and the United States with the reggae-imbued album Outlandos d’Amour (released in late 1978 in Britain and in early 1979 in the United States). Its lead single, “Roxanne,” a love song to a sex worker, showcased Sting’s distinctive near-falsetto voice and superb songwriting. The title song of the follow-up album, Regatta de Blanc (1979), earned the first of the band’s five Grammy Awards.

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Zenyatta Mondatta to Synchronicity

Zenyatta Mondatta (1980) and the synthesizer-rich Ghost in the Machine (1981) saw a marked evolution from the stripped-down arrangements of their early work to a more layered but still tightly focused sound. The group reached its commercial and critical peak with the multiplatinum album Synchronicity (1983), which spawned the massive hit “Every Breath You Take,” a ballad about obsession featuring a hypnotic guitar line by Summers. Often mistaken for a love song, it spent eight weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and won two Grammys, including song of the year.

On all their work, Summers’s evocative guitar playing and Copeland’s polyrhythmic virtuosity provided a solid foundation for Sting’s impassioned vocals and sophisticated lyrics (which included references to Vladimir Nabokov and Arthur Koestler).

Break-up, reunion, and royalties dispute

In 1984, at the peak of their popularity, the Police dissolved. Copeland went on to score numerous motion pictures, while Summers recorded adventurous music, including two albums with fellow guitarist Robert Fripp. Sting became an extremely popular solo artist, revisiting his jazz roots (accompanied by such accomplished musicians as saxophonist Branford Marsalis and keyboardist Kenny Kirkland) and later incorporating Latin and folk influences.

The trio reunited briefly in 1986 and released the compilation album Every Breath You Take: The Singles, which featured a rerecording of their 1980 hit “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” They reconvened again for a performance at the 2007 Grammy Awards and followed it with an enormously successful world tour in 2007–08.

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In 2025 Summers and Copeland sued Sting and his publishing company for unpaid royalties, claiming that they had made important contributions to the band’s songs and had entered into an oral agreement with him to share income. In early 2026 it was reported that Sting had paid his bandmates $800,000 in back royalties, but Summers and Copeland said that millions more were owed to them because of income from streaming and downloads.

Honors

The Police were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. Twenty years later the U.S. Library of Congress added Synchronicity to the National Recording Registry, a list of audio recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”