The songs worked with three instruments. In short, everything you know about the Police is not wrong, but dramatically altered in concept and rearranged in execution. We would disagree violently in prose. While the tour was originally intended to support their 1982 album It's Hard, the band later announced it would be their final tour, though they would eventually reunite twice and then tour again in 1989. We stopped strangling each other, did an encore and then came back, had another fight and then back for another encore. First up is 'Every Breath You Take' followed by 'King of Pain', an excellent song that never ceases to challenge the listener, 'Wrapped Around Your Finger' and 'Tea in the Sahara', both of which dutifully remind us why the Police and Sting, in particular, are the best things that have happened to rock since the Sex Pistols. While Summers picks out a muted chord progression distantly related to 'Invisible Sun', the dusky romantic caring in the song is quietly vitalised by the desolate pluck of a piano, the pastel wash of Summer's guitar synth and a distant chorus of Sting's in quiet radiant harmony. Seven months later, the band played their final concert in Australia and went their separate ways. Other topics would appear to be include prehistory ('Walking In Your Footsteps'), mother fixations (Summers' 'Mother'), the pursuit of knowledge ('Wrapped Around Your Finger') and the fine art of murder ('Murder By Numbers', only included on the cassette version). Sounding more like Captain Beefheart than the Police, it's a blackly humorous portrait of a poor shlep who needs only to hear the phone ring to start ranting. The Police had the courage to say goodbye at the very peak of their commercial and artistic abilities. I don't feel so much connected to that now. I don't demean myself. Sting as the next David Bowie Yes...I think that would do nicely. That's all I want to say. The single, 'Every Breath You Take', is a very sad song and it makes me sad, but it's a wonderful sadness. Catch the band in their early days at a show at the Boston Orpheum in 1979 and then compare and contrast to a Synchronicity-era performance at Atlanta's Omni Auditorium. 'Synchronicity's' big surprise, however is the explosive and bitter passion of Sting's newest songs. Every time he picks up the receiver dear old Mom is there. Drivel, mostly, but it gives that patina of books having been read. I felt the songs I wrote were different, so the playing had to be different. I'd never been to America - America was a dream for me. Now, none of these songs are particularly insightful, but then neither are any of them particularly stupid. An audience has its role too. Besides "Eminence Front", which has been featured in the band's act off and on since 1982, "Cry If You Want" is the only It's Hard track the band has played since these tours, having appeared a few times in the group's first shows of 2006 and as part of a medley following "My Generation" from 2006 to 2009; it was also briefly included at the start of The Who Hits 50! Whatever forced their hand, the Police responded to it with an album that is stirring, provocative and a hard slap at those uppity hipsters who say they just don't matter anymore. The 1979 Boston gig came in the midst of their labours on 'Reggatta de Blanc' - represented here by 'Walking On The Moon', 'Bring On The Night', and 'The Bed's Too Big Without You', still loyal to their album arrangements. "Dangerous", "It's Hard", "Eminence Front", and "Cry If You Want" were performed nightly, while "Athena" and "A Man Is a Man" were also played several times each. Really, this Sting is some moody guy. The comparisons don't end there. "Rolling Stone, 2/91, "There's still a lot of tradition in the Police; we're still on the boards and we go through a lot of showbizzy things. While Townshend's announcement during the first show that they planned to do "a proper British tour next year" was met with loud cheers, this ultimately did not occur. 'Tea In The Sahara', 'Synchronicity's' moodiest, most tantalising song, is an aural mirage that brings back the birdcalls and jungle sounds of earlier songs as whispering, ghostly instrumental voices. I don't demean people. 'Synchronicity II' refracts the clanging chaos of 'Synchronicity I' into a brutal slice of industrial-suburban life, intercut with images of the Loch Ness monster rising from the slime like an avenging demon. Though this ultimately would not be the case, it would be their last tour until 1989. Even Sting is singing with more dramatic economy, retreating from his grandstand yells into richer, more forceful tones. They just get sucked in, WHOOOOOSH! 'Every Breath You Take', 'Wrapped Around Your Finger' were all about my life. I would guess that devotees of this extremely sussed trio will find plenty to amuse them, and indeed Sting has sown all sorts of cryptic little clues and messages throughout his songs which will probably have people out digging for bejewelled hares all over the British Isles (and quite possibly in the Sahara). It both confirms you as someone who has given them something, and at the same time it makes them work, like real art should. Like it's predecessor, 'Ghost In The Machine', the 'Synchronicity' album was recorded on Montserrat although writing for the album started as early as 1982 when Sting was staying in Jamaica. It is not a happy album. All you can hope to do is keep repeating it. Not essential, but definitely a worthwhile purchase for serious fans. That he sites this intriguing meditation in a sumptuous pop melody and sings it multi-tracked voices of chill purity is no more than a skilled writer/performer fulfilling his dues, but that he does it at all is remarkable. Throughout the show I explained that this is dance music, please don't sit down - stand up in the seat or just dance. "Doctor Jimmy", "Boris the Spider", "Love Ain't For Keeping", and "Squeeze Box" were reintroduced to the set on this leg after long absences. And in 'King Of Pain' Sting enters a realm he never dared before. Sting's brooding 'King Of Pain (which actually sports one of the LPs most attractive hooks) and 'Oh My God', with its heavy air of supplication, may well be autobiographical slips. It leaves a puzzling end to a most interesting album. 'Synchronicity' doesn't take the headlong rush into electronics implied by the title, but it does show The Police playing around even more than usual with guitar synthesisers and other effects. When I sat down with the band and discussed what we were going to tackle this was all I could write. We were out there fighting a war - and we won! Other songs occasionally played were: The band returned after a four-week break for the second leg of the tour, which began on November 27 at the Camping World Stadium, at that time known as the Tangerine Bowl, in Orlando, Florida. Fresh light is cast on 'Walking In Your Footsteps', intriguingly more open and rhythmic, and a ghostly 'Wrapped Around Your Finger'. There is something personal about 'Oh My God' and 'Every Breath You Take' that lonely chest-beating like 'Message In A Bottle' was never privy to. The "thought" Police have arrived. And you feel that, you feel your connection with it and therefore what you do, very naturally, is connect with it through your music and so you keep writing while you have your finger on this pulse. The first concert is a well-known radio broadcast from The Orpheum in Boston, one of the band's perennial strongholds. I think it's my function to vanish behind the handiwork, in a sense, and just let it stand on its own. I thought, 'Man, this is incredible, it's like Hades!' It's a grand design, but I'm not sure if it come off or not. Neither tune can match any of Sting's compositions either in style or output, but their inclusion here helps make the LP more balanced and democratic. If I was them that's how I would do it too. Synchronicity sets them right without bonding them closer. Such songs as 'De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da' and 'Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic' stood out like glowing gems, safely sealed off from Sting's darker reflections. 'Walking In Your Footsteps' is Sting's warning to the world of the evils of nuclear warfare, and even if the lyrics are a tad disappointing, the melody isn't. "I ultimately thought it sounded better that way. Not only is 'Synchronicity' The Police's best album, but it is probably one of the most socially relevant records in recent years. The principal songwriter and front person Sting proclaimed that we were nothing more but spirits in a material world and made a plea for all to rehumanise. That was brought out on the album cover, where my idea was for each of us to have a separate strip and have the freedom to photographically do whatever we as individuals wanted, without knowing what the other two planned. But as the focus narrows from the global to the personal on side two, the music becomes more delicate - even as the mood turns from suspicion to desperation to cynicism in 'Every Breath You Take', 'King Of Pain' and 'Wrapped Around Your Finger', a triptych of songs about the end of a marriage, presumably Sting's own. Eight of the 110 songs are his, and fully half of them are blatantly depressed - not particularly angry, but down and dejected. I feel that the old god who stood there and went through his act totally aloof of whether the audience was there or not is something that I'm against. The 12-panel fold-out booklet houses a series of black-and-white photos and some bare-bones liner notes. Each disc runs over 70 minutes and features 15 songs. "Rolling Stone, 9/83, On what his 'strip' on the cover of the album says about him..."I don't know. 'Oh My God' squirms and twists before succumbing to 'Mother', written by guitarist Andy Summers and 'Miss Gradenko', by drummer Stewart Copeland. "I think we'd become so refined as a group of musicians that we realised that the three instruments just playing solo and ensemble was perhaps the best way of doing it - and it just seemed to happen. Which of course is not their fault. It's like within the parameters of the music there are lots of accidents and lots of things ricocheting off each other. It's weird, as a writer, which I primarily regard myself as. The Police are much like Gods to their pop universe, not only in their worship rating but in their omnipotent attitude to their work. Arguably, the first disc is the most interesting as it captures the band in their first flushes of success.