The AT40 Blog/June 15, 1985: Sting's "answer" to his biggest hit

If one ever listens to a Sting song, you know he can get pretty deep. The songs he wrote as a member of his band, The Police, are prime examples. Sometimes, Wikipedia can be your best friend in deciphering his lyrics, most notably the 1984 Top 10 hit, "Wrapped Around Your Finger," the band's last Top 40 hit.

So when he wrote the words and music to what would be his first Top 40 hit, "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free," he was looking at the complete antithesis of the biggest hit he ever wrote and recorded, "Every Breath You Take," by his  band two years earlier.

Where "Every Breath You Take," the No. 1 song of 1983, was about possession and always being there, his solo debut single was the complete opposite, according to the singer-bass player.

"This song was as much a hymn to my newfound freedom as it was an antidote to the brooding issues of control and surveillance that haunted 'Every Breath You Take,'" Sting said in describing that debut solo hit. "Perhaps the highest compliment you can pay to a partner is 'I don't own you -- you're free.' If you were to try to possess them in the obvious way, you could never appreciate them in the way that really counts. There are too many prisons in the world already."

With The Police "on hiatus" in 1984, Sting (real name Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner) began work on his studio album, "The Dream Of The Blue Turtles." But unlike his previous albums with bandmates Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, Sting went a totally different direction. He changed his musical style and brought in jazz artists he knew that could make an impact.

Darryl Jones: The Chicago-based bass player was 22 and highly touted as a member of the legendary Miles Davis' touring band when Sting recruited him. Jones would eventually take over for the retired Bill Wyman as the Rolling Stones' bass player in 1993.

Kenny Kirkland: By the time Sting brought him in, the New York native and keyboardist was 28 years old and had made a name for himself in jazz with Polish fusion violinist Michael Urbaniak, Eastern European jazz star Miroslav Vitous and working on albums with horn player Wynton Marsalis.

Omar Hakim: The drummer had worked with vibraphonist Mike Mainieri and singer Carly Simon. He became a member of the group Weather Report and soon after that, became a featured session musician on the British band Dire Strait's biggest album, "Brothers In Arms."

Branford Marsalis: Turning 24 during the session, the horn player and older brother of Wynton Marsalis had played with Art Blakely's Jazz Messengers as well as Lionel Hampton and Clark Terry. Ultimately, the New Orleans artist would be Jay Leno's choice as his first bandleader on The Tonight Show when he took over for Johnny Carson in 1992.

Add backing vocalists Janice Pendarvis and Dolette McDonald, and Sting had his new "band" for the album. He and that band flew to Barbados to record the album at the same recording studio, Blue Wave Studio, that Eddy Grant recorded his 1982 breakthrough album, "Killer On The Rampage," which featured his 1983 summer smash, "Electric Avenue," which, ironically, was kept out of the No. 1 spot that summer by "Every Breath You Take." Grant actually added congas on a cut from the album, "Consider Me Gone."

After arriving on the island, Sting took a nap and it was in that nap he dreamed the title of the project. According to Sting in his Lyrics By Sting, "I dreamed I was sitting in the walled garden behind my house in Hampstead, under a lilac tree on a well-manicured lawn, surrounded by beautiful rosebushes. Suddenly the bricks from the wall exploded into the garden and I turned to see the head of an enormous turtle emerging from the darkness, followed by four or five others. They were not only the size of a man, they were also blue and had an air of being immensely cool, like hepcats, insouciant and fearless. They didn't harm me, but with an almost casual violence commenced to destroy my genteel English garden, digging up the lawn with their claws, chomping at the rosebushes, bulldozing the lilac tree. Total mayhem: I woke up to the sound of Branford in the room upstairs, riffing wildly on the tenor sax, followed by his unmistakable laughter."

Songs on "The Dream Of The Blue Turtles" had various subjects -- love, such as "Love Is The Seventh Wave," the similarities between the devastation of youth in World War I and heroin addiction in a current-day London in "Children's Crusade," a miners' strike in his native United Kingdom on "We Work The Black Seam," and an uncertain future that Sting could explain as people are more loving than not in the powerful, Cold War anthem, "Russians."

But the first single "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free," was a "follow-up" to his old band's biggest hit ever. In the two years between making the album "Synchronicity" with his band mates and "The Dream Of The Blue Turtles," Sting's perspective had changed.

"I've been through periods of wanting to be possessed, by my parents, my girlfriends. I don't want to be owned anymore," he told Rolling Stone in 1985.

While it opened a door into that issue for the star, there was more to what he was writing.

"In relationships I feel very susceptible to entrapment," Sting told Musician magazine in 1985. "I see the bars go up and I try and escape, usually in the most violent and vicious way. I've destroyed one person totally; I've left people in a bloody pulp as I've felt the bars go up. If anything, 'Set Them Free' is a kind of warning. I'm not really into the idea of permanent relationships. I find that phony, shallow and unrealistic in many ways. That's not to say the relationships I have are in any way inferior. I think they're more intense because of that belief."

Featuring Marsalis' saxophone and the keyboards of Kirkland, "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" was one of the first songs the band recorded for the album.

When A&M Records executives heard the tracks from the album, they mostly agreed that song should be the leadoff single for Sting, partly because it was a departure from what the artist had done in the band. Though the transformation may have started happening with the last two Police albums, "Ghosts In The Machine" and "Synchronicity," A&M felt the time was right to show another side of Sting's artistry.

"If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" made its Hot 100 debut at an impressive No. 44 on June 8, 1985, showing that music fans were ready for something new from Sting, especially with it being a solo effort. One week later on June 15, 1985, the song debuted in the Top 40 at No. 33, the highest Top 40 debut hit of the week.

From there, the song bounced up to No. 26 then into the Top 20 at No. 19. One week later, it was No. 13 and then No. 11 the week after that. Then on July 20, 1985, "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" became Sting's first Top 10 solo hit, entering at No. 7. The next week, he was in the Top 5 at No. 5, then into the Top 3 at No. 3 on August 3, 1985. It held at No. 3 for two weeks before finally dropping to No. 4 by August 17, 1985 and heading back the other way. The hit would spend 18 weeks on the Hot 100.

To promote the first single, the band filmed a music video with British music video wizards Kevin Godley and Lol Crème, who did the landmark dark video for "Every Breath You Take." For it, they filmed each member of the band separately, then put them on a sound stage, some members in the foreground, others in a faded background, a cool visual for those who understood and others who thought Godley and Crème had gone completely daft.

Let's just say the music video is "beautifully flawed."

Sting began to earn a new audience away from his band who many first thought when they heard their songs in the late 1970s was on the borderline of punk. Then again, all good musical acts find ways to grow and share new music with others.

And the Brit proved to be a winner with "The Dream Of The Blue Turtles" and that debut hit. Sting earned Grammy Award nominations for Best Male Vocal Performance and Album of the Year, losing in both cases to good friend Phil Collins and his "No Jacket Required" album.

Three other songs from "The Dream" would become Top 40 hits with "Fortress Around Your Heart," which sounded more like a jazz track than the debut single, hitting the Top 10 and peaking at No. 8. "Love Is The Seventh Wave" and "Russians," the eerie track that Sting would open the 1986 Grammy Awards with, would both be Top 20 hits.

More importantly, the debut album's success gave Sting a chance to broaden his horizons with his next few albums, "... Nothing Like The Sun," "The Soul Cages," and "Ten Summoner's Tales." In 2000, Sting hit the Top 20 with "Desert Rose," a world music hit featuring Algierian singer Cheb Mami.

These days, Sting is looked upon as a star on the world stage with a more sophisticated sound and one totally different from his earlier
days as a member of The Police.

And the song that he set his lover "free" as a "follow-up" to 1983 No. 1 hit with The Police got the ball rolling during the summer of 1985.

Being deep does have its benefits.