Review: Vinyl Reissue of Dantalian's Chariot's 'Chariot Rising'

Zoot Money's Big Roll band is one of those group's you read about a bit if you're into sixties British rock, but outside of the ephemeral live scene, their biggest contribution to rock was a certain young guitar-whiz named Andy Summers. Their music was fairly generic big-band British soul and blues in the vein of Manfred Mann, although Money's mildly hoarse soul shout was full of personality and Summers, of course, is no slouch when wielding an axe. 

Review: 'The Police: Around the World' Restored and Expanded Blu-ray

On the precipice of world domination, The Police embarked on a tour of all six populated continents with camera in hand in 1979/'80. When not blazing through numbers from their first three albums on stage, they were filming touristy skits involving Andy Summers sumo wrestling in Japan, Stewart Copeland arguing with a camel rider near the pyramids in Egypt, and Sting taking a fast-motion rickshaw ride in Hong Kong. The Police are often labeled as a new wave or punk-lite trio, but they clearly were a Monkees for the eighties. 

That's actually not entirely a joke and hardly an insult (faithful Psychobabble readers know I love The Monkees). The Police were heart-throb cute, had a bunch of exhilarating hits, made audiences crazy, liked to be on screen, and were incorrigibly silly and corny. All of these qualities are captured in the tremendously fun travelogue The Police: Around the World, which really does seem to use Bob Rafelson's "Monkees On Tour" episode as a template... though with a lot less sobriety. The doc's only moments of genuine off-stage sincerity seem to be when the guys lose themselves in a groovy raga jam (Andy plays sitar, Sting plucks tamboura, Stu taps the tabla) and when Sting expresses genuine horror at the sight a snake charmer feeding a live cobra to a mongoose. Around the World also captures The Police at a moment when they seem to actually enjoy each other's company, and that joy spills over to the stage where the band's musicianship admittedly outclasses The Monkees' by several kilometers. 

Review: The Police's 'Greatest Hits' Vinyl Half-Speed Remaster

The Police were one of the most reliable hit machines of the first half of the eighties. Sting churned out killer songs like "Don't Stand So Close to Me", "Spirits in the Material World" and "King of Pain". Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland kept his sappier tendencies in check and provided some of the most creative and off-kilter guitar and drum work (respectively) to adorn outrageously popular songs. All was right with the world until they broke up in a slow-fuse sonic boom of ego and acrimony at the height of their popularity. So The Police were no more, but they'd left behind five pretty damn perfect albums and a bushel of pretty damn perfect singles. It was all over but the greatest hits-ing.

Review: 'The Police: Every Little Thing'

The Police were probably the biggest band of the early eighties, yet their story is oddly ill served. There aren't a ton of books about The Police even though they have a completely unique story and enduring popularity. As told by Caroline & David Stafford in their new book, The Police: Every Little Thing, that story is one of overcoming odds. The great irony is that the odds The Police had to overcome was being traditionally good-looking industry insiders who wrote classically perfect songs, played extraordinarily well, and sold scads of records. Why were these odds? In a word: punk. Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland came up at a time when the British press and fellow artists were suspicious of anyone who played too well, did not exude the appropriate level of intensity, or behaved too nicely. Music listeners were less judgmental and The Police became huge stars despite lacking punk cred. That's because they worked so hard and made strong records with such an individual blend styles. 

Any band with The Police's output would be worthy of close examination, but the worth of Every Little Thing runs deeper than Synchronicity being a great album that shifted 8 million units in the U.S. alone. The band's background is downright bizarre. Drummer Stewart Copeland's dad Miles was in the CIA, helped orchestrate a coup in Syria, and was apparently a bit of a sociopath. His older brother Miles was a frothing capitalist determined to make his way managing a major rock band. Summers was a thirty-something leftover of the psychedelic age expected to sell himself as a punk. Sting was a Sting (see: "Fields of Gold") expected to sell himself as a punk. There was no friendship among the guys, just a series of power struggles and compromises that resulted in some spectacular records.

So The Police: Every Little Thing would be necessary if it did nothing more than fill a gap in rock and roll history and tell a fascinating story. It also happens to be lyrically written and really funny (David is a former writing partner of Young Ones "socialist comedian" Alexei Sayle)-- a definitive biography of a definitive band worth the wait.

Vinyl Remasters of 4 Police Albums

Perhaps no late seventies/eighties band was as successful and brilliant in equal proportion as The Police. Each of their five albums is a must-own, almost completely unburdened by sub-par material, and each one displays a different facet of this most complex of power trios. Their debut Outlandos d’Amour saw Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland attempting to fool the punks into believing they were kindred spirits, failing at that, and producing a slick yet electrifying brew of speed rock, reggae, and pop. Their next two albums are their most similar as Regatta de Blanc and Zenyatta Mondatta lose the punk gestures to focus more on their tasty brand of poppy white (Blanc) reggae (Regatta—they were just as handy with a pretentious album title as they were with their instruments). 

1,100th Post: Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Songs of the 1980s!

Like, gag me with a spoonful of Mr. T cereal, my tubular valley Smurf! I’ve totally posted, like, 100 posts here on Psychobabble since my 1000^th post when I ran down my personal favorite 100 songs of the seventies. That means it’s, like, time to do the same for my 100 faves of the eighties! It’s gonna be non-stop Leon Neon references, Pee Wee Herman quotes, and close ups of Madonna’s navel as I bag your face through a massive mass of mint tunes! Where’s the beef? Probably somewhere in my 1,100^th post, Poindexter! So take a chill pill and bang your head to Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Songs of the 1980s! Totally!

100. “Nasty” by The Damned

“Oh, you’ve got a video?” Only a total nerd would have answered this question in the negative in the eighties. There was nothing more awesome than going to the video store to rent some shitty movie from the horror section, but if you were English, that awesomeness hit a serious snag when professional prig Mary Whitehouse spearheaded the prosecution of 39 “video nasties,” including Flesh for Frankenstein, Driller Killer, and Cannibal Holocaust. As always, it was Rat Scabies, Dave Vanian, and the aptly named Captain Sensible who called for a little rationality amidst the witchhunt. They did so with three minutes of high-speed punk professing their romance with video nasties. That they recorded the track specifically for one of the best episodes of “The Young Ones” makes “Nasty” all the awesomer.

99. “Hungry for You (J’aurais Toujours Faim de Toi)” by The Police

One of the neat surprises of Ghosts in the Machine is how proficient Sting is with a horn in his mouth. Throughout the record, he fattens out the core Police sound with overdubbed saxophone arrangements. The chart on “Hungry for You (J’aurais Toujours Faim de Toi)” is particularly simple, but those two note blasts say more than a million over-bloated eighties saxophone solos. The songs message—mostly delivered in French—is equally fat-free: “No matter what I do, I’m still hungry for you.” That there is real lust.

98. “Automatic” by Prince and the Revolution

“Automatic” pretends to be a message of love, but I have a feeling it has something more akin to “Hungry for You” on its dirty mind. Like that Police song, “Automatic” derives its power from a mesmerizing beat, but it also builds a tangible world: the seventh circle of sex hell. Prince’s vision is kind of disturbing because of the explicit threats (“I’m going 2 have 2 torture U now”) and the robotic quality of it all (“A-u-t-o-matic”). Sexy, disturbing, futuristic, uncompromising. Prince in a nutshell.

97. “Kiss Off” by The Violent Femmes