Day After Day: Driven to Tears

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Driven to Tears

When you think of the band The Police, most people think of the Synchronicity era when the trio was the biggest band in the world. Number 1 album, number 1 single, playing stadiums, winning Grammy awards. "Every Breath You Take" was everywhere, so much so that I grew sick of it. I heard it and several other songs so often on radio that I didn't even buy the album until decades later.

But for me, the peak era of The Police was 1980 (the band was only together from '77-'83). They had broken through the year before with their album Regatta de Blanc, which featured the hits "Message in a Bottle" and "Walking on the Moon." They were rock vets who cut their hair short and jumped into London's punk scene, but they brought such energy to their heady mix of rock, reggae and dub that you couldn't deny they were doing something new and exciting. They were labeled as "new wave," which fit as well as any other descriptor.

The fall of 1980 saw the release of their third studio album Zenyatta Mondatta. The lead single was "Don't Stand So Close to Me," a reggae-tinged banger about a teacher hooking up with a student. I remember buying the album on vinyl at the mall in Pickering, Ontario, for $4.99 and playing it non-stop. It still holds up as perhaps the best Police album and to me, the band was at their best on "Driven to Tears."

The song was never released as a single but got plenty of radio play. It was the first sign of Sting's political activism, expressing outrage at the excesses of the Western world while people starve elsewhere. The band's best musician was drummer Stewart Copeland, and his powerful yet sparse drumming drives this song forward. (Rush's drummer supreme Neil Peart credited Copeland with inspiring him to change his style.) Sting accompanies Copeland with an angry bass line and guitarist Andy Summers contributes a short but potent solo. Four decades later, the song has lost none of its power.

The album went to #1 in the UK, #5 in the U.S. A year later, Ghost in the Machine did even better thanks to the big hit "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" and then, well, you know about Synchronicity. After the massive Synchronicity tour, Sting decided he wanted to go solo and the band split up. I liked the first few Sting solo albums but then he started to get less interesting to me. Copeland and Summers each worked on different projects but nothing to compare to their old band. The Police reunited for a short tour in 2007-2008, but their dislike for each other (mainly Sting and Copeland) meant it wasn't going to be a long-term thing. Still for about six years there, and especially from 1978-80, they were the hottest thing going.