Listen as the Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’ Comes to Life

The Police‘s smash hit “Every Breath You Take” came to Sting in a rush of inspiration while visiting James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye resort in Jamaica. “I woke up in the middle of the night with that line – ‘every breath you take, every move you make, I’ll be watching you‘ – in my head,” Sting recalled in 1993. “I sat down at the piano and had written it in half an hour.”

His initial demo of the song, which you can hear below, found Sting working alone at a Hammond organ in October 1982 inside London’s Utopia Studios. “The tune itself is generic, an aggregate of hundreds of others, but the words are interesting,” he later told The Independent. “It sounds like a comforting love song, but I didn’t realize how sinister it is. I think I was thinking of Big Brother, surveillance and control.”

“Every Breath You Take” proved to be anything but generic to record buyers. The Police’s finished recording of the song became the biggest hit in both America and the U.K. in 1983, topping the Billboard singles chart for eight weeks.

READ MORE: Top 10 Police Songs

But the sessions to transform Sting’s demo into a fully formed song, held at AIR Studios in the balmy Caribbean island of Montserrat, were nothing short of excruciating.

“This was a difficult one to get, because Sting wrote a very good song but there was no guitar on it,” guitarist Andy Summers later told Revolver magazine. “He had this Hammond organ thing that sounded like Billy Preston. It certainly didn’t sound like the Police with that big, rolling synthesizer part. We spent about six weeks recording just the snare drums and the bass. It was a simple, classic chord sequence but we couldn’t agree how to do it.”

Watch the Original ‘Every Breath You Take’ Video

Endless Retakes Before a Controversy

Then there was the issue of Stewart Copeland‘s slippery drumsticks. “The actual recording started out with loads of takes of the backing track, because Stewart usually screwed up,” producer Hugh Padgham told Sound on Sound.

“It was hot, there was no air conditioning where he was playing and he’d be really sweaty,” he added, “so sometimes the sticks would fly out of his hands when it all got very exciting. In fact, I even gaffered the sticks to his hands and the headphones onto his head to keep them in place.”

Sting would often demand retakes if there was something so small as a drum fill that he felt was out of place – but then grow restless with the process. “Remember, this was in the days before Pro Tools, when we’d have to use a razor blade,” Padgham said, “and even though it was Sting who’d generally be involved in those decisions, it would still be hard to keep his interest. He’s not one to show patience or any interest in studio techniques.”

Summers finally had a breakthrough moment. “I’d been making an album with Robert Fripp, and I was kind of experimenting with playing [Hungarian composer Bela] Bartok violin duets and had worked up a new riff,” he told Revolver. “When Sting said ‘go and make it your own,’ I went and stuck that lick on it – and immediately we knew we had something special.”

Disagreements over songwriting credit would follow, since Summers’ guitar part became so integral. The solo demo, issued as part of an upcoming box-set reissue of 1983’s Synchronicity, makes clear what was still missing.