An Arresting New Development
© Greg Camden
—"Bring on the Night," 1979
As Stewart Copeland recalled of his first experience of Sting in the September 1979 issue of Melody Maker: It was a terrible gig. The band was a sort of sophisto Newcastle Chick Corea affair. Everybody was in their mid-thirties and balding. And the numbers were all seven minutes long and very intense. [. . .] It was absolutely, incredibly awful. But they went down a storm. Just because of Sting. Because of his raps with the audience. Because of his singing. Because of his presence. The group was dire. They'd do these really jazzy swishes on the piano or the cymbals. . . . But Sting had then what he has now. This fantastic presence. It was really pretty obvious that he had enormous potential.
Sting had already made plans to move to London, wife and baby in tow, to increase Last Exit's chances of making it big when Stewart Copeland got in touch with him and chatted him up about the project Stewart had in mind. For his part, Sting had given some thought to doing something different than the jazz-influenced music which Last Exit performed. "I'd reached a cul-de-sac in my musical advancement," Sting said in 1981 of his feelings about Last Exit when Copeland pitched Sting joining up with him. One of the things that put him in this frame of mind was the Sex Pistols, the startlingly rebellious punk group which in 1976 was in and of itself a world-changing phenomenon. (So controversial was the Sex Pistols that even though their single "God Save the Queen" was banned in England, it went straight to number one—and the English pop charts featured a blank spot as England's best-selling single.) According to Sting, "they were destroying something which had held me back. I was much older, a much more sophisticated musician and a more mellow person than Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious, but I could relate to that anti-establishment feeling. The energy and aggression—hatred!" And so, when Sting did move to London on January 23, 1977, Copeland had found a guitarist, Henri Padovani, to bring to life the band that had been percolating in Copeland's mind for a good while. The Police had been born.
