Too Much Too Soon
© Greg Camden
Strapped to the wing with the engine running[. . .]
Tied to a chair and the bomb is ticking
The situation was not of your picking
You say that this wasn't in your plan
Don't mess around with the demolition man
—"Demolition Man," 1981
As Sting was quoted in 1983's The Police Chronicles: When we were making our third album, Zenyattà Mondatta, we kept getting phone calls from people in the music industry. We became very aware of the whole commercial industry at this time. This was very profound, very strong pressure. It was the first time we'd really felt it [. . .] from outside, that is. I mean, obviously, when you make a record, you want it to be a hit. [. . .] This became different. The industry pressure--you could feel it during conversations with people in the industry. You'd hear about retailers waiting for your album to come out. So you'd be in the middle of making an album and you know about all these people waiting for it--including the record buyers, of course--and you started hoping that people were going to enjoy it. It's a terrible pressure to have. [. . .] It means you're becoming public property.
Added to this pressure was the fact that The Police had given themselves only from July 7 to August 7 to record the album--and even that small amount of time would be interrupted for almost a week to fulfill two prior commitments (to rock festivals); and there would be no room to spare: The Police's first show of their next tour was an August 9 festival in Belgium. The stress was too much, and the sessions were host to a great deal of infighting, both within and without the band: Stewart and Sting had become, quite literally, like two battling brothers (Sting had once suffered a cracked rib in a dressing-room brawl); and producer Nigel Gray quit in the midst of recording due to a monetary dispute. As Sting remembers: "It was a very difficult time--there was a sense of urgency and quite a lot of drugs. None of us had to go into rehab or anything, it didn't get too bad, we were just experimenting. But we should have been concentrating on the music. We didn't like each other much at this point. There were three big egos pulling in different directions. I started to be very ruthless and very cruel in order to get the songs done."
