Early in the fall of my grade 11 year, 1979-80, I went out on a Friday night to find the house across town in Truro where Håken (that year's exchange student from Sweden who played on my high-school soccer team with me) lived. We were meeting up to do some reasonable underage drinking and record listening. The nice lady he boarded with saw the "Support the Police" button my my army surplus coat and told me how nice it was that I was so civic minded. I explained it was a little different (as she would have if he had read the "White Dopes on Punk" one next to it) but didn't get far into it when I quickly realized that, though 16 like us, what Håken had landed was an apartment of his own. Being European, he was very much up on his drinks and records and he was the best player we had on our soccer team (we won one game that first year) so he was good to know. Having his own apartment made him gold.

One of the groups we listened to the most was The Police who put out five albums before Sting went solo. Yesterday, when hunting out the CD for The Darkness, and also picking up the new Sarah Harmer as well as the Robert Plant retrospective of his non-Zep work "Sixty-Six to Timbuktoo", I picked up the first four Police albums on reissued 25 year anniversary CDs for nine bucks each. [I am, by the way, quite pleased with the 233 Princess Street Sunrise Records location which always seems to have what I want for less than Amazon.]

So here I am, like Ian, thinking about what this music meant and means to me. For the most part, in terms of instrumentation, we were more interested in the guitar and syncopated drumming than Sting's contribution. It was dubbed "white reggae" which was fair enough for the first two albums but starts to get wonky when you try to figure out Zenyatta Mondatta (released Oct. 1980) or Ghosts in the Machine (released October 1981).    I don't know how many had the soundtrack to the 1983 movie Rumblefish - Amazon reviews here - by the drummer for the Police, Stewart Copland, but I did.   I also nicked the CKDU 45 of "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" for the not otherwise released b-side.  I guess I was a fan.   And why not?   The dual menace of nuclear war and impending computerization is pretty heavily layered in among all their work, Gorby was years off and Ronnie Ray Gun had the button.  Good stuff to dance to when you weren't listening to "Da, Da, Da" or Falco.   When Sting went solo where was definitely a feeling he had done a bit of a post-Jam Paul Weller and the Style Council years - gone a bit soft, a bit recorded in the south of France.    Bruce bought those albums.    I never did.