26th July 2024 sees the global reissue of The Police ‘Synchronicity’, released in multiple formats, including a 6-disc Limited Edition Deluxe Boxset containing 55 previously unreleased tracks, new liner notes and interviews, rare archive memorabilia and unseen photographs. It’s a treasure trove for Police fans.

Synchronicity hit No.1 around the world, selling over 15 million globally (8.5 million sales of which were from the US alone). The No.1 hit single ‘Every Breath You Take’ would go on to be the most played song in radio history, with more than 15 million plays.

The critical reception for Synchronicity was no less impressive: the album received five Grammy Award nominations in 1984 and won three (Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, Song of the Year (‘Every Breath You Take’) and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal). The album also received press acclaim and has since appeared in many lists, including #159 in Rolling Stone Magazine’s Greatest 500 Albums of All Time.

This reissue has been three years in the making, created with the band’s involvement and endorsement. The accompanying 62-page boxset booklet contains extensive new liner notes written by acclaimed music journalist Jason Draper, who details the conception and infamous birth of arguably The Police’s masterpiece.

Over forty years on, all three members of the band continue to mark the legacy of The Police: Stewart Copeland published his Police Diaries and toured the world with his Police Deranged concerts. In October and November Stewart will perform across the UK with his new spoken-word show Have I said Too Much?; Andy Summers has published several photography books focusing on the Police era. He is currently touring his Cracked Lens + A Missing String show across the US; and Sting continues to tour extensively: his current US and European Tour runs throughout 2024 and features many Police songs among his solo work.

Review from Salon by Kenneth Womack

Police's "Synchronicity" 40th anniversary deluxe box set pops with energy - If you were in earshot of a radio at the time, “Every Breath You Take” was embedded in your daily soundtrack...

Online prognosticator Rick Beato recently opined that in 2100, acts like the Beatles, Nirvana, Queen, and, yes, the Police will still be in heavy rotation when it comes to celebrating the rock era. Beato makes a solid, data-supported case. But as a college professor who teaches popular music, I have observed that today’s students seem just as besotted, if not more so, with Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.

So will the Police, those purveyors of white reggae with just five studio albums to their name, really ply their way into the next century? The new deluxe box set for "Synchronicity," the band’s megaselling 1983 LP, certainly makes a strong case of its own. Back in the day, the Grammy-winning album was propelled by a quartet of hit singles in “Every Breath You Take,” “King of Pain,” “Wrapped Around Your Finger” and “Synchronicity II.” If you were in earshot of a radio at the time, “Every Breath You Take” was embedded in your daily soundtrack.

As it happened, it was a minor miracle that the Police reunited at all to create "Synchronicity." The band had long been plagued by interpersonal rancor — lead singer Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland were the principal combatants. But the results speak for themselves, with the group abandoning its reggae roots for an album that brims with the atmospherics, jazz hues and world music that would characterize Sting’s solo career.

I am delighted to report that the deluxe edition of "Synchronicity" will be a joy for older fans and newly minted Police aficionados alike. I have long been dissatisfied with the original digital versions of the LP, which often sounded muted. The new version, remastered from the original tapes, outpaces earlier editions in every respect. The album absolutely pops with energy.

And folks who enjoy generous helpings of ancillary material will not be disappointed. The super deluxe version not only includes the remastered album, but numerous outtakes and demo recordings that amount to some 84 tracks. Listening to the various takes of “Synchronicity II” as it snakes its way through the production process is worth the price of admission in and of itself. You can literally follow along as new layers of terror and intrigue accrue as Sting relates his mysterious tale about the primordial slime that gathers in the heart of “a dark Scottish lake.”

Will music lovers still be seeking out the Police in droves in 2100? I honestly haven’t got a clue. Predicting the multitudinous sociocultural shifts that are bound to occur between now and then is a fool’s errand. But I know this: as long as humans have ears and access to the world’s digitized back catalog, the Police will find devoted adherents.

Review from Mojo by Tom Doyle

The Police Synchronicity Review: “A weird mainstream record by an altogether underrated group.”

Vastly expanded reissue charts the making of the group’s highly fractious and hugely successful final album.

December 1982 and out there in the wider world, The Police were fast becoming the biggest band on the planet: a string of international hits, two US Top 5 and three UK Number 1 albums, a couple of Grammys, a Brit, fan adulation, the lot. Inside AIR Studios on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, however, as they set about making their fifth album, bitterness and resentment hung heavy in the air between the three members of the group.

The main source of disagreement was, of course, creative control. When singer/bassist Gordon ‘Sting’ Sumner and drummer Stewart Copeland had joined forces in early 1977 and drafted in guitarist Andy Summers later that year (replacing original guitarist Henry Padovani), the group’s frontman was a novice relative to his bandmates: Copeland had spent a couple of years in English proggers Curved Air; Summers was a veteran of tours and sessions with everyone from Soft Machine to Neil Sedaka. As the chief songwriter and sole hitmaker, though, Sting’s inherent confidence had grown and grown, and he now insisted on absolutely calling the shots in the studio.

AIR may have been in an idyllic setting, but as Copeland tells MOJO today, “we soon turned it into a living hell”. The Police had used the studio two years previously for the recording of their fourth LP, Ghost In The Machine, co-producing with Hugh Padgham (Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins) and this time around employed the same set-up: Sting in the control room, Summers in the live room, and Copeland with his kit in the wooden-walled dining room of an adjacent building. The goal was sonic isolation, but at the start of the sessions for Synchronicity, the arrangement only served to physically reinforce the intra-band divisions.

The first serious crack appeared when the trio were working up one of Sting’s new songs, Every Breath You Take, from the singer’s solo demo. He and the drummer argued over the rhythmic direction and an almighty ruckus ensued. Suddenly, it looked as if a fifth Police LP was unachievable and that the sessions were off.

A peace-making summit was hastily negotiated. The band’s manager, Miles Copeland (the drummer’s eldest brother), pointed out that AIR’s owner, George Martin, was on the island and suggested they should ask him to oversee the sessions. Summers was duly dispatched to Martin’s house through what he now remembers as “the dense and intense jungles of Montserrat”. The sage, laid-back producer politely declined to get involved but said, “I’m sure you can work it out.” The guitarist returned to the studio, related this simple, contemplative advice; the others agreed, and the tape rolled again.

The beat for Every Breath You Take was pieced together element by element, losing Copeland’s virtuosic drumming but resulting in a metronomic, almost Kraftwerk-like precision. It’s one of the tracks whose development, from demo through studio rehearsal, is charted in this six-disc reissue of the group’s most successful, and final LP.

If The Police were never cool (see Sting’s lyrical pretentions, Jamaican vocal inflections and unabashed self-love), in terms of their constituent parts they were dazzlingly inventive musicians who conspired to make a series of singles – and The Police were always essentially a singles band – which were enormous, era-defining hits, but that in retrospect are striking in their artfulness. The sparse, haunting dub of Walking On The Moon, for one, now sounds like a deeply strange record to reach UK Number 1.

Here, the 36 unreleased tracks (albeit including alternate or instrumental versions of the LP cuts) highlight the outside influences that each brought to the table. Summers had just made an album, 1982’s I Advance Masked, with Robert Fripp, and his lead vocal on Mother – boldly tracklisted midway through side one – involves a manic, screaming performance that sounds as if he’s auditioning to be Adrian Belew’s replacement in (the similarly troubled) King Crimson. Copeland contributed the tumbling Afrobeat of Miss Gradenko to the finished record, while his unused contributions included I’m Blind (odd new wave) and the instrumental, organ-led Ragged Man, both recycled for his soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film Rumble Fish.

Elsewhere, Sting’s demos reveal someone attempting to break free of the confines of the three-piece band, whether with the aid of the synth arpeggios of Synchronicity I or the JBs-styled brass stabs of O My God. The album’s title was, meanwhile, inspired by Arthur Koestler’s 1972 book The Roots Of Coincidence, which partly explored the Jungian theory of synchronicity (involving a psychological state somehow causing a physical event). In the third single released from the album, the propulsive Synchronicity II, the singer painted a picture of a browbeaten man whose growing anxiety coincides with the faraway surfacing of the Loch Ness Monster. If it stretched Jung’s theory to snapping point, it was a towering rocker nonetheless.

While some of the tracks suffered from the thin, digital reverb-y aural trends of the era, Padgham was a good choice for co-producer, having engineered Peter Gabriel’s ground-breaking third LP, whose echoes could be heard in the marimba-led atmosphere of King Of Pain or the sequenced polyrhythms of Walking In Your Footsteps. The overall result was an art rock record that managed to yield four hits, including the brooding ballad Wrapped Around Your Finger, with its none-more-Sting, Greek mythology-referencing opening couplet, “You consider me the young apprentice/Caught between the Scylla and Charybdis.”

Following the album’s June 1983 release, in spite of the bad blood between them, The Police managed to complete a nine-month-long 1983-4 world tour, represented here by selected tracks from the Omni in Atlanta and a full show from the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum that showcase the band’s live vitality and slickness. Onstage at Shea Stadium in New York, Sting quipped “we’d like to thank The Beatles for lending us their stadium”, but mentally took the decision there and then to quit the band, likely hastened by a pre-gig fight with Copeland that left the latter with a fractured rib.

By the end of the Synchronicity campaign, The Police were indeed the most successful band in the world, with 10 million sales of the album and another three Grammys in the bag. Which is all the more remarkable really since, listening back to it now, it remains a pretty weird mainstream record, by an altogether underrated group.