Police classic Andy Summers called it “a hackneyed pop song”

The comfort of such an immensely accessible love song and its underlying oddities have not gone unnoticed, especially from the perspective of Sting, who admitted he didn’t realise at the time how “ominous” the words sounded. “I’ll be watching you” is enough to make anyone uneasy, but somehow it manages to do so in this particular register under the guise of romance.

Another feature that made the song an instant hit was perhaps its simplification. It follows a simple chord progression that is in no way difficult to listen to. “I woke up in the middle of the night with that line in my head, sat down at the piano and had it written in half an hour,” Sting recalled. “The melody itself is generic, a collection of hundreds of others, but the lyrics are interesting. It sounds like a comforting love song.”

During the recording of the song, the band had a lot of trouble keeping together, but after a desperate visit to fifth Beatle George Martin, they rekindled their magic and returned to the studio to record the song. Maybe that’s why it became what it is, but for Andy Summers, it all became much more organic when he went into the studio and followed his gut, even if he wasn’t entirely convinced he liked the song.

“I didn’t like it,” Summers explained. He continued, “I always thought, ‘It’s a cheesy pop song.’ I was more into Thelonious Monk, but (Sting) said, ‘Go ahead and make it your own.’ So I tried it once and (plays ‘Every Breath You Take’ riff). Once I played that guitar line, that was it. It went straight to number one.”

In the moments before recording this particular song, it seemed like the odds were stacked against them creating something that would add a sparkling elegance to their final album, but here it certainly worked. Given the multitude of hits from 1983, “Every Breath You Take” confirmed The Police’s enduring claim to the genre.

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