Music From The Dark Side

     The Police were a highly unusual band. Their songs, the majority of which were written by bassist / vocalist Gordon Sumner (a.k.a. Sting), ranged from moody to black as night. Yet despite that dark and often cutting edge, they were immensely popular during the Seventies and early Eighties. They seemed to have tapped into an undercurrent of British society that eluded the lighter music prevalent in those years.

     The Police’s final record, its 1983 release Synchronicity, was a culmination of the dark, sometimes apocalyptic themes in their songs. The following track, the standout of the record, strikes me as unsurpassable of its kind. The listener is taken to a scene that depicts several kinds of stress and degradation – a typical middle-class British family – in a land that’s barely holding on to its forebears’ bequests of peace and progress.

Another suburban family morning
Grandmother screaming at the wall
We have to shout above the din of our Rice Crispies
We can’t hear anything at all
Mother chants her litany of boredom and frustration
But we know all her suicides are fake
Daddy only stares into the distance
There’s only so much more that he can take

Many miles away
Something crawls from the slime
At the bottom of a dark Scottish lake

Another industrial ugly morning
The factory belches filth into the sky
He walks unhindered through the picket lines today
He doesn’t think to wonder why
The secretaries pout and preen like cheap tarts in a red light street
But all he ever thinks to do is watch
And every single meeting with his so-called superior
Is a humiliating kick in the crotch

Many miles away
Something crawls to the surface
Of a dark Scottish loch

Another working day has ended
Only the rush hour hell to face
Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes
Contestants in a suicidal race
Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance
He knows that something somewhere has to break
He sees the family home now looming in the headlights
The pain upstairs that makes his eyeballs ache

Many miles away
There’s a shadow on the door
Of a cottage on the shore
Of a dark Scottish lake
Many miles away… many miles away…