"All for one, one for all? Fuck that. That's very limited. I'm out for myself and they know it!"
By December 1980, The Police were on top of the world. Released two months earlier, their second album, Zenyatta Mondatta, debuted at number one in the UK, with Don't Stand So Close To Me, their third UK number one single, becoming the biggest-selling single of the year. In America, they were set to headline New York's legendary Madison Square Garden, in Australia the album had also topped the nation charts. But if this kind of success sounds like the dream for any young band, it was accompanied by tensions which threatened to tear the band apart. Talking to Classic Rock in 2023, guitarist Andy Summers stated that by this point, he had decided that he was "working with two total arseholes."
The quote at the beginning of this article came from Sting, the band's vocalist/bassist speaking to English music writer Phil Sutcliffe for The Police: L'Historia Bandido, a band biography he was working upon with fellow writer Hugh Fielder. "As long as the group is useful for my career I'll stay," Sting added. "When it isn't I'll drop it like a stone... I do sometimes think, I want this to end."
"The artist in me is looking for death, it's looking for destruction."
