Driven to Tears

The Zoo Crew has got "Driven to Tears" on the turntable right now, The Police off Zenyatta Mondatta, and if you Zoo Freaks have been riding with us any length of time you already know this one does not sit still. It is the kind of record that makes a room go quiet for a second, then the bass and the drums lock in and everybody leans forward. We spin it because it still means something, not because it is safe. You can hear the whole set, and a whole lot of other deep cuts that never made the commercial playlists, over at THE ZOO.

Sting has said, more than once, that the first two Police albums were mostly about him. On Zenyatta Mondatta he turned the camera outward. In the liner notes for Message in a Box he put it plain: he could not have written "Driven to Tears" or "When the World Is Running Down" three years earlier. He had not seen the world yet, and he was still too interested in himself. By the time the band was circling the globe, the pictures of hunger and neglect had gotten under his skin. Songfacts and the old interviews line up on the spark. He wrote the lyric after watching television reports of starving children. He has called it a heartfelt reaction to seeing poverty first hand, and he has said it is probably the only song he ever wrote on the road, worked out in a motel room on the second American tour. The question in the chorus is not a slogan. It is a shrug that will not let itself off the hook. How can you say you are not responsible? What is the reaction supposed to be when you are confronted by the latest atrocity? All you are left with, he told people later, is tears.

Andy Summers, talking years afterward about the album, kept the verdict short and stuck to it. There is a strong political message in the lyrics that has held up through the years, and it is fun to play. That second part matters. The Police were never a lecture band. Stewart Copeland's drums push the thing forward like a bike that has just caught the green light, Summers' guitar goes angular and a little mean in the breaks, and Sting's bass sits under the vocal like a low warning. The line everybody remembers, "too many cameras and not enough food, this is what we've seen," was already on the album. It was not a rewrite for the benefit show. A few people on the air at the time got that wrong. Sting took the song to Live Aid at Wembley in 1985, which fit the day better than almost anything else on the bill, and he brought it back for Live 8 in London in 2005. In Lyrics by Sting he said it felt as relevant then as it had a quarter century earlier. Biafra, Darfur, the same pictures, the same question of whether anybody is still able to feel them.

The album around it was made under a clock. The band had about four weeks at Wisseloord in the Netherlands with Nigel Gray, the same producer who had helped them on Reggatta de Blanc, and they finished the record the day they left for another tour. Sting later called Zenyatta Mondatta their most flawed album and, in the same breath, the one that made them big. It sat at number one in Britain for four weeks and reached the American top five. The singles were "Don't Stand So Close to Me" and "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da," but the deep cut that the players still talk about is this one. Miles Copeland, Stewart's brother and the band's manager, cooked up the title the same way he had cooked up the first two: a worldly sounding word game that does not quite mean anything and somehow means the tour. Stewart has said Mondatta pointed at the world they were circling, and Zenyatta carried a little Zen and an echo of names like Kenyatta. Jerry Moss of A&M later named a champion racehorse Zenyatta after the record. That is a long way from a motel television and a lyric about cameras.

None of that arrives out of nowhere. The Police started as three people who should not have fit and did anyway. Stewart Copeland was an American drummer touring Britain with the prog band Curved Air when he walked into a show in Newcastle in late 1976 and saw a local jazz-rock outfit called Last Exit. The singer and bass player was Gordon Sumner, a former schoolteacher and sometime ditch digger who had picked up the nickname Sting from a black-and-yellow striped sweater that made him look like a wasp. Copeland wrote in his diaries that he knew the date because he wrote everything down. He thought the band was good and the singer was the meal ticket. They traded numbers. Punk was coming on hard. Copeland already had a band name and a manifesto. He talked Sting into moving to London.

Sting arrived in January 1977 and they jammed the same day. Corsican guitarist Henry Padovani made them a trio, and they played their first gig that spring, short hair, collars up, trying to pass for punks in rooms that could smell a ringer. They even turned up bleached blonde in a chewing-gum commercial, which the real punks did not love. Andy Summers, already a veteran of the Animals, Zoot Money, and Soft Machine circles, saw them and wanted in. He told The Guardian there was fantastic potential in Sting and Stewart and that he had always wanted a three-piece. Sting wanted him too. Summers joined on the condition that it stay a trio, so Padovani was out. Miles Copeland heard "Roxanne," borrowed the money for a proper session, and got them onto A&M. The first album was cut cheap, secondhand tape, egg boxes on the walls. By Zenyatta Mondatta they were tight enough to cut a protest song that still swings, then walk out the door onto a plane.

If you want the band's own shelf, the official site is thepolice.com, where the studio history still names Zenyatta Mondatta among the records. The official Facebook is The Police, the official Instagram is @thepolicebandofficial, and the official account on X is @ThePoliceBand, which has been marking the album's anniversary with the old tour photos. Fans keep their own rooms going too. The Police Fan Page group lives at facebook.com/groups/1205659936220690, and the fan community page is The Police Fansite. Both of them stay busy with photos, tour stories, and arguments about which deep cut should have been the single.

That is the stretch we like on this station. A schoolteacher from Wallsend, a drummer who kept diaries, a guitarist who had already done the British Invasion, four rushed weeks in a Dutch studio, and a song that still asks what you do when the pictures get bad. We will let it ride out, then come back with something else from the stacks. Stay with the Zoo Freaks.