Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic

Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew has got the needles down on a record that still feels like somebody cracked a window in a rainy room. The Police, off Ghost in the Machine, and the song is Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic. If you are riding with us over at THE ZOO, you already know we do not spin the obvious cuts just to fill a slot. This one earned the turntable. It is bright, it is a little lovesick, and the story behind it is messier than the chorus lets on.

Sting wrote the thing years before the band was a household name. In Lyrics By Sting he put the year at 1976, the year he moved to London with no money, no prospects, and nowhere to live. All he had was Stewart Copeland's phone number and a vague idea of starting a band. Punk was the weather that season. The Sex Pistols were shouting Anarchy in the U.K., and the clubs wanted something loud and mean. Sting showed up at the Zanzibar in Covent Garden and sang this very song at an audition. The man behind the desk told him they needed commercial hit songs, not this kind of stuff. He carried that rejection around for a long time, and then the same tune became the hit they had asked for.

He has told the softer part of the story more than once. In a basement flat in Bayswater there was a pretty blonde woman with green eyes, three doors down, and he did not have the nerve to speak to her for about two years. That woman was Trudie Styler. The line about a thousand rainy days, and a big enough umbrella that still leaves him getting wet, was about her. He later married her. The song sat in his pocket through the lean years, an acoustic ballad that did not sound like the band they were trying to be. An early pass even turned up on the Strontium 90 sessions with Mike Howlett, cut on a four-track in a loft in Acton with a cheap acoustic, a bass, an African drum, and whatever microphones were lying around.

The rhyme gave him trouble for years. Copeland likes to tell it. Sting was hunting for a word that would sit next to magic, and the only candidates he could find were tragic and pelagic. Pelagic means ocean-going. Copeland, in leather pants and a punk haircut, remembers sitting there pondering the difference between ocean-going fish and river-going fish while Sting wrestled the lyric. Tragic won. It does not quite fit a love song, which is part of why the line sticks. The chorus is sunshine. The verse is a guy who keeps resolving to call and never quite does.

By early 1981 the tune had a second life. Sting cut a new demo near Montreal with the French-Canadian keyboard player Jean Roussel. The piano part was already a hit before the rest of the band heard it. The record company heard it and wanted it on the album. Copeland has said you could have put that demo on the radio as it stood. The trouble was they were a band, and they wanted to Police-ify it. They tried it fast, slow, reggae, punk, even bossa nova. Andy Summers later said he felt disappointed by how much of Ghost in the Machine was handed down already finished. Copeland remembers a long war. Every time they moved away from the demo, the song stopped sounding like a hit. Sting told The Independent it sounded like a number one to him, the band still thought it was soft, and after a fair amount of hair-pulling he got them to play over the top of what he and Roussel had already built.

The drum take that made the record is the one Copeland cut while he was angry. He showed up in a morning grump, told them to roll the demo, and had Sting stand over the kit and flag the changes. One pass. Summers built the guitar against those drums. Sting redid the bass to the real kit instead of the drum machine. Roussel flew in and stayed on the track, the only outside player to land on a Police studio album. Summers thought he was pushy and that there was no room for a dozen piano parts. Copeland figured Roussel was just like the rest of them. Either way, the piano is the spine of the single you know.

They cut Ghost in the Machine between AIR Studios in Montserrat and Le Studio in Quebec, with Hugh Padgham producing. Sting has said he put this song on the record to leaven the sober tone of the rest of it. The album leans on saxophones, politics, and a colder keyboard color. This track is the open window. It was the first single almost everywhere except Britain, where Invisible Sun went out first. It hit number one in the U.K., Ireland, the Netherlands, and Canada, and number three on the American chart. In 1982 it took Best Pop Song at the Ivor Novello Awards. The video, shot by Derek Burbidge on Montserrat, caught the band climbing over the Trident desk in the studio. Copeland swears they were not trashing the console on purpose. They were fit, the board was long, and climbing over it was how you got from one fader to another. Half the studios in the world later claimed they owned that same wrecked Neve.

The man who wrote it did not start as a rock star. Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner was born in Wallsend, up by the shipyards in the northeast of England, in 1951. His mother was a hairdresser. His father was a milkman and a former fitter. Young Gordon helped on the milk round and got obsessed with an old Spanish guitar a family friend left behind. He went to St Cuthbert's Grammar School in Newcastle, slipped into Club A'Gogo to hear Cream and Manfred Mann, and taught himself to sing and play by spinning records at the wrong speed so he could catch the parts. He trained as a teacher, dug ditches, and played jazz-rock on the side with a band called Last Exit. A bandleader named Gordon Solomon looked at the black-and-yellow striped sweater and decided he looked like a wasp. The nickname Sting stuck. He has said his kids call him Sting and his mother calls him Sting, and that shouting Gordon in the street would not turn his head.

The band started with a phone number and a jam. In late 1976 Stewart Copeland, the American drummer out of Curved Air and the son of a CIA man, was passing through Newcastle and swapped numbers with the singer-bassist from Last Exit. Sting moved to London in January 1977 and looked Copeland up the day he arrived. They ran a short, loud set. Copeland wanted in on the punk rooms. Sting was less sure, but he could see the opening. They pulled in Corsican guitarist Henry Padovani, called themselves The Police, and played a debut at Alexander's in Newport that lasted about ten minutes. The first single, Fall Out, was cut at Pathway Studios for about a hundred and fifty pounds. They bleached their hair for a chewing-gum commercial and caught grief from the real punks for it. Andy Summers, a seasoned player who had already been through the Zoot Money and Soft Machine circles, sat in, then replaced Padovani on the condition the group stay a trio. From there the sound opened up. Reggae skank, jazz chords, pop hooks, three players who could actually play. By the time Ghost in the Machine arrived in 1981 they were already stars in Britain. This song is the one that pushed them the rest of the way into American living rooms.

Sting has quoted the rainy-day lines in other songs since, including O My God on Synchronicity and the fade of Seven Days on Ten Summoner's Tales. The tune never really left his book. On the reunion tour he introduced it in Dublin by talking about Connemara, Roundstone, and the stretch near Clifden where he has said he worked on it. Whether the basement in Bayswater or the west of Ireland owns the birth certificate, the feeling is the same. A shy man, a woman he cannot quite reach, and a chorus that pretends the whole thing is easy.

If you want the band's own shelves, the official site is The Police, and Sting's own pages live at Sting.com, where the lyric still sits in the book. The band keeps a verified page on Facebook, posts on Instagram, and talks to the faithful on X. Fans who want the longer hangout have a home at The Police Fansite. We will keep the record turning over here. Every little thing, Zoo Freaks. Magic is not a bad word for it.