Invisible Sun

Some songs arrive like a weather front. Invisible Sun is one of those. It sits on Ghost in the Machine, the fourth album by The Police, and it does not behave like the bright reggae-rock singles that had carried the trio out of the clubs and onto the charts. The pulse is slow. A synthesizer loops in the center of the track and never quite lets go. Sting sings close to the microphone, as if he is reading a street report rather than selling a chorus. On a station built for album sides and the long story behind them, this is the cut that earns the needle. You can find that kind of radio, commercial-free and listener-supported, at thezoorocks.com.

The three men who made it had never been a conventional rock band, and they were never going to become one. Gordon Sumner, the singer and bassist the world knows as Sting, came out of Wallsend, near Newcastle upon Tyne. He had been a schoolteacher. Before the punk clubs, he had played jazz fusion with a group called Last Exit, writing songs that already carried a literary bent and a bass line you could follow with your eyes closed. Stewart Copeland was the drummer, born in Virginia, raised in the Middle East, the son of a CIA officer, a player who had already passed through the progressive band Curved Air and who treated rhythm as a lead instrument. Andy Summers was the guitarist and the oldest of the three, a musician who had logged time with Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers, and the Animals, a man who thought in altered chords, chorus, and echo rather than in barre-chord slogans. They found each other in London in 1977, borrowed the volume and the urgency of punk, and refused the rest of the dress code.

The records came fast. Outlandos d'Amour in 1978 put Roxanne and Can't Stand Losing You on the radio and gave the band a reputation it had partly invented, including the story that those early singles had been banned. Reggatta de Blanc in 1979 delivered Message in a Bottle and Walking on the Moon, and a live show tight enough to quiet a room full of skeptics. Zenyatta Mondatta in 1980 added Don't Stand So Close to Me and De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da, and turned the trio into an international headline act. By 1981 they were no longer pretending to be a scruffy club band. They were filling halls, arguing in interviews, and writing songs that no longer fit the old trio formula. Ghost in the Machine is the album where that argument became the music.

They cut it at AIR Studios on Montserrat, with Hugh Padgham co-producing, over a stretch of about six weeks that felt like a luxury after the rushed sessions of the early records. Padgham put them in separate rooms. Sting arrived with a growing obsession with synthesizers and, on some tracks, his own alto saxophone. Summers has said he felt the guitar was being crowded out of a band that was supposed to be a guitar trio. Copeland has remembered fights about where the kick drum and the bass were supposed to sit. The atmosphere was not peaceful. The songs were strong enough to survive it. Spirits in the Material World opened the set with a hypnotic keyboard figure. Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic became the obvious hit, built in part over a demo Sting had shaped with keyboardist Jean Roussel. Invisible Sun was the other pole of the record, the one that did not smile.

Sting wrote it in Ireland, where he was living, during the hunger strikes in Belfast. His wife at the time, the actress Frances Tomelty, was from Belfast, so the streets in the lyric were not a postcard. He has said he wanted to write about that place and still show some light at the end of the tunnel. There has to be an invisible sun, he told interviewers years later. You cannot always see it, but something has to be radiating light into a life. The image may also brush against a much older line. In 1658 Sir Thomas Browne wrote, in Hydriotaphia, that life is a pure flame and that we live by an invisible sun within us. The song does not need the citation to work. It helps explain why the title feels older than a pop single.

The words are blunt. There is a reference to the Armalite, the rifle associated with paramilitary groups in the conflict. There is a line about keeping out of trouble the way the soldiers say. There are starving faces, weapon sights, and the cold couplet about changing the place by killing everybody in the human race. Sting later called it a dark, brooding song about streets patrolled by armored cars, haunted by fear and suspicion, and wounds that would take generations to heal. He has also said he was glad the glimmer in the title turned out to be somewhat prophetic, and that he hoped the sectarian violence that destroyed so many lives was truly over. Copeland heard a second city inside the same track. Beirut, where he had grown up, was being heavily bombed while the band was recording, and for him the song was about that hometown going up in flames. One record, two wars, no slogan.

The playing matches the subject. Summers has said the two guitar solos were improvised, not written out. He came up slowing down Wes Montgomery records and copying solos note for note, then decided his own solos would be made in the moment, after the chords and the scales were clear and the hours of practice were allowed to speak. On Invisible Sun the notes search instead of announce themselves. The vocal stays dry. The drum part sits back. It is a long way from the snap of Reggatta de Blanc, and that distance is the point.

A&M released it as a single in Europe on September 18, 1981, the first single taken from the album in the United Kingdom. It reached number two on the UK chart, number five in Ireland, and number twenty-seven in the Netherlands. Australia barely registered it. It was not issued as a single in the United States, which is why American radio often filed it as an album track while British radio treated it as an event. The video, directed by Derek Burbidge, used footage from Northern Ireland: soldiers, armored cars, children against barbed wire and graffiti. The BBC refused to air it, judging the pictures unsuitable. The ban did the usual work of a ban. It made the clip more famous than a routine television slot would have. MTV, newly launched in 1981 and short on videos from bands of this size, played it heavily anyway.

The song outlived the original lineup. On June 15, 1986, at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, The Police played what was then their final concert, a benefit for Amnesty International billed as Conspiracy of Hope. U2's Bono joined them on Invisible Sun. In 1998 Sting recorded a new version with the British reggae group Aswad. When the trio reunited for the 2007 and 2008 tour, the song returned to the set, including a show at Stormont Estate in Belfast, on the grounds of the Northern Ireland assembly. The arguments that split the band have been told three different ways. The catalog does not need the stories to agree.

The band's own site, still carrying news of the catalog and the solo work around it, is thepolice.com. The long-running official home of the songwriter, and of the fan club that has followed both Sting and The Police for decades, is sting.com. Verified pages still posting film, photographs, and reunion-era clips are on Facebook at facebook.com/thepolice and on Instagram at instagram.com/thepolicebandofficial. For the station that keeps the album cut in the same rotation as the hit, you are already in the right room at thezoorocks.com. Invisible Sun does not ask you to look away from the street. It asks you to believe there is still a light you cannot always see, and then it lets the guitar go looking for it.