Murder By Numbers

You are locked into The Zoo, the listener-supported, commercial-free rock stream that still believes an album cut can carry a whole hour if the band earned it. The station lives at thezoorocks.com, and the track coming up is one of the slyest things The Police ever slipped past the gatekeepers. “Murder By Numbers,” from 1983’s Synchronicity, is the song that did not fit on the vinyl and did not need to. It found its people on cassette, on compact disc, and on the flip side of the biggest single the trio ever had.

The Police were Sting, born Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner in Wallsend, near Newcastle, on October 2, 1951; Andy Summers, the jazz-schooled guitarist from Lancashire who had already logged time with the Animals, Soft Machine, and Kevin Coyne; and Stewart Copeland, the Virginia-born, Beirut-raised drummer who had been the engine of Curved Air. Copeland spotted Sting in a Newcastle jazz outfit in 1976, dragged him toward London, and by early 1977 the three-piece was in place after a brief turn with original guitarist Henry Padovani. They came up in the punk year and refused the costume. Reggae skank, pop hooks, Copeland’s upside-down kit, Summers’ chorus and flanger, and a singer who could make a three-minute single feel like a short story: that was the formula, and it ran from Outlandos d’Amour in 1978 through Reggatta de Blanc, Zenyatta Mondatta, and Ghost in the Machine. By the end of 1982 they were arena-sized, rich, and thoroughly sick of one another.

Synchronicity was the fifth album and, as a studio band, the last. The title came from Carl Jung’s idea of meaningful coincidence, events linked by symbol rather than cause. Sting was deep in the reading, and the record is full of doubles: a man unraveling at home while something stirs in a Scottish loch, lovers and tyrants, private pain set against public weather. They cut it in December 1982 at AIR Studios on Montserrat, the Caribbean room built by George Martin. Producer Hugh Padgham has said the social weather was as bad as the musical weather was good. Sting tracked bass in the control room, Summers played in the live room, and Copeland’s kit sat in a dining room in an adjoining house, the three of them watching one another on video monitors. It kept the blood off the microphones and the guitar out of the bass. Summers even hiked across the island in the heat to fetch Martin when the sessions threatened to come apart. The album still arrived in June 1983, sat at number one on the Billboard 200 for seventeen non-consecutive weeks, and gave radio “Every Breath You Take,” “King of Pain,” and “Wrapped Around Your Finger.”

“Murder By Numbers” is the odd document inside that package. It is the only song on Synchronicity credited to Sting and Andy Summers together. Summers has said the chords arrived at dinner. He started playing a set of jazz changes, the kind of voicings a rock guitarist is not supposed to bring to a pop session, and Sting liked them on the spot. The lyric was already in Sting’s notebook, written earlier in 1982 to a different, more ordinary melody. A demo cut at Utopia Studios under the working title “Nos 6” proves the words were finished before the Montserrat arrangement existed; that demo later turned up on the 2024 Synchronicity box. On the island, Summers had dessert-time chords and Sting had the page. Copeland has told the story the way a drummer would: they worked the tune while he finished eating, then everybody walked to a separate room, and by the time the other two were ready he was already playing. Padgham rolled tape. The first take is the record.

The lyric is a how-to, delivered in a voice so dry it could be a civil-service manual. You learn to smile, you learn the stance, you practice on animals and work your way up, and if you are clever enough the state will pin a medal on the method. Sting has said the target is political evil, the way leaders train a public to accept cruelty as procedure. On the Synchronicity tour he sometimes introduced it as a song about the manipulation of large groups of people, then pointed out that the crowd in front of him was being worked the whole time he said it. That is a very Police joke: the finger pointed at the politician and then, without a change of tone, at the singer holding the microphone. The music undercuts the chill. Summers’ chords are closer to a smoky jazz club than to a protest rally, Copeland plays with brushes and a light wrist, and Sting sings it almost as a lullaby. The menace is in the manners.

The original vinyl of Synchronicity had no room for it. Running time and groove width pushed the song off the LP, so buyers who only owned the black disc never saw it in the program. Cassette and compact disc editions carried it as the closer, after “Tea in the Sahara,” and the timing sits at about four minutes and thirty-six seconds. It also shipped as the B-side of “Every Breath You Take,” the single A&M put out in Britain on May 20, 1983, catalog AM 117, with a twelve-inch and a double-pack close behind. Plenty of listeners met the song that way, flipping the biggest hit of the year and finding a jazz sermon about sanctioned killing. Later pressings and reissues folded it back into the album proper, which is why a lot of rock fans remember it as the last word on Synchronicity even though the first vinyl buyers never had it.

The band did not survive the victory. The Synchronicity tour ran through 1984, including the Shea Stadium shows that put them on the same lawn the Beatles had played, and then the three of them walked. Sting went to jazz with the Blue Turtles, Summers to film scores and instrumental records, Copeland to opera, soundtracks, and a second life as a film composer. They reconvened for the 2007–2008 reunion, a victory lap that filled stadiums and proved the old arguments had only been packed, not solved. “Murder By Numbers” stayed in the set. A bootleg from that tour later gave bassist Christian McBride the model for a big-band arrangement; Sting and Summers both played on McBride’s version, Summers volunteering once he heard the chart, which is a long way from three men in separate rooms on Montserrat refusing to look at one another.

If you want the file on the band rather than the myth, the official house is thepolice.com, with the working social desks at Facebook, Instagram, and X. Sting’s own office, which still keeps the Police book, is sting.com. For the session notes, the single couplings, and the demo history, the fan-built PoliceWiki at thepolicewiki.org is the shelf the obsessives actually use. And when you want the cut without a spot load and without somebody talking over the ride-out, you are already in the right room: The Zoo, album rock the way the format was supposed to work, deep tracks included. “Murder By Numbers” is the one they almost left off the record. That is usually how you know it belonged there.