Omega Man

You are parked on The Zoo, the station that still believes an album side can change the weather in the room, and the cut coming out of the red LED glow is "Omega Man" by The Police, written by Andy Summers and filed as track nine on Ghost in the Machine. On the sleeve it is spelled with the Greek letter, Ωmegaman, the last letter of the alphabet pressed into service as a name. Two minutes and forty-eight seconds. No single. No video. Just a guitarist who had already helped invent the sound of the biggest trio on the planet, stepping up with a song about the last man left, and a singer who would not let the label put it out front. That is the kind of argument that makes a record worth living with.

Ghost in the Machine landed on October 2, 1981, through A&M, the fourth Police album and the first one with a title in plain English. Sting had been reading Arthur Koestler for years. Koestler's book supplied the name, the idea that mind and body are not the same substance, that there is a ghost rattling around inside the gears. The cover did the rest: three red digital faces on a black field, no group photo, because the three of them could not agree on one. VH1 later ranked that sleeve forty-fifth on its list of the greatest album covers. In Britain the record went straight to number one and stayed there for three weeks. In the States it stopped at number two on the Billboard 200, boxed in by the kind of pop machine the songs were already side-eyeing. "Invisible Sun" was the British lead single and reached number two, even with the BBC refusing the video over footage from the Troubles. "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" became the global hit. "Omega Man" stayed on the album, which is where some of the best Police music has always lived.

Summers has told the story more than once. A&M heard the track, Miles Copeland played it at a company convention, and the room voted it the first single. Summers wanted that. Sting, feeling his power and not inclined to hand the opening shot to anybody else's song, refused. The label blinked. Summers has said he was upset, and then he has shrugged, because by then the band was selling out halls on several continents and gold was no longer a theory. He has also said, years later, that the song should have been the single. Listen to the doubled opening riff, the way it leans a little psychotic, and the solo that follows, and you can hear why a room full of record people lost their minds. It is short, it is mean, and it does not ask permission.

The lyric is a last-man picture. Summers has said the spark was Soylent Green, the 1973 Charlton Heston film about a wrecked city, rationed food, and a corporation with a secret in the crackers. The title points just as hard at The Omega Man, Heston's 1971 film, itself drawn from Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, later remade under the book title. Same actor, same ruined streets, same man talking to nobody because nobody is left. The singer is the omega, bottom of the order, end of the line, walking through a world that has already ended and arguing with himself about whether to stay. On a record full of saxophones, slogans, and Sting reading philosophy, this one is the horror story. It sits near the close of the album, between the global finger-wag of "One World (Not Three)" and the inward turn of "Secret Journey" and Stewart Copeland's "Darkness," and it pulls the temperature back down.

The sessions were a luxury by Police standards and a fracture by any other measure. After the rush of Zenyatta Mondatta, they gave themselves about six weeks and got out of the building. Most of the tracking happened at George Martin's AIR Studios on Montserrat, far enough from the A&M offices in California that an executive could not wander in with notes. Hugh Padgham, already known for the gated-drum records he had made with Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins, co-produced and engineered, and he put the three of them in separate rooms. Keyboards and saxophone piled up. Sting played a lot of the horns himself. Summers reached for a Fender Twin and a Pete Cornish board and, on other tracks, the Roland GR-300 guitar synth. Ted Jensen mastered it. Summers was going through a divorce. The band was not getting along. He later said the Koestler title fit, because the ghost in this particular machine was three men who could barely stand in the same hallway. Copeland has talked about the same stretch as the start of the silos that would crack the group open on Synchronicity.

Bass players will tell you Sting mailed in the low end on this one, a straight line under Summers' chords, and there is a history behind that. Sting had a reputation for declining to play on the other members' songs, or for playing them without much affection. Copeland got one composition on the album, "Darkness," and even then Sting rewrote the words on "Rehumanize Yourself" after rejecting Copeland's lyric. Summers got "Omega Man" and nothing else. The democracy was theoretical. The guitar, though, is not theoretical. That opening figure, doubled until it scrapes, and the solo that tumbles out of it, are the sound of a player who had spent his life getting to the point where the hands decide. Summers has said he would not have given the part days of thought. You practice until the ugly right idea shows up on time.

The trio that made it had been a working unit for about four years and already sounded like a closed civilization. Gordon Sumner, called Sting, was born in Wallsend, Newcastle, in 1951, a schoolteacher and jazz bassist who walked into London punk with a voice nobody in that scene could match. Stewart Copeland was born in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1952, raised in Beirut, a drummer who had already done time in Curved Air and who hit like a man trying to outrun the song. Andy Summers, born Andrew James Somers in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire, on the last day of 1942, was the elder, a veteran of Zoot Money's Big Roll Band, the Soft Machine, and Eric Burdon's Animals, a guitarist who thought in color and echo more than in blues boxes. The Police formed in London in 1977 with Corsican guitarist Henry Padovani. Summers came in, Padovani went out, and the famous three-piece locked. Outlandos d'Amour in 1978, Reggatta de Blanc in 1979, Zenyatta Mondatta in 1980, then this record, then Synchronicity in 1983, the one that made them unavoidable and finished them. They were done as a working band by 1986. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame took them in 2003. A reunion tour ran through 2007 and 2008 and proved the old chemistry was still combustible. They have not made another studio album. They do not need to. The five they left are still arguing with each other.

"Omega Man" is the argument you can hold in one hand. It is the guitarist's song on the singer's album, the single that never was, the Charlton Heston nightmare set to a new-wave gallop, the last letter of the alphabet walking around a dead city and talking to itself. Play it loud enough and the red digits on that cover start to look like a warning light. That is the Zoo way. Deep cuts, real histories, no commercials stepping on the ride-out. The whole station lives at https://thezoorocks.com/, and the band's own door is still open at https://thepolice.com/. Summers keeps his own house at https://andysummers.com/, and Sting's is at https://www.sting.com/. The official pages are on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/thepolice, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/thepolicebandofficial/, and on X at https://x.com/ThePoliceBand. The fans who have been keeping the ledger since the Montserrat days built the PoliceWiki at https://thepolicewiki.org/. Go read the entries. Then put the needle back on side two and let the omega man finish his walk.