Rehumanize Yourself

The Zoo Crew has got a real sharp one spinning for the Zoo Freaks right now, “Rehumanize Yourself” from The Police and the 1981 album Ghost in the Machine. If you are riding with us on THE ZOO, turn it up a little. This one does not swagger in like a hit single. It comes in sideways, half calliope and half warning, and it sticks with you after the needle lifts.

The song sits as track seven on Ghost in the Machine, released on October 2, 1981, and it is one of the rare Police numbers credited to both Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland. Copeland brought the reggae-leaning pulse and the skeleton of the tune. Sting rewrote the words into something much harder to shrug off. Folks who have dug into the writing say Copeland’s first pass at the lyric was a good deal less responsible. What landed on the record is a short, angry sermon about what happens when a person puts on a role and leaves the human being at the door.

Sting later spelled that out in his book Lyrics. He borrowed the album title from Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine, which argues that the modern mind is grafted onto older, more primitive wiring, and that in the wrong hour those older circuits can take the wheel. He tried, as far as a stack of pop songs would allow, to wrestle with that idea. Violence in Northern Ireland showed up in “Invisible Sun.” Destructive appetite showed up in “Demolition Man.” Skinheads and Nazis showed up right here, in “Rehumanize Yourself.” He said some of the songs were a plea for sanity, and others were an admission of the darkness that hangs around all of us. The cover, those three faces turned into red digital readouts, was the visual version of the same thought. They were the ghosts in the machine.

The opening picture is not abstract. “They kick a boy to death ’cause he don’t belong” came from a killing near Sting’s home, a gang of skinheads who beat a young man to death. He has said it happened around the time his first son was born, and that becoming a father made peace and nonviolence feel less like a slogan and more like a requirement. From there the song moves through a policeman who wants a gun just to keep him warm, because violence has become the local weather, and a factory hand building a machine that is not for him. Then comes Billy, who joins the National Front and throws his hand in the air with the rest of them. The chorus does not argue. It just keeps saying the same thing: rehumanize yourself. British pressings often spelled it “Re-Humanise Yourself,” which is how a Newcastle writer would have said it. Same song, same bite.

The record was cut at George Martin’s AIR Studios on Montserrat in the summer of 1981, with the band and Hugh Padgham producing. By then the three of them were not exactly swapping guitar picks and beach stories. Padgham put them in separate rooms: Sting in the control room, Andy Summers out in the studio, Copeland in the dining room. It kept the peace, and it also looked exactly like the band felt. Summers has said that by this stretch he felt he was working with two total arseholes. Sting, looking back, did not dress it up either. He told biographer Phil Sutcliffe he had been unsympathetic, aggressive, mean, selfish, and egotistical, and he later blamed a short run with cocaine for making him unbearable in his own skin. He said he quit the stuff not long after Ghost, dumped what he had left after a little ritual send-off, and never went back.

Copeland, talking to Classic Pop years afterward, compared being in The Police to wearing a Prada suit made out of barbed wire. Harsh, he said, and the records were still great. He also gave Sting his due on the horns that color this album, including the lines weaving through “Rehumanize Yourself.” Sting had only been playing saxophone about six months. He hauled a tenor and an alto into the vocal sessions, liked what he heard, and stacked the parts four deep until they sounded like a brass section. It should not have worked. It changed the whole weather of the record. In a Rolling Stone interview that November, Copeland was asked about the odd noises on “Rehumanize Yourself” and answered that they were all human: guitars, saxophones, typewriters, wailing secretaries, dancing cooks. No ghosts in the mix, just people making a racket on purpose.

The song even wandered into a movie a few years later, turning up in the 1984 comedy Bachelor Party. That is a strange room for a lyric about skinheads and factory alienation, but The Police had a habit of putting serious medicine inside a tune you could still move to. The circus-colored arrangement keeps taunting the lyric. You can almost dance to a song about a boy kicked to death in the street, and that discomfort is the point.

If you want the long view, the band that made this record started in a very small room. On September 25, 1976, Stewart Copeland was the American drummer in the prog band Curved Air, passing through Newcastle. He caught a local jazz-rock outfit called Last Exit and could not take his eyes off the singer-bassist, a former schoolteacher named Gordon Sumner. Sumner already had the nickname Sting, on account of a black-and-yellow striped sweater that made him look like a wasp. Copeland thought the band was good and the frontman was the meal ticket. They swapped phone numbers at a party afterward. Copeland, who already had the name The Police and a punk manifesto in his pocket, talked Sting into moving to London. Sting arrived on January 12, 1977, and they jammed the same day.

They started as a trio with Corsican guitarist Henry Padovani, a genuine punk and, for a while, the only thing London critics liked about them. The first gigs came in the spring of 1977, short and loud. Andy Summers, a decade older and already a veteran of Eric Burdon and the Animals, crossed their path during a side project called Strontium 90. Sting wanted him in immediately. Summers told Copeland outside Oxford Circus that the band had something, but they needed him, and he was in, on the condition they stay a trio. Padovani was out. Miles Copeland, Stewart’s brother, heard “Roxanne,” scraped together about fifteen hundred pounds, and got them into a tiny studio and then onto A&M. Outlandos d’Amour was cut cheap, some of it on secondhand tape in a room padded with egg boxes. Four years later those same three men were on a Caribbean island, barely speaking, making Ghost in the Machine.

That is the trick of this band. The fights were real, the ego was real, and the chemistry was still a one-off. Summers has said Sting could not play drums like Stewart and Stewart could not play guitar like him, and what you got was the three of them, not a solo act with a rhythm section. “Rehumanize Yourself” is a fine example. Copeland’s beat keeps it from turning into a lecture. Summers finds space in the corners. Sting stacks those beginner-sax lines until they sound like a street parade that took a wrong turn into a riot. The official home for all of that history is The Police, and the Ghost in the Machine shelves, shirts and all, live over at the band’s store on store.thepolice.com.

The band still keeps a light on for the old records. Their official Facebook page is The Police on Facebook, the Instagram account is @thepolicebandofficial, and the active X account is @ThePoliceBand, which marked forty-five years of Ghost in the Machine and asked fans which track still hits hardest. If you want the fan rooms, the long-running community page The Police Fansite is still posting interviews and birthday notes, and the public group The Police Fan Page is where the diehards compare pressings and trade stories. Spin it again, Zoo Freaks. Some songs ask you to dance. This one asks you to remember you are a person before you are a uniform, a shift, or a mob.