Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - If You Love Sting, Set Him Free Edition Part 2

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🗓️ 31 October 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

Walk into any store or flip on a radio, and you’ll probably hear the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” sooner or later. Thanks to that ubiquity, the swooning, menacing megahit’s songwriter—Sting—is a very wealthy man.

Now his former bandmates, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, are suing Sting over who deserves to profit from “Breath” and other Police songs. No matter how that dispute turns out, it’s a reminder of Sting’s uncanny songwriting skill and his charmed life of hitmaking.

For more than four decades, Sting seems to resurface every few years with a new earworm, from “Roxanne” to “Russians,” blending New Wave rock with another genre—reggae, jazz, classical, country, even rap and Raï—and in the process, getting sampled by new generations of millennial and zoomer hitmakers.

Join Chris Molanphy as he recounts the long, varied, sophisticated, but catchy career of the King of Pain. Whatever he tries, every little thing Sting does is magic.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Adobe Acrobat Studio so brand new.
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0:29.6	Studio. Sean has had some good ideas over the years, but using Canva was a really good one. Sean designed some social
0:39.8	posts to promote his friend's car boot sale. They looked good. Really, really good. Next
0:48.6	thing he knows, someone came and bought the lot, including the car. Now Sean doesn't know I was going to get home.
0:57.0	Thanks, Canva.
1:00.0	Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from
1:21.1	coast to coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's
1:26.5	Why is this song number one series on our last episode.
1:31.1	We covered the rise of a man born Gordon Sumner, better known as Sting.
1:37.7	In the police, the eclectic post-punk band that made him famous, Sting wrote all of the hits and tried his hand at punk,
1:47.2	reggae, new wave, synth-pop, and romantic balladry. Although the band's biggest hit,
1:53.6	Every Breath You Take, was not as romantic as it seemed. We're now in the mid-1980s. The police have quietly broken up after becoming
2:04.9	Rock's biggest band, and Sting is about to embark upon a solo career that's even more
2:12.1	wide-ranging and genre unbound.
2:21.9	After the police went on hiatus in 1984,
2:25.9	Sting started work on a solo album while making guest appearances on other superstars records.
2:31.0	For Phil Collins, who was recording his soon-to-be
2:35.3	blockbuster LP No Jacket Required, Sting provided counterpoint vocals on Phil's
2:43.9	haunting ballad, long, long way to go.
2:47.9	Turn it off if we wanted to, switch it off. We'll go and go. Turn it off if we want to, switch it off
	...

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