Every Breath You Take

To escape public attention, Sting retreated to the Caribbean in the early 1980s, where he began writing "Every Breath You Take" at Ian Fleming's writing desk on the Goldeneye estate in Oracabessa Bay, Jamaica. He woke in the middle of the night with the opening line in his head, sat at the piano, and finished the song in half an hour. He later said it sounded like a comforting love song but was in fact about Big Brother, surveillance and control, calling it "very, very sinister and ugly". The song drew on earlier material, with influences traced to a Gene Pitney song titled "Every Breath I Take" and even to Led Zeppelin's "D'yer Mak'er".

The demo was cut in an eight-track suite at Utopia Studios in North London, with Sting singing over a Hammond organ. Months later, the Police reconvened at George Martin's AIR Studios in Montserrat to record it for Synchronicity, their fifth and final album. The sessions were difficult. Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland fought verbally and physically, and producer Hugh Padgham said the two hated each other by that point. The sessions nearly collapsed until a meeting with the band's manager, Miles Copeland, secured an agreement to continue.

Andy Summers devised the guitar part after experimenting with Béla Bartók violin duets, playing the riff straight through in a single take after Sting told him to make it his own. Copeland recorded his drums in the studio's dining room, where the heat was such that his sticks had to be taped to his hands. Released as a single, the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for eight weeks, the band's only American number one, and spent four weeks at the top of the UK chart. At the 26th Grammy Awards it won Song of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.