King of Pain
by The Police
- 123
- BPM
- D major
- Key
- 10B
- Camelot
- 54
- Danceability
- 42
- Acousticness
Sting wrote "King of Pain" in Jamaica, at the former home of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. He had just left his first wife after a painful break and gone there to pull himself together. He was looking at the sun one day with Trudie, who is now his wife, and remarked on a little black spot on it. He then said that was his soul up there, and went back inside and wrote it down. He also wrote "Every Breath You Take" and "Wrapped Around Your Finger" in Jamaica.
His interest in Carl Jung, and more in Arthur Koestler, fed the song. Koestler was a Hungarian-born novelist living in England and curious about parapsychology. His book The Ghost in the Machine gave the Police their fourth album its name.
Engineer and co-producer Hugh Padgham recalled that the multi-track recording had everything playing all the way through. During mixing Sting walked in one day, said it was bad, and Padgham agreed. The final mix was stripped down, and the piano and vocal introduction was recorded on a different date and edited in. It came out in the US as the second single from Synchronicity, after "Every Breath You Take" had spent eight weeks on top of the charts. It reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October 1983 and No. 17 in the UK in January 1984.
King of Pain runs at 123 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.95 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 488 ms. It is in D major, Camelot 10B, which shares its notes with B minor and mixes cleanly with G major and A major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.