The Police – Message In A Bottle

A guitar figure played alone, then the other two join

In the early months of 1979, The Police went back to Surrey Sound, a small studio in Leatherhead above a dairy, to make a second album. A&M Records would have preferred a large room and a famous producer. The band refused. They booked time with Nigel Gray, who had engineered and co-produced Outlandos d’Amour, and they kept the budget tight. Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland produced Reggatta de Blanc with Gray. The album came out on 5 October 1979 and went to No. 1 in Britain.

“Message in a Bottle” was written by Sting. Summers and Copeland built the arrangement around a guitar figure that climbs and repeats. On the record Summers plays that part. Sting sings and plays bass. Copeland’s drums do not lay down a constant cymbal pattern. He leaves space and strikes the rim of the snare, which is why the beat feels light even when the chorus gets louder. The lyric is a man on an island sending a note that says he is alone, then discovering a hundred million bottles with the same message. Sting has tied the writing to a stretch of isolation, not to a tour story.

A&M released the single in Britain on 7 September 1979, a month before the album. It was the band’s first No. 1, and it stayed at the top for three weeks. In the United States the same single stalled at No. 74 on the Billboard Hot 100. The follow-up, “Walking on the Moon,” gave them a second British No. 1 that November. American radio caught up more slowly, on later hits, but the British chart story of the group starts with this bottle.