One bass note, then a wide gap
The bass states one note, then leaves a wide gap. Andy Summers answers with a guitar soaked in echo, as if it arrived from the next room. Stewart Copeland’s drums tiptoe: reggae in the wrists, pop in the grin. Walking on the Moon, from Reggatta de Blanc in 1979, is a hit built from absence. Sting sings lightly over empty space. Nothing crowds. The chorus is a man surprised by his own lightness, and the band has the discipline to leave him room.
He wrote it drunk, he has said, in a hotel room in Munich after a show, bouncing and mumbling a line about walking round the room. In the morning the nonsense was still there. He changed the room to the moon and kept the gait. The Police took it to Surrey Sound in Leatherhead, Nigel Gray engineering and producing with them, the same small studio that had held their first album. The space in the mix is not a later effect. It is the writing. Summers’s chords are sparse on purpose. Copeland plays the off-beat like a secret. Sting’s bass is both the furniture and the view.
The single went to number one in Britain in the winter of 1979, a few months after Message in a Bottle had done the same. Two chart-toppers, and the group still sounded like three people who could hear one another. The video put them in the snow at Kennedy Space Center, an obvious picture for an unobvious song. Live, the gaps sometimes widened further, Copeland decorating, Summers stretching the echo. The lyric is a love song that refuses to clutch. Giant steps are what you take, and the music takes them.
I was drunk in a hotel room in Munich, bouncing around, singing walking round the room. In the morning I changed it to Walking on the Moon.
(Sting, recalling the writing, 1979)
What the trio understood, before the stadiums arrived, was that reggae had taught them subtraction. Reggatta de Blanc is named for that lesson, a mangled phrase for white reggae, and this track is the cleanest proof. There is no string section waiting to tell you how to feel. There is a bass, a rimshot, a chord that rings and dies. Sting’s vocal is almost conversational. The surprise sits in the intervals, not in the volume.
What remains is the nerve of those holes. Plenty of bands in 1979 were adding parts. The Police removed them until a number one could be hummed from its silences. Walking on the Moon still feels like walking out of a loud pub into a street with too much sky. The Munich hotel room is gone. The gait is not. One note, then the gap, then the note again.
