Bass notes with weather between them
The bass states one note, then leaves a canyon. Andy Summers answers with a guitar so drenched in echo it seems to arrive from the next room, or the next orbit. 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 constructed out of absence. Sting sings as if the air itself were the arrangement. Nothing crowds. The chorus is a man astonished by his own lightness, and the band has the discipline to let him float.
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 composition. Summers’s chords are sparse on purpose. Copeland plays the off-beat like a secret. Sting’s bass is 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 still the group 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 until the moon felt less like a joke and more like a climate. 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 astonishment is in the intervals, not in the volume.
What remains is the courage 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 room in Munich is gone. The gait is not. One note, then weather, then the note again.
