Everybody knows “Every Breath You Take.” It’s the biggest hit the Police ever had, one of the most famous tunes of the Eighties. It spent 8 weeks at Number One in the classic pop summer of 1983. In 2019, BMI officially proclaimed it “the Most Played Song in radio history,” breaking the 22-year record set by “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin.” It spent another 11 weeks at Number One in the summer of 1997, when Diddy and Faith Evans turned it into a hip-hop tribute to the late Notorious B.I.G., “I’ll Be Missing You.” It’s one of the world’s favorite songs — the most famous hit Sting ever wrote.
Or did he? That’s now a legal matter. The music world got a shock this week when his ex-bandmates, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland, sued him in London High Court, claiming they should be credited — and paid — for writing “Every Breath You Take,” 42 years after it came out.
The bottle-blonde British threesome famously hated each other, so this might just seen like the latest of their nonstop battles. They recorded it while regularly punching each other out in the studio. Sting said he spent half the Synchronicity tour with a broken rib, after one of his backstage brawls with Copeland. But this is a unique case. There’s no precedent for a band this famous having a songwriting credit dispute like this, in court, over such a beloved hit. (The Band, they might have complained a lot in bars, but they never took it to court.) Who the hell spends 42 years going to war over a love song?
It’s also a special case because there’s no argument at all over who did what. Nobody’s ever disputed that Sting wrote the lyrics, chords, and melody, as he almost always did in the Police. “Our current single, ‘Every Breath You Take,’ wrote itself, largely because it was taken from a very old tradition,” Sting told Musician magazine in 1983. “It’s very atavistic and yet it means something now. I woke up in the middle of the night in Jamaica and went straight to the piano and the chords and song just came out within ten minutes. Wrote the song. Went back to bed. It’s a way of saying there’s still something meaningful and useful in the old way of doing a rock & roll ballad. But it’s not entirely derivative, there’s something else I hear in it: a tinge of sadness.”
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His original demo was a fully formed song, with a Hammond organ part that they dumped after Andy Summers came up with the guitar arpeggios. The demo has the same words and tune as the final version from their 1983 smash Synchronicity. But in recent years, the 82-year-old Summers has been saying his riff earned a writing credit. “’Every Breath You Take’ was going in the trash until I played on it,” Summers said on Jeremy White’s podcast in 2023. “It’s a very contentious [topic] — it’s very much alive at the moment.” He hinted at legal action, saying, “Watch the press; let’s see what happens in the next year. That’s all I can tell you.”
The three Police men have made no comment on the case. Sting and his company Magnetic Publishing Limited are listed as co-defendants. In 2022, Sting sold the rights to his songwriting catalog — both solo and with the Police — to Universal Music Group, for an estimated $250 million.
It was the biggest hit of 1983, but it’s never left the airwaves, with its seductive sound and sinister emotion. For a few decades, nobody seriously questioned that Sting wrote it, like he wrote all their hits. All three of them play brilliantly: Summer’s guitar, Copeland’s massive snare sound, Sting’s bass throb at the 2:58 point. You can hear what each musician is doing at any given moment, because Hugh Padgham’s expert production and engineering are so beautifully sparse, with so much open space in the sound. The only enigma, sonically, is the weirdly but awesomely clanging piano, played by Sting. He does for one-note piano solos what Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” did for one-note guitar solos.
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So it’s not like there’s any mystery about what each one contributed to “Every Breath You Take.” The issue is what counts as “songwriting,” versus what counts as “arranging.” It’s an eternal argument for musicians, but it was different in the old days, when bands made money from album sales. That revenue stream has dried up, which means publishing royalties matter more than ever. The fights get uglier as musicians get older and their grandkids get thirstier. As the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik wrote, “Every biography or memoir set in the world of popular music turns out to be a book about music publishing.” Spandau Ballet songwriter Gary Kemp once got sued by the rest of the band, except his brother. Did the guy who played the sax solo on “True” write one-fifth of the song? (According to the judge, this much was not true.)
As Sting was always fond of saying, “Every Breath You Take” wasn’t the most radically original song in the world. In 1993, when an interviewer told him, “You completely ripped Bob Marley off on ‘So Lonely,’” Sting agreed. “Totally. ‘No Woman, No Cry’ sped up with a slightly different melody. Those chords, classic aren’t they, C, G, A Minor, F. It’s like the chord sequence around ‘Every Breath You Take’ is generic. It’s ‘Stand By Me’ and it’s ‘Slip Slidin’ Away’ by Paul Simon and the lyrics aren’t particularly original either, they’re straight out of a fucking rhyming dictionary. But somehow there’s something quite unique about that song and I don’t know what it is.”
It’s no surprise the recording sessions were open warfare, with fistfights in the studio. “Sting wanted Stewart to just play a very straight rhythm with no fills or anything,” Padgham recalled. “And that was the complete antithesis of what Stewart was about. Stewart would say, ‘I want to fucking put my drum part on it!’ and Sting would say, ‘I don’t want you to put your fucking drum part on it! I want you to put what I want you to put on it!’ and it would go on like that. It was really difficult.” As Copeland said, “The times when I came the closest to homicide, the times when it became absolutely critical that I choke the life out of this man, were when he would come over to me and tell me something about the hi-hat.”
The combat dragged on until Summers added his arpeggio riff. “I didn’t stand there and crow about it,” he told Guitar World in 2022. “It was more about keeping those other bastards happy.” As he sees it, he rescued the song from oblivion. “That song was going to be thrown out. Sting and Stewart could not agree on how the bass and drums were going to go. We were in the middle of Synchronicity and Sting says, ‘Well, go on then, go in there and make it your own.’ And I did it in one take. They all stood up and clapped. And, of course, the fucking thing went right round the world, straight to Number One in America. And the riff has become a kind of immortal guitar part that all guitar players have to learn.” Sting told the same basic story. As he recalled in 1983, “Musically, I wrote the song and the guitar parts and then turned to Andy and said, ‘Make it your own.’”
They argued over songwriting all the time, even in the early days. Copeland and Summers always got a credit or two per album. “The main problem was the songwriting,” Sting said later. “I was giving a portion of my publishing away to the band just to keep it together and everybody wanted to be a songwriter.” Wasn’t it obvious he was the writer in this band? “I can’t really answer that but I was the person writing all the hits. I thought it was beyond argument. But we still had numerous fights about it.”
Sumner and Copeland did get to contribute tunes to Synchronicity, so the fact must be faced: these tracks make a real shaky case for their songwriting chops circa 1983. Summers wrote the insultingly awful “Mother,” which was an easy Number One on Rolling Stone’s recent list of Terrible Songs on Great Albums. (It beat “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”) The best you can say for Copeland’s “Miss Gradenko” is that it isn’t “Mother.” It was scandalous to stick these piss-poor efforts on the same album as “Every Breath You Take,” “King of Pain,” and “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” and having this evidence on the record is no boost to their cause. Compared to them, “De Doo Doo Doo, De Da Da Da” is a masterpiece on par with any book by Nabokov.
But in the plus column for Summers, he wrote “Omegaman,” the best song on Ghost in the Machine. He also came up with “Behind My Camel,” which won a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental of 1980. Sting hated it so much he buried the tape in the yard behind the studio, until Andy dug it up. Copeland penned keepers on 1979’s Reggatta de Blanc, like the gem “Does Everyone Stare.” But he found his outlet composing film soundtracks like Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish. “My compositions go pretty much to outside projects,” he said. “Because in the band, there’s a kind of unity of sound that we’ve arrived at, on Sting’s material, and I know what to do with it.”
The Police broke up soon after “Every Breath You Take,” at the end of their Synchronicity stadium tour, for no reason except mutual loathing. They reconvened very briefly in 1986 for a lousy remake of “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” then again in 1992 at Sting’s wedding, then finally in 2007 for their long and lucrative reunion tour. They played Al Gore’s Live Earth benefit concert, with John Mayer adding guitar and Kanye West rapping, “Sting, you the only Police good in the hood.” The closest they’ve come to working together since then? This week, actually, when jazzman Christian McBride dropped his new album. It has his version of “Murder by Numbers,” the song Sting and Summers wrote as a Synchronicity B-side. In a comically ironic bit of timing, they both play on the McBride version — hopefully in separate rooms, to avoid killing each other.
It’s ironic that such a universally popular wedding ballad has such a fractious origin story — and with this lawsuit, it gets more fractious than ever. But there’s no end of weird details about the saga of “Every Breath You Take.” For one thing, there’s this: “More Than I Can Say,” by the U.K. pop smoothie Leo Sayer, a long-forgotten Top Ten hit from 1981. The first time I heard “Every Breath You Take” on the radio, I wondered, “How can they get away with this?” Spoiler: they got away with it, since nobody noticed or cared, but it’s basically the same song. Sayer was covering a Fifties oldie, but his Eighties version is the one that sounds like “Every Breath You Take,” even though the Police probably never heard it. As for Diddy’s remake, Sting told Rolling Stone, “I put a couple of my kids through college with the proceeds.” Last fall, he said the rap mogul’s trial didn’t “taint” it for him, since “it’s still my song.”
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Until now, the most notorious songwriting dispute was The Band. For years, drummer Levon Helm railed against Robbie Robertson over the credits. (Helm’s claims were complicated by the fact that he had a long and prolific solo career, yet did not write songs for his albums.) “I wrote songs before I ever met Levon,” Robertson told Rolling Stone in 2000. “I’m sorry, I just worked harder than anybody else. Somebody has to lead the charge, somebody has to draw the map. The guys were responsible for the arrangements, but that’s what being a band is, that’s your fucking job.”
But for Sting, this song was always personal. “It’s ostensibly a love song, a very seductive romantic love song,” Sting told Rolling Stone. “But it’s about controlling somebody to the nth degree and monitoring their movements.” Many fans missed the sinister subtext. “It’s not like ‘Stand by Me,’ which is this wonderful noble song that means just one thing. ‘Every Breath You Take’ is very ambiguous and quite wicked.” Sting later wrote an answer song, his 1985 solo hit “If You Love Someone, Set Them Free.” “I had to write the antidote,” he said, “after I’d poisoned people with this horrible thing.” Maybe that’s why the conflict around this song never ends. It’s a timeless classic with a long, twisted history. But 42 years after it topped the charts, the tale of “Every Breath You Take” just keeps on getting stranger.
