Chris Campion – Walking On The Moon, The Untold Story of the Police

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I am sure like many of my fellow contributors on this site, I have long held dream that one day I may discover the skills and determination to write a book about music. That I would chose a band, spend a year or two in research, conducting interviews, and finally writing a book that would knock people’s socks off. But where do you start? Well, I guess first things first; you need to choose what to write about. Maybe I could write about a band? Shall I choose a band or an artiste I admire, someone whose music I think means something – that I have an emotional attachment to? Whose personality I find intriguing and exciting? Or shall I just pick whomever I hate and detest the most and spend an unproductive year getting worked up about how much I loathe them.

The latter road is the one Chris Campion has decided to travel in Walking On The Moon, what he has dubbed the untold story of The Police. Coupled with this, he attempts (and fails) in a small way to tell the story of the rise of New Wave rock, but in doing something so ambitious follows too narrow a path that ignores everything other than those bands that touched the periphery of The Police. Thankfully, he ignores most of the trio’s early lives, and so the story begins as they make they first inroads into music, concentrating also on the relationship they had with their manager, Miles Copeland.

This is by no means the first book written about The Police. Sting has authored his own account, and a few years ago Andy Summers published his own memoir, the wonderful One Train Later. Through it Summers reveals himself as a talented, poetic writer, engagingly honest about the troubled relationship he had with Sting and Copeland. This was compounded by the fact that he was somewhat older, with greater experience and years of finding himself at the sidelines of success. Campion pores scorn on most of this, claiming Summer’s account reads like “a storeyed career through the annals of rock greatness”, but breaking down much that he did to make it seem much more meaningless. This continues throughout the book, as everything little thing the band and personnel do is recorded with a sneer of contempt, relishing in their failures and never recognising success. I have no great love for The Police but as a reader I soon found it tiresome, every page filled with fresh bile and loathing for the subject of the book.

The book is littered with quips and comments that seem to be there solely to bring Sting down a peg or two. When discussing ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’, Campion reminds us that it is a story of forbidden love between a teacher and a pupil, before advising us that Sting used to teach 5 to 7 year olds. Summers is described as a “sickly and malnourished child” in an ill-advised video shoot dressed as a sumo. Everything Sting touches seems worth of derision. Quadrophenia is described as “a hackneyed after school special”. Copeland is criticised for making a film “larking around in the Congo (while) nearby in Ethiopia, people were dying”. Campion seems to have little regard for anything, and his attempts to sum up the invasion of New Wave music, particularly from the UK into the US, covers little new ground.

After a while, the scorn and bile gets boring, and you begin to wonder exactly who this book is aimed at. Fans of The Police will be disappointed to see something they like pulled apart so much. News of the somewhat fractious relationship between the three band members is old hat, and there is nothing here that has not already been covered, particularly in Summers’s account. He closes by tearing shreds out of their reunion tour, stating that their performances were poor, with scripted adlibs and the eye on little more than the money. The final three paragraphs of the book question what legacy the band have bequeathed to the world, and his conclusion (and, “admitted in a rare moment of humility” (or maybe in a moment of humour), something shared by Copeland) is nothing that important. Others inspired people to pick up guitars and write songs but he feels no-one could be inspired by Sting, that his band were Conservative radicals, tax-dodging boys in blue, with no saving graces. This is an awkward read that will struggle to find an audience, and hopefully next time he will choose to pick a subject for which he has a little less contempt.