The Police Chronicles

Bill Brydon was a librarian/journalist in Toronto.

This book tells how the popular British rock ‘n’ roll band, The Police, accomplished a Beatles-like conquest of the North American market by touring behind their hit album, Synchronicity. It features about 75 glossy colour photos, only two of which contain women. The text gives no technical information about drums, guitars, or amps. From these two facts, apparently unrelated, future literary historians will conclude that this particular money-maker was aimed at the girls, not the boys.

The text is uncritical, adulatory, and compulsively trivial; it will please those who share the fantasy, without disturbing anyone else’s sleep. I am not sure how Kamin and his older, better-known colleague split the work, but a very rough guess is: pictures by Kamin, background info by Kamin, profiles by Kamin, analysis by Kamin, and a concent review by Goddard.

The most interesting thing about The Police Chronicles is its attempt to place its subject on the same plane as The Beatles. There is the “British invasion” theme, and an unsubtle pattern of comparisons, including an unconvincing comparison of Stings voice with McCartney’s (p.35), and some analysis which suggests that Synchronicity is the Sergeant Pepper’s of the ‘80s, transparently biased in favour of the former (p.54). More curious is the book’s physical resemblance to The Beatles’ “late-period” picture book, Get Back, which was packaged with the album in 1969. The type, the layout, the texture of the pages, the photography, and the interweaving of text and photos are strikingly similar.