The Police – Flexible Strategies (2018)

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‘Flexible Strategies’: Recovering The Police’s Most Arresting Rarities
A collection of B-sides and rarities, ‘Flexible Strategies’ proves what a versatile group The Police were, and reveals a number of long-lost gems along the way.

Bearing in mind their canon includes enduring hits such as ‘Roxanne’, ‘Message In A Bottle’, ‘Walking On The Moon’ and ‘Every Breath You Take’, it’s safe to say that The Police remain one of rock’s great singles bands. However, as their collection of B-sides and rarities, Flexible Strategies, demonstrates, they also kept a gem or three in reserve when it came to their flipsides.

Issued as part of the band’s exhaustive, career-spanning 6LP box set, Every Move You Make: The Studio Recordings, the vault-scouring collection is extremely welcome, not least because the post-millennial CD reissues of the band’s five studio albums eschewed its 12 standalone B-sides, which have also previously been hard to source digitally.

Largely familiar to the diehards, the material on Flexible Strategies provides a fascinating alternative history of Sting and co’s work, and shows just how rapidly they evolved from punk-era hopefuls of 1977 to the all-conquering rock legends responsible for 1983’s multi-platinum-selling Synchronicity.

Allowing for a few wonderfully eccentric diversions, Flexible Strategies mirrors this remarkable career arc. ‘Can’t Stand Losing You”s frenetic, pumped-up B-side, ‘Dead End Job’, and ‘Walking On The Moon’s beefy, Sex Pistols-esque flip, ‘Visions Of The Night’, both featured in The Police’s earliest live sets, while the manic ‘Landlord’ (a scathing and still frighteningly prescient critique of squat-level living and/or homelessness in London) made for a quixotic, rubber-burning companion for the iconic ‘Message In A Bottle’.

As a unit, The Police will always be associated with Sting’s songwriting prowess, yet Flexible Strategies reminds us that his cohorts also fought hard for their credits. Drummer Stewart Copeland’s ‘De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da’ B-side, ‘A Sermon’, is stuffed with sharp hooks that stand among the best of the group’s work.

Elsewhere, guitarist Andy Summers (whose Zenyatta Mondatta highlight, ‘Behind My Camel’, won a Best Instrumental Grammy in 1982) weighs in with a diverse selection of tracks, including the atmospheric instrumental ‘Shambelle’, the disarmingly frank break-up song ‘Someone To Talk To’ and the brilliantly arcane ‘Friends’: a cheerful song about cannibalism based upon Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi novel Stranger In A Strange Land, and which was originally paired with the chart-topping ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’. Throw in a robust 1983 re-recording of Outlandos D’Amour’s ‘Truth Hits Everybody’ and you’ve got a quirky compendium akin to The Who’s Odds & Sods or The Jam’s Extras, rating as an essential album on its own terms.

Track listing

Dead End Job – 3:35
Landlord – 3:07
Visions Of The Night – 3:06
Friends – 3:36
A Sermon – 2:23
Shambelle – 5:10
Flexible Strategies – 3:42
Low Life – 3:46
Murder By Numbers – 4:33
Truth Hits Everybody – 3:47
Someone To Talk To – 3:05
Once Upon A Daydream – 3:32

Track 1 is from the ‘Can’t Stand Losing You‘ single, which was released by A&M Records in September 1978.

Track 2 is from the ‘Message In A Bottle‘ single, which was released by A&M Records in September 1979.
Track 3 is from the ‘Walking On The Moon‘ single, which was released by A&M Records in November 1979.

Track 4 is from the ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me‘ single, which was released by A&M Records in September 1980.
Track 5 is from the ‘De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da‘ single, which was released by A&M Records in December 1980.

Track 6 is from the ‘Invisible Sun‘ single, which was released by A&M Records in September 1981.
Track 7 is from the ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic‘ single, which was released by A&M Records in October 1981.
Track 8 is from the ‘Spirits In The Material World‘ 7-inch single, which was released by A&M Records in December 1981.

Track 9 was issued as a bonus track on the CD and cassette editions of ‘Synchronicity‘, which was produced by Hugh Padgham/The Police and released by A&M Records on June 17th 1983.
Track 10 is from the ‘Every Breath You Take‘ double 7-inch single, which was released in the U.K. by A&M during May 1983 (AM 117 / AM*01).
Track 11 is from the ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger‘ single, which was released by A&M Records in July 1983.
Track 12 is from the ‘Synchronicity II‘ single, which was released by A&M Records in October 1983.

Notes
Released: Nov 16, 2018
Genre: Rock, Reggae, Pop
Style: Pop Rock, New Wave
Length: 43:36

Label – A&M Records