The Greatest Songs Ever! Roxanne

Back on October 20, 1977, Sting, the beloved Tantric sex god, savior of the rainforest and Commander of the British Empire, was merely another singer in another Brit punk band. Except he was older than most.

At the nearly elderly age of 26, he knew that if his trio, the Police, didn’t make it soon, he wouldn’t have many other chances for stardom. The Police were playing that night in the Nashville Club, an unassuming little Paris venue, and, to pass the time until the show, Sting took a stroll through the city’s notorious red-light district.

Fascinated by the sight of prostitutes openly plying their trade, he began to imagine what it might be like to fall in love with one of these lipsticked ladies of the street. By the time he walked back to the band’s fleabag hotel, the notion was turning into a song. Police guitarist Andy Summers recalled that Sting played him some ideas for the track before they’d even left Paris.

The band’s independently released debut single, “Fall Out,” had been an unmitigated disaster, so when they went into producer Nigel Gray’s Surrey Sound Studios in Leatherhead just outside London, on January 13, 1978, they were suffering an acute case of career anxiety.

Surrey Sound had been chosen largely for its rock-bottom rates of £10 (about $19) an hour, but with the Police still on the breadline, even this minimal cost was financed by drummer Stewart Copeland’s opinionated music entrepreneur brother, Miles Copeland, who expected to see a return on his money.

Among the tracks they recorded was the song had Sting started in Paris, now named “Roxanne” after the gorgeous fantasy heroine in Edmond Rostand’s 1897 novel, Cyrano de Bergerac.

“I was just about to sing the first line,” remembers Sting, “when I noticed a stand–up piano. I was tired, I’d been up all night, so I just sat down. I thought the piano lid was closed, but it was open, so I wound up playing this incredible chord with my arse. It was this sort of atonal cluster that went nicely against the chords we were playing. We thought it was funny, so we left it in.”

As Nigel Gray recalls, despite that lucky start, getting the song just right took some doing. “Because there are several long gaps, it was difficult to get everybody to come back in on the beat. I finally did it by standing on the loudspeaker cabinet so they could all see me, and conducting them.”

When the song was done, Sting regarded “Roxanne” as little more than a throwaway, because “the song was such an anachronism. Compared with our usual material it was slow, quiet and melodic.” He still felt that way on March 21, when Miles Copeland turned up at Surrey Sound to see how his investment was shaping up.

“They were all very depressed at the end of the session because I had ripped apart just about every number they’d done,” remembers Copeland. “I asked them if they had anything else and they said, ‘Well, there’s one more song but we’re not going to play it to you,’ as they figured I wouldn’t like it. That song turned out to be ‘Roxanne’ and I immediately thought it was fantastic.”

The next day, Copeland took the track to A&M Records and secured a deal to have it released. Being a shrewd operator, he knew that a virtually unknown band wouldn’t attract a large advance, so he didn’t even ask for one. “I said, ‘No advance, no upfront money, nothing — just give me the highest royalty you can possibly pay and let’s go do it.’”

“Roxanne” was released in the U.S. and U.K. in April, but despite nearly universal good reviews and Mick Jagger’s declaring it his favorite single at the time, it flopped, largely because Radio One, the U.K.’s national radio station, considered the lyrics too vulgar for airplay.

When A&M re-released it in the U.S. in February 1979, there was little promotion, and the band was even advised not to tour the U.S. because it wouldn’t be worthwhile. Defying such warnings, the headstrong Police went ahead. They traveled by station wagon, and all three band members shared one motel room. “When we first came to America,” Sting says, “nobody knew who the fuck we were. I mean nobody. Nobody gave a fuck about [“Roxanne”]. Nobody played it.”

Six gigs into the tour, when the Police pulled into Austin, Texas, on March 7, everything started to turn around. A local DJ took a liking to “Roxanne” and started playing it. “They played it on the radio station and people phoned up and said they liked it,” recalls Sting. “The station next door picked it up and the town next to that picked it up. And we found ourselves with a hit.”

“Roxanne” entered the Billboard Top 40 on April 7, spent 13 weeks on the charts and, though it peaked at a humble 32, launched one of the biggest bands of the ’80s and soon achieved classic status.

Notable cover versions have come from George Michael, King’s X and Incubus, whose guitarist, Mike Einzinger, points out that “Roxanne” played a part in the creation of their 1999 song “Stellar.” “When I wrote the guitar parts I wasn’t really thinking of what was going to go on underneath it as far as the rhythm section,” he explains. “Our drummer, Josi, and Dirk, our bass player, came up with this “Roxanne”-type thing and it just fit.”

“Roxanne” was memorably performed by Eddie Murphy in his 1982 smash comedy 48 Hours and reinterpreted by Ewan McGregor in 2001’s Moulin Rouge. And can anybody seriously doubt that the 1987 Steve Martin–Daryl Hannah movie, a modern re-telling of the Cyrano DeBergerac story, would have been called Roxanne if the song hadn’t become so well-loved?

It’s only fitting then, that 19 years after the Police’s bitter breakup, “Roxanne” would kick off their brief reunion performance at the 2003 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.