Were The Police a Punk Band?

PUBLISHED:

UPDATED:

Are spiky hair and guitar-slinging necessary or sufficient conditions to qualify as “punk rock”?

While it may be hard to imagine that a group that has over 1 billion plays on Spotify was ever considered a “punk” band, the sentiment that The Police were a punk band that somehow had all of the “right stuff” to transcend punk rock and become legends is considered to be fairly uncontroversial – even their Wikipedia page declares that The Police started out as punk band. I mean, just look at how spiky Sting’s hair was back in 1977 – how could that not be punk?

Then again, it may be that defining The Police as punks who managed to break out of a scene that seemed doomed to mainstream commercial failure is really an act of revisionist history, and that a closer look at their origins may reveal an entirely different story. Let’s do some sleuthing and see if we can get to the bottom of the question of whether or not The Police were ever truly a punk rock band.

One particularly interesting bit of history is that Stewart Copeland wrote and recorded a punk-ish album under a pseudonym, Klark Kent. Klark Kent songs were, in his own words, “too stupid” for Sting to sing, so instead of being Police songs, Copeland did the D.I.Y. thing and played all of the instruments himself and self-released a single and full-length album.

Curiously, while The Police’s early singles languished in obscurity, Klark Kent got the attention the B.B.C., who were scouting around London for punk acts to showcase. Klark Kent (Copeland) ended up appearing Top of the Pops with The Police and friends as his backing band, all of them masked and looking incredibly weird.

Stewart Copeland has also stated that The Police’s early single, “Fall Out” (1977), was self-recorded, and that Sting, Copeland, and then guitarist Henry Padovini packaged, promoted, and sold copies of the single themselves – very much another D.I.Y. move.

These are all pretty interesting tidbits, so let’s dig in and examine the evidence for and against The Police being a punk band in more detail.

Reasons to think that The Police started out as a punk band:

Reasons to think that The Police were never a “real” punk band:

Our Verdict

The Police were definitely not a real punk rock band. However, despite their obvious shamming and scamming to score gigs (and potential fame), it’s pretty clear that some of their early output is inspired by punk, while not being punk rock itself.

It’s hard to ignore the influence that the meteoric rise of the punk scene in late 1970’s London had on up and coming musicians. Understandably, many of them wanted in on the action and fun (and chaos!), and lucky for some of them, so did record labels – a trend that would emerge again in early 1990’s Seattle.

Bottom line – while The Police were definitely not a real punk band, they were influenced by the genre in positive ways, and it’s at least partly responsible for the uniqueness of their sound, and their massive success.

Never miss a story

Sign up for new punk rock stories every month.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy.