Music Arcades: The Police: Greatest Hits

As The Smiths coincided exactly with my years at full-time university, so The Police's career extended across my teenage years at school. I owned copies of their first two albums among the first 30 or so that I ever bought, but sold or swapped them as my interest waned around the time of the third one. A couple of years later, as I became the over-earnest student you first met, it was dear old Sting and his songs that first introduced me to Arthur Koestler — Janus and The Sleepwalkers being formative influences.

Then, for 15 years or so I barely gave The Police a thought, until one of those moments when you hear an old song in a new context and it sounds wonderful all over again. I can't remember exactly which song it was, but I the time and place are clear: it was the first evening of the holiday M and I had in New York in June 1999, and someone selected The Police from the jukebox in a bar.

At that moment I resolved to buy one of their compilations, and did so within ten days of our return. Of course, I never enjoyed the music then as I had in that three minutes under the influence of jetlag and a new city. But I still like 10 of the 16 songs (specifically tracks 1-6 and 10-13). In fact those 10 songs are all you need, in my universe, to cover all of The Police's career. Much of the rest is just trimming and padding, but the white reggae of Walking on the Moon and Bed's Too Big Without You stands up remarkably well.

Hard to avoid wistful-yet-clichéd reflection on days when songs at the top of the charts actually sounded OK. It's a conditioned reflex.