DON’T MESS WITH THE MAGIC

BACK IN THE so-called glory years of the record industry, label executives often came off as some bizarre personality fusion of Stalin and Santa Claus. Recording artists would often see the benevolent side of slaps on the backs, manipulative but encouraging verbal cheerleading (“We’re gonna make you a star, kid!”) and a promotional machine that appeared to have love for their albums alone. Of course, if an artist ever had the gumption to request an audit of their royalty account, these smiling faces would transform into fiery demons looking to obliterate their career with a scorched-earth intensity. These very same execs also loved to embrace almost superstitious truisms about “things that need to happen to create a hit act or identify a dog.”

One of these prophetic markers was the all-important third album. To understand this concept, you need to shift your consciousness back a few decades to an era when major labels actually invested in talent and sought to groom artists for success. Typically, a record label would “carry” a band’s losses through albums one and two, but if they didn’t score significant chart and/or sales action with album three, they might be cut loose from the corporate umbilical cord, often never to be heard from again.

For the Police, that line in the sand was their 1980 album, Zenyatta Mondatta.

“It was a crazy and bizarre time,” Andy Summers remembers. “We had some good hits off of our first two albums, and we were doing well in the States, but we hadn’t broken wide open there yet. You can’t believe how much pressure there was for us was perceived as the possible breakthrough album.”