Extract from the 1st album of The Police, Love Outlandos“Roxanne” remains an unstoppable tube. And will put the British trio peroxidized in orbit. But two years later …
Written from the point of view of a man who falls in love with a prostitute, the title of The Police takes up the name the name of Roxanne, the female heroine of the play by Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac. Would Sting be a connoisseur of French classical literature? Yes and better, the singer-songwriter-bassist-guitarist would have seen on an old poster hung in the hall of a hotel in Paris, in France, where the group had stayed-the group will first play at the Palladium bus then in a deserted bataclan…. If the song fails to rank in the British or French charts, its reissue in 1979, it will reach 12th place in the classification of singles in the United Kingdom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eir7DXJMB8888
It must be said that at the time, the group had no notoriety and their missed passage during the Mont de Marsan festival in 1977 did not predict the radiant future of the formation, a quartet then, with Henry Padovani and Andy Summers on guitars, and Stewart Copeland on drums. And the tooth of the criticisms had been very hard with regard to the English group: Henry Padovani will leave the training just after the festival.
Flashback: At the time, punk had just exploded and all the rockers in the world were trying to hang up the wagons and be associated with this innovative, nihilist rock scene. But The Police came from another planet. Classic musical studies, a big level of interpretation, in short, far from punks that discovered their instrument 3 minutes before entering the studio! Visionaries, the criticisms of the time were limited to saying that it was the worst group of the plateau. Possible, no pirate recording came to contradict this point. But the future will prove them wrong, but it is another story.
