LYRICS（ISBN=） 英文原版

　　From the first Police album, Outlandos D’Amour, through Sacred
Love, here are the collected lyrics written by Sting, along with
his commentary.

　　Sting is an award-winning singer, songwriter and human rights
activist.

Introduction
Outlandos d’Amour
Reggatta de Blanc
Zenyatta Mondatta
Ghost in the Machine
Synchronicity
The Dream of the Blue Turtles
Nothing Like the Sun
The Soul Cages
Ten Summoner’s Tales
Mercury Falling
Brand New Day
Sacred Love
Index by First Line
Index by Song Title
Photo Credits

　　Publishing my lyrics separately from their musical
accompaniment is something that I’ve studiously avoided until now.
The two, lyrics and music, have always been mutually dependent, in
much the same way as a mannequin and a set of clothes are dependent
on each other; separate them, and what remains is a naked dummy and
a pile of cloth. Nevertheless, the exercise has been an interesting
one, seeing, perhaps for the first time, how successfully the
lyrics survive on their own and inviting the question as to whether
song lyrics are in fact poetry or something else entirely. And
while I’ve never seriously described myself as a poet, the book in
your hands, devoid as it is of any musical notation, looks
suspiciously like a book of poems.
　　So it seems I am entering, with some trepidation, the unadorned
realm of the poet. I have set out my compositions in the sequence
they were written and provided a little background when I thought
it might be illuminating. My wares have neither been sorted nor
dressed in clothes that do not belong to them; indeed, they have
been shorn of the very garments that gave them their shape in the
first place. No doubt some of them will perish in the cold cruelty
of this new environment, and yet others may prove more resilient
and become perhaps more beautiful in their naked state. I can’t
predict the outcome, but I have taken this risk knowingly and,
while no one in their right mind should ever attempt to set “The
Waste Land” to music, in the hopeful words of T. S. Eliot, “These
fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
　　—Sting
　　OUTLANDOS D’AMOUR (1978)
　　Next to You
　　So Lonely
　　Roxanne
　　Hole in My Life
　　Peanuts
　　Can’t Stand Losing You
　　Truth Hits Everybody
　　Born in the ’50s
　　Visions of the Night
　　Our first album as the Police was recorded piecemeal in a rundown
studio above a dairy in Leatherhead. We had been together as a band
for roughly a year by then. Some of the songs had been written for
my previous band, Last Exit, and adapted for the new one. Others
had been composed while touring, and some were created during
rehearsals or while recording.
　　We weren’t signed to a record company yet, and none of us had any
money, so we used some secondhand tapes that we found in our
manager’s garage and recorded very late at night, for an even
cheaper studio rate: moonlighting only after another band had
left.
　　We’d work until the coffee ran out and we were bleary-eyed and
delirious with exhaustion and the absurdity of our arguments.
　　I’d drive back to London in my battered old Citro?n in a kind of
euphoria, with these tunes thundering in my head, yelling
improvised lyrics at the top of my voice to the empty road and the
stars twinkling sceptically above the rooftops.
　　I’d get back to my flat in Bayswater just as the sun was coming
up through the trees in Hyde Park, thinking that these were some of
the best days and weeks of my life. I’d try to scribble down
whatever I’d been declaiming in the car and then go to sleep for
the rest of the morning.
　　The afternoon would be spent trying to make sense of these
fragments and working on them until early evening so that I would
have something presentable that night.
　　I was happy because I’d dreamed about this, this making of an
album, for as long as I’d owned a guitar, strummed my first chord,
and rhymed my first couplet. It was almost too much to
absorb.
　　There’s no grand concept at work in this album, just a loose
collection of dreams, fragments and fantasies, low doggerel and
high dudgeon, sense and nonsense, anger and romance, all welded
together by the bluff and bluster of a new band.
　　We were insane in our optimism, and we were never happier.
　　Next to You
　　I can’t stand it for another day
　　When you live so many miles away
　　Nothing here is gonna make me stay
　　You took me over, let me find a way
　　I sold my house
　　I sold my motor, too
　　All I want is to be next to you
　　I’d rob a bank
　　Maybe steal a plane
　　You took me over
　　Think I’m goin’ insane
　　What can I do
　　All I want is to be next to you
　　What can I do
　　All I want is to be next to you
　　I’ve had a thousand girls or maybe more
　　But I’ve never felt like this before
　　But I just don’t know what’s come over me
　　You took me over, take a look at me
　　What can I do
　　All I want is to be next to you
　　What can I do
　　All I want is to be next to you
　　All I want is to be next to you
　　All I want is to be next to you
　　All I want is to be next to you
　　So many times I used to give a sign
　　Got this feeling, gonna lose my mind
　　When all it is is just a love affair
　　You took me over, baby, take me there
　　What can I do
　　All I want is to be next to you
　　What can I do
　　All I want is to be next to you
　　What can I do
　　All I want is to be next to you
　　What can I do
　　All I want is to be next to you
　　All I want is to be next to you . . .
　　*****
　　I wrote these lyrics while I was in Last Exit and then grafted
them shamelessly onto the chords from Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No
Cry.” This kind of musical juxtaposition—the lilting rhythm of the
verses separated by monolithic slabs of straight rock and
roll—pleased the hell out of me. That we could achieve it
effortlessly just added to the irony of a song about misery being
sung so joyously.
　　It was something of a coup when someone pointed out to BBC
television that, because of my poor diction, I seemed to be singing
the name of a popular TV presenter, Sue Lawley, and not “So
lonely.” It was played on national television as an homage to Sue,
but we didn’t complain. Blessings are often unexpected.
　　So Lonely
　　Well, someone told me yesterday
　　That when you throw your love away
　　You act as if you don’t care
　　You look as if you’re going somewhere
　　But I just can’t convince myself
　　I couldn’t live with no one else
　　And I can only play that part
　　And sit and nurse my broken heart
　　So lonely
　　So lonely
　　So lonely
　　So lonely
　　So lonely
　　So lonely
　　So lonely
　　So lonely . . .
　　Now no one’s knocked upon my door
　　For a thousand years or more
　　All made up and nowhere to go
　　Welcome to this one-man show
　　Just take a seat they’re always free
　　No surprise no mystery
　　In this theatre that I call my soul
　　I always play the starring role
　　So lonely
　　So lonely
　　So lonely
　　So lonely
　　So lonely
　　So lonely
　　So lonely
　　So lonely . . .
　　A friend of mine bought a sheet of lyrics for “Roxanne” that had
turned up in a collection of memorabilia, and he asked me to verify
if it was genuine.
　　”Well, that’s my handwriting,” I said, “and those are my
doodles”: three clocks–one at five to four, another at ten past
six, and one sidelong that looks to be showing eight o’clock–a
sundial, an hourglass, five sets of five-bar gates that prisoners
use to mark the passing of the days, some kind of whirlwind vortex
spinning in the top right-hand corner, and a spear or an arrowhead.
I imagine I was drawing these as I was listening back to various
takes of the vocals, but I don’t know what they mean.
　　I wrote “Roxanne” in Paris in 1977. The band was staying in a
seedy hotel near the Gare Saint-Lazare. I had a set of descending
chords starting in G minor and a melancholy frame of mind. Inspired
by the romance and sadness of Edmond Rostand’s great play Cyrano de
Bergerac and the prostitutes on the street below my window,
“Roxanne” came to life.
　　I’ve sung this song on most of the nights of my life since then,
and it’s my job to sing it with the same freshness and enthusiasm
as if I’d written it that afternoon and not thirty years
previously. I always manage to find something new in it and I’m
still grateful.
　　Roxanne
　　Roxanne
　　You don’t have to put on the red light
　　Those days are over
　　You don’t have to sell your body to the night
　　Roxanne
　　You don’t have to wear that dress tonight
　　Walk the streets for money
　　You don’t care if it’s wrong or if it’s right
　　Roxanne
　　You don’t have to put on the red light
　　Roxanne
　　You don’t have to put on the red light
　　Roxanne (Put on the red light)
　　Roxanne (Put on the red light)
　　Roxanne (Put on the red light)
　　Roxanne (Put on the red light)
　　Roxanne (Put on the red light)
　　Roxanne
　　I loved you since I knew you
　　I wouldn’t talk down to you
　　I have you to tell just how I feel
　　I won’t share you with another boy
　　I know my mind is made up
　　So put away your makeup
　　Told you once I won’t tell you again
　　It’s a bad way
　　Roxanne
　　You don’t have to put on the red light
　　Roxanne
　　You don’t have to put on the red light
　　Roxanne (Put on the red light)
　　Roxanne (Put on the red light)
　　Roxanne (Put on the red light)
　　*****
　　Copyright © 2007 by Steerpike (Overseas) Limited.
((etc))