Rounding out our spotlight on The Police this week, for such a highly successful band who produced a plethora of classic/accessible hits, they could also get pretty weird at times. Perhaps the best example of that is “Mother”, a whacked-out little number that particularly stands out given it arrives near the midway point of the band’s most (commercially) successful album, 1983’s Synchronicity.
Andy Summers (who penned the song) had this to say about his peculiar addition to the album: “…it was written kind of ironic, to be kind of funny, but crazy. It’s inspired by Captain Beefheart to some extent. It’s something that’s really off-the-wall. It was very bizarre – I think it freaked the record company out. When the album came out, we had all the press in the world watching us and talking about it. The reviews came in, and that song got written about so much because it was so off-the-wall and so ballsy to do that, because the band was having so much commercial success.”
