Hot Stamper Pressings of Sting and The Police Available Now
Forget the domestic pressings, forget the lightweight Nautilus Half-Speed, forget whatever lame reissues have come or will come down the pike – if you want to hear this album right, a Hot Stamper UK pressing is the only way to go.
And take it from us, you need to see that little Strawberry marking in the dead wax of your UK pressing to have any hope of hearing audiophile-quality sound.
Why go to all that trouble? Because the album is an absolute classic – it leads off with “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” and never lets up. (Well, toward the end of side two it lets up, but it’s plenty strong before then.)
Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that tend to win our shootouts.
As of 2024, shootouts for this album should be carried out:
How else can you expect to hear this record at its best?
Based on our experience, Zenyatta Mondatta sounds better:
Twin Grammy Awards
Nigel Gray engineered this album as well as the first two by The Police. He was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album for Zenyatta Mondatta and also won two Grammys for producer of Best Rock Performance (“Don’t Stand So Close To Me”) and Best Rock Instrumental (“Behind My Camel”).
On 31 July 2016, the members of The Police; Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland reacted on a social network to Gray’s death writing: “Nigel Gray recorded the first three Police albums, the first two in his converted studio above a dairy in Leatherhead in Surrey. Nigel was a qualified medical doctor who followed his passion into music and was able to use his kindly bedside manner to coax three extraordinarily successful records from a band operating at the time on the tiniest of shoestring budgets. We simply couldn’t have done it without him, that’s the truth”.
5 stars: “Zenyatta contains perhaps the quintessential new wave anthem, the haunting ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’… Zenyatta Mondatta remains one of the finest rock albums of all time.” [That’s a bit much.]
Side One
Don’t Stand So Close to Me
Driven to Tears
When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around
Canary in a Coalmine
Voices Inside My Head
Bombs Away
Side Two
De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da
Behind My Camel
Man in a Suitcase
Shadows in the Rain
The Other Way of Stopping
Further Reading