Music / The Dream of the Blue Turtles

"Let me set the battlements on fire."

The Dream of the Blue Turtles, released in 1985 through A&M Records, is the debut studio album by English pop rock musician Sting. Following the Troubled Production of The Police's fifth album, Synchronicity, the band went on an extended hiatus. Sting himself came to believe that the band had reached their artistic peak with their 1983 Shea Stadium concert during the album's supporting tour, and thus decided to eke out a career for himself, independent of Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland. Consequently, following the tour's conclusion in March of 1984, he gathered together various session musicians who could play to his longtime jazz influences, spending a year putting together a record that could establish himself as an artistic force in his own right.

Musically, the album acts as a continuation of Synchronicity's Jazz Fusion direction, amplifying the various elements and approaches of the Police album, right down to featuring a re-recording of the Zenyattà Mondatta cut "Shadows in the Rain". At the same time, the subject matter becomes more removed from Sting's personal life, having had time to overcome the Creator Breakdown that influenced most of the content on Synchronicity. The subject matter on The Dream of the Blue Turtles is much more esoteric as a result, ranging from typical love songs to Protest Songs against the Cold War and the Margaret Thatcher administration to a rebuttal of the Synchronicity single "Every Breath You Take".

Contrary to his labeling as a solo musician (and the fact that he wrote every track on the album himself apart from "Russians"), Sting was adamant not to call the resulting product a "solo album," feeling that it devalued the contribution of the various session musicians with whom he'd collaborated. This insistence would extend to the album packaging itself, which included a lengthy blurb that emphasized the music as a collaborative effort rather than purely solo material. Despite this, Sting was antsy about the album's release, having made the decision to break off from the Police at the height of their success. Nonetheless, it would end up a major commercial success, topping the charts in Australia and the Netherlands, peaking at No. 3 in the UK, and hitting No. 2 in the US. It would later be certified triple-platinum in the US, double-platinum in the UK, platinum in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and New Zealand, and gold in Hong Kong and Spain. This success would motivate Sting to further explore a solo career once the Police disbanded following the end of their hiatus.

The Dream of the Blue Turtles was supported by six singles: "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free", "Love Is the Seventh Wave", "Fortress Around Your Heart", "Russians", "Moon Over Bourbon Street", and "We Work the Black Seam". The album's recording and supporting tour would also be documented in the 1985 documentary Bring On the Night.

Tracklist:

Side One

1. "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" (4:14)
2. "Love Is the Seventh Wave" (3:30)
3. "Russians" (3:57)
4. "Children's Crusade" (5:00)
5. "Shadows in the Rain" (4:56)

Side Two

1. "We Work the Black Seam" (5:40)
2. "Consider Me Gone" (4:21)
3. "The Dream of the Blue Turtles" (1:15)
4. "Moon Over Bourbon Street" (3:59)
5. "Fortress Around Your Heart" (4:39)

There is a deeper trope than this, swelling in the world:

• Answer Song: "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" was written as one to "Every Breath You Take" off of Synchronicity. Sting was mortified by the number of people who interpreted the Stalker with a Crush song as a standard love song, and consequently wrote "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" as an "antidote."
• Book Ends:
  • The album opens and closes with songs that act as Spiritual Antitheses to "Every Breath You Take".
  • The music video to "Fortress Around Your Heart" opens with Sting hiding away in a bunker, with a group of executives popping in to pay him to shoot a performance. The video ends with him taking his payment from the shoot and gluing it to the wall of his bunker.
• Credits Gag: The liner notes list Vic Garbarini as "instant resident critic and whipping boy" and describes Miles Copeland and Kim Turner as having "played the managers."
• Drugs Are Bad: The last verse of "Children's Crusade" compares the lives lost to drug addiction to the soldiers who died during World War I.
• Face on the Cover: A blue-tinted monochrome photo of Sting; photos of him also appear on each of the album's singles.
• Idiosyncratic Cover Art: The covers for "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" and "Love Is the Seventh Wave" both provide variations on the main album's cover. The former is simply the album cover with the title swapped out, while the latter features a new photo of Sting on a beach and a water effect added to the border.
• Insistent Terminology: Sting was adamant on not calling this a solo album, emphasizing the collaborative contributions of the various session musicians involved.
• Instrumentals: The Title Track.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" directly advocates practicing this, as an "antidote" to the Obsession Song subject matter of the oft-misinterpreted "Every Breath You Take".
• Lyrical Dissonance: "Shadows in the Rain" is a jaunty jazz-pop track about being debilitatingly insane.
• Miniscule Rocking: The Title Track clocks in at just a minute and 15 seconds.
• Mythology Gag: "Love Is the Seventh Wave" closes with a self-parody of "Every Breath You Take", where he sings "Every breath you take, every move you make, every cake you bake, every leg you break".
• One-Word Title: "Russians"
• Performance Video: Both "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" and "Fortress Around Your Heart", with the latter including an extra framing device of Sting being pulled out of hiding to record the video.
• Perilous Power Source: "We Work the Black Seam" depicts nuclear power as this, noting the prolonged lethality of Carbon 14 and warning that the power plants' operators can't truly control their own energy. In a contemporary interview, Sting clarified the song's meaning by voicing his belief that neither nuclear energy nor coal power (the latter of which he would more vocally oppose in later years) were ideal sources of power. Ironically, later findings would point to nuclear power being far safer than how the song portrays it.
• Protest Song:
  • "Russians" is an ode against the escalation of the Cold War, warning that the people who will suffer most from it are innocent families and their children. In the wake of the song's single release, Sting asserted that it wasn't meant to be pro-Soviet, but rather "pro-children."
  • "We Work the Black Seam" protests the Margaret Thatcher administration's hostile response towards the Miners' Strike, which spanned the entirety of the album's production.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • "Love Is the Seventh Wave" was inspired by a day Sting spent in Barbados hanging out with some surfers, who explained to him that every seventh wave is the strongest.
  • "Russians" was inspired by a night Sting spent at Columbia University watching pirated broadcasts from the Soviet Union via a satellite receiver built by inventor Ken Schaffer. At that hour, the only thing on was children's programming, with Sting being impressed by the quality of the material and realizing that Russian families care for their children just as British and American ones do.
• Rearrange the Song:
  • "Shadows in the Rain" is a re-recording of a track from Zenyattà Mondatta, featuring a faster tempo and jazzier, more upbeat arrangement.
  • "We Work the Black Seam" is a reworking of "Savage Beast", a piece from Sting's pre-Police band Last Exit.
  • In the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Sting recorded an acoustic version of "Russians" as a charity single, donating the proceeds to humanitarian and medical aid in Ukraine.
• Roger Rabbit Effect: The music video for "Love Is the Seventh Wave" integrates live-action footage of Sting with animated backgrounds designed by students at Latchmere Junior School.
• Sampling: "Russians" includes samples of both a broadcast from Russian news show Vremya and communications from the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.
• Sanity Slippage Song: "Shadows in the Rain", narrated by an asylum patient who repeatedly asserts that he's mentally stable despite being delusional and suffering from severe anterograde amnesia.
• Shout-Out:
  • "Russians" interpolates the "Romance" theme from Sergei Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé suite; Prokofiev receives a writing credit as a result.
  • "Consider Me Gone" quotes William Shakespeare's 35th sonnet with the lines "Roses have thorns, and shining waters mud/And cancer lurks deep in the sweetest bud/Clouds and eclipses stain the moon and the sun."
  • "Moon Over Bourbon Street" was loosely inspired by Interview With the Vampire.
• Spiritual Antithesis: "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" was intentionally created as this to "Every Breath You Take". Instead of being a deceptively tranquil Obsession Song, it's an upbeat piece centered around the I Want My Beloved to Be Happy trope. The theme is echoed in "Fortress Around Your Heart".
• Studio Chatter:
  • "Shadows in the Rain" opens with drummer Omar Hakim bemusedly asking what key the song is supposed to be in. As the music starts, he groans as no one answers him.
  • As the music ends on the instrumental Title Track, the entire band cracks up.
  • Sting howls like a wolf at the end of "Moon Over Bourbon Street".
• Title Track: "The Dream of the Blue Turtles"
• Variant Cover: Some releases of "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" feature an alternate cover featuring one of the photos from the album liner notes depicting Sting striking a pose. This cover is used to represent Sting's solo career in The Police's music video for "Don't Stand So Close to Me '86".
• The X of Y: The Dream of the Blue Turtles (and by extension the Title Track).
• War Is Hell: "Children's Crusade" compared World War I to the actual Children's Crusade, depicting it as a stain upon England's image while nothing that, by the standards of the album's time, the soldiers who fought the conflict were ridiculously young.

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