The Police lasted barely seven years. They made five albums, became for a while the biggest band in the world, and then stopped — deliberately, at the summit, which almost no band achieves.

They were an unlikely three: an American drummer, a schoolteacher and jazz bassist from the north-east of England, and a guitarist nearly a decade older who had spent the sixties in London's rhythm-and-blues clubs. They met in 1977, when the only door into the music business was punk, so they bleached their hair and called themselves a punk band — a disguise nobody believed for long, because all three could play far too well. What they found instead was a sound built out of space rather than volume: three players, nowhere to hide, and what other musicians could never quite copy was the silence.

Sting wrote nearly all of it, and he has a one-sentence theory of music that explains a great deal of what you will hear tonight.

“For me the essence of all music is surprise. When I listen to a piece of music, if I'm not surprised within the first eight bars, I've stopped listening.”

The surprises are everywhere in this music, and they are not only in the sometimes unusual chord changes. They are in the grooves — beats that arrive where you don't expect them, or refuse to arrive at all. They are in riffs and melodic figures nobody else would have invented. And they are in the way a song will slip into a new key partway through a verse without ever appearing to move. Above all he loves the bridge: the passage in the middle where a song changes direction and the singer changes his mind. Listen for it tonight in Every Breath You Take.

Click HERE to read more about the story of The Police and their creative process.