The Very Best of Sting & The Police

by

The Police and Sting

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Music: 4.5 stars; Compilation: 3.5 stars.

Saw Sting in concert a few weeks back (surprisingly strong set with LOTS of Police-nuggets such as Bed's Too Big Without You etc.) and that lead me to revisit this album. This was rushed out in 1997 as a result of P.Diddy's monster hit "Missing You", sampling "Every Breath You Take".

"The Very Best of Sting and the Police" (18 tracks, 78 min.) is "politically correct" in that it brings an equal number of Police hits and Sting solo-hits (9 each). It has a lot of things going for it: first and foremost, much of the music is outstanding. Best of all is the inclusion of "So Lonely", a major hit which somehow was omitted from The Police's "Every Breath You Take: The Classics". This can directly be attributed to using the full extent of a single CD capacity. The sound quality is surprisingly good as well. What is very unfortunate is that all 18 songs are mixed and matched without any apparent rhyme or reason. Thus we go from the Police's "Can't Stand Losing You" directly into Sting's "An Englishman in New York. Say what? Or we go from Sting's "Seven Days" into the Police's "Walking on the Moon"! Why couldn't they simply present the songs in chronological order? That said, there IS a lot of great music on this CD. It's simply up to you to play it in an order that makes more sense and pleases the ear more.