Written during the band's second tour and recorded in an amazing 4 weeks (minus several days gigging). The band members have often expressed disappointment over it, going so far as to re-record two songs during a brief, unsuccessful reunion.
Zenyattà Mondatta went to #5 in the U.S. and #1 in the UK and Australia, spurred by the success of the Sting-penned singles "Don't Stand So Close to Me" and "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da". It would later receive glowing reviews from re-assessments in Rolling Stone and Q Magazine, among others, in spite of the fact that this is the least well-received of the five albums by The Police - so much so, it was the only one of their five albums not to obtain a spot on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
The Police embarked on a tour of the world the day of the album's completion, beginning in Belgium and reaching places such as India and Egypt. The album is the last of the Police's early era, influenced by reggae and punk and featuring few musical elements on top of the core guitar, bass, and drums. Perhaps due to the lack of time for writing lyrics, the record has two instrumentals, "The Other Way of Stopping", and the Grammy-winning "Behind My Camel" (a third song, "Voices Inside My Head", is mostly an instrumental except for the words "Voices inside my head/ Echoes of things that you said", which are repeated a couple of times in the middle of the song). "Behind My Camel" was guitarist Andy Summers' first entirely self-penned composition, and it was not popular with the other members of the band. According to Sting, "I hated that song so much that, one day when I was in the studio, I found the tape lying on the table. So I took it around the back of the studio and actually buried it in the garden." Allegedly, Sting was so uninterested in the piece that he refused to play it. Andy Summers managed to coax Stewart Copeland into recording the bit as a duo, and then overdubbed the bass line himself. In Chris Campion's Police biography Walking On The Moon, Police producer Nigel Gray believes that the title was an in-joke by Andy Summers: "He didn't tell me this himself but I'm 98% sure the reason is this: what would you find behind a camel? A monumental pile of shit." The song would go on to win the 1982 Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.
Zenyattà Mondatta is also notable for containing the band's first lyrics ever referring to political events, with Sting's "Driven To Tears" commenting on poverty and Copeland's "Bombs Away" referring to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. These themes would become more prevalent in the Police's next album, Ghost in the Machine.
Six years later the band re-recorded "Don't Stand So Close to Me" and "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da". The first song was released on Every Breath You Take: The Singles, while the other remains unreleased.
Track listing
1. "Don't Stand So Close to Me" 2. "Driven to Tears" 3. "When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around" 4. "Canary in a Coalmine" 5. "Voices Inside My Head" 6. "Bombs Away" 7. "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" 8. "Behind My Camel" 9. "Man in a Suitcase" 10. "Shadows in the Rain" 11. "The Other Way of Stopping"
Chose a gun and threw away the sun.
Now these towns, they all know our name.
I can hear them say"
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