Ten reasons why The Police's Every Breath You Take is a timeless hit

8:26The Police’s blockbuster single Every Breath You Take turns 40

When you think of the most impactful years in pop music history, 1983 has to be right up there. It was the year Michael Jackson's Thriller hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in February and stayed on the throne for the next 37 weeks. David Bowie dropped the biggest-selling album of his career in Let's Dance. And a nascent MTV was making multi-platinum eye candy out of freaky fashionistas like Prince, Culture Club, Duran Duran, and Cyndi Lauper.

But in the midst of all these big sounds and bigger hair, The Police's Every Breath You Take managed to worm its way into the darkest recesses of our collective psyche en route to becoming the top-selling single of 1983 — quite a feat for a moody, mid-tempo track that's essentially about stalking your ex-lover. The song also propelled the chart-topping success of the UK group's fifth and ultimately final album, Synchronicity, which was released 40 years ago this week.

To mark the occasion, music critic Maura Johnston joined host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to talk about the impact Every Breath You Take had on pop music in the '80s, and its enduring appeal four decades on. From that conversation (and some supplemental sleuthing), we've extracted 10 key facts about this creepy yet undeniably catchy song.

For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

1. It's got one of the most iconic guitar arpeggios of all time

"It's one of that era's defining sounds," says Johnston, "right up there with the punchy opening synths of [Madonna's] Material Girl, or that lurking intro to [Michael Jackson's] Billie Jean."

WATCH | Official music video for Every Breath You Take:

2. Its success is inextricable from the advent of MTV

"By 1983, MTV had expanded enough in the States to be a formidable promoter of music," Johnston says. "It was essentially national radio. The Police were already mainstays of the channel, but the video for Every Breath You Take was a really striking black-and-white clip. It was directed by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, who were establishing themselves as innovators in the music video realm. They did [Duran Duran's] Girls on Film, and they would go on to do other videos that were very visually striking as well."

3. It's a very popular song at weddings — though it probably shouldn't be

After all, its primary lyrics ("Every breath you take/ And every move you make/ Every bond you break/ Every step you take/ I'll be watching you") are more a cause for a restraining order than a romantic first dance. As Johnston reminds us: "In 1983, Sting himself said, 'I think it's a nasty little song, really rather evil. It's about jealousy and surveillance and ownership.'" (In a 1996 interview with Guitar magazine, Sting further discredited his most famous song, calling it "a generic, rule-obeying song … I suppose you'd have to say there's nothing original about it except its ambiguity… ...and I think that's its power.")

WATCH | Every Breath You Take (Cover) Live at Mandarin Oriental Hotel:

4. But you could be forgiven for thinking it's a love song

"Listening to just the chorus of a song [without context] is a pop music tradition," Johnston says. "It's like when Kurt Cobain sang, 'they know not what it means.' But even though Sting called it a 'rule-obeying' song when he was disdaining it, I think that's a big part of why it sounds beautiful: the arpeggios, the gently undulating tempo ... Sting does that mostly controlled vocal performance and he does have a really beautiful voice. It really is one of those songs that can be misconstrued as describing passion of the non-unsettling kind."

5. And if you were led to believe Every Breath You Take is a sentimental tune, blame Puff Daddy ...

... who famously flipped the track into a tear-jerking tribute to The Notorious B.I.G. with 1997's ubiquitous single I'll Be Missing You. According to Johnston, that remake is a big part of the reason why Every Breath You Take is easily divorced from its dark original context.

"It introduced the song to an entirely new generation of youth who may not have been around for that first era of MTV, but who were certainly around for its other imperial era [in the 1990s], when it was just minting hits, and it was on the verge of the teen-pop boom. And [Puffy's remake] made the spirit of the song a lot more celebratory. It was celebrating the life of The Notorious B.I.G., and any jealousies that Sting might have held onto all those years kind of dissipated by him performing the song at award shows with Puff Daddy."

WATCH | Official music video for I'll Be Missing You:

6. Also, Every Breath You Take is not just a song about stalking

"As it turned out, it was also a metaphor for Sting's extremely complicated feelings about the internal dynamics of The Police, which dated all the way back to when the band was named by [drummer] Stewart Copeland," Johnston says. "Sting hated the name. But in his 2003 memoir, Broken Music, he was like, 'I didn't say anything.' So that passive aggression was just building and building from the start."

7. In 2019, the performing rights organization BMI named Every Breath You Take the most-performed song in its entire catalogue

By that point, the song had been played on radio an estimated 15 million times.

WATCH | Sting Accepts The Award For "Every Breath You Take" Becoming BMI's Most Performed Song:

8. In 2021, the song reached over 1 billion plays on Spotify

As of late last year, it was just one of nine songs from the 1980s to cross that threshold.

9. In 2022, its music video reached over 1 billion views on YouTube

It was the 225th video to achieve that milestone, and just the seventh from the 1980s to do so.

10. Beyond the stats, the song's universal appeal is supported by science

In 2021, a team of Danish researchers studied over 4 million tracks on Spotify to determine what sort of songs are most popular at specific times of day, and they discovered that Every Breath You Take scored consistently at all hours, earning it the distinction of being the most universal, well-rounded song in pop history. "It was commonly listened to at every time of the day, which [researchers] attributed to its melodic and rhythmic qualities," Johnston says. "Although one of the researchers said in their findings, 'it's a very middle-of-the-road type song,' which actually must have been a perverse victory for Sting, who's said the song is generic. So I guess, mission accomplished?"

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Maura Johnston produced by Stuart Berman.