Product Description

Sting had a lot to prove on his first post-Police effort, and he proved himself up to the task of establishing a distinctive identity as a solo artist. Instead of replicating his reggae-tinged Police style, he ventured into new realms, hiring top drawer American jazz musicians like Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland and drum monster Omar Hakim to accompany him on the kind of harmonically sophisticated (though decidedly non-jazz) tunes he'd begun working on towards the end of the Police's lifetime (see SYNCHRONICITY). There's still a touch of reggae on the open-hearted "Love Is the Seventh Wave", and even a funked-up version of the formerly abstract Police tune "Shadows In The Rain", but most of the tunes here (except the pop smash "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" are the kind of literate, adult-friendly sophisto-pop that would become a template for his subsequent solo recordings. BLUE TURTLES still stands as one of his most memorable albums.

Track Listing

1. If You Love Somebody Set Them Free
2. Love Is The Seventh Wave
3. Russians
4. Children's Crusade
5. Shadows In The Rain
6. We Work The Black Seam
7. Consider Me Gone
8. The Dream Of The Blue Turtles
9. Moon Over Bourbon Street
10. Fortress Around Your Heart
11. If You Love Somebody Set Them Free

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11098 in Music
• Released on: 2001-06-11
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Enhanced
• Running time: 53 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
From one spin of The Dream of the Blue Turtles, Sting's first solo release, it's obvious that for him there would be life beyond the Police. Teamed with a band of top jazz players, he presents his musical visions that had gone unrealised while he was still constrained by his former ensemble. In style and subject matter, it's a decidedly diverse collection of songs and the playing is excellent throughout. The love songs are mostly focused on endings or escapes, and it's quite possible to interpret much of the imagery in reference to the bitter break-up of the Police. Sting's concern with history and politics is in evidence: he makes a father's plea for sanity and restraint in the nuclear age, takes up for the UK's much-abused coal miners, and relates the savage stupidity of World War I to the destructive effects of adolescent heroin addiction. Songs that seem elaborately constructed and recorded contrast with others that are presented as one-take jams. Seen as a whole, The Dream of the Blue Turtles is eclectic, ambitious--sometimes pretentious--but altogether worth owning. --Al Massa

Customer Reviews

Mixed bag...
There are two songwriters on this album - the Sting who writes clunking all-too-obvious political songs - the awful "Russians" (lazy unpoetic rhymes like Precedent / President, and Ideology / Biology...! The good bit - the tune - is taken from a classical composer) and "We Work the Black Seam"; and then the Sting who creates wonderful songs as "Fortress Around Your Heart" and "Moon Over Bourbon Street" (with its tune borrowed from the old jazz standard "Autumn Leaves"). The musicianship is excellent - Marsalis and Co cannot put a foot wrong and produce music you will never hear in the charts. A good start then, and Sting would go on to better things with Nothing Like the Sun and The Soul Cages - a rare English talent indeed. Just drop the sixth form politics please...

"Set the battlements on fire."
In his 2003 autobiography, 'Broken Music', Sting wrote, "That the band [The Police] would break up at the pinnacle of its career when our position seemed virtually unassailable, surprised everyone but me. I saw my own future very clearly outside of the band, because I wanted more freedom. ... I wanted to make music that wasn't tied to the limitations of a three-piece band, where I didn't have to compromise my own standards as a songwriter." 'The Dream of the Blue Turtles' was Sting's first attempt at achieving solo recognition in this way.

Sting's first album is an eclectic bag of decent songs with one outstanding gem. Intelligent lyrics rub shoulders with seasoned musicianship. He has an eye for pale landscapes - both internal and external - and historical atmosphere. Indeed, this album can be viewed in itself as a historic document of the 1980s with songs about the Russian threat, the coal strike, and child soldiers. It is, in my opinion, a cold album, a night album, full of shadows, but nevertheless burning intensely inside.

Four songs do not deliver on expectations - "Love is the Seventh Wave" is in calypso style, but Sting's voice is too deadpan; "Shadows in the Rain" is a bog-standard rocker; "Consider Me Gone" has a jazz-blues feel ('to look for heaven is to live here in hell'); and the album's title track is a short instrumental jazzy jam session of no relevance.

But there are five songs worthy of high praise - "If You Love Somebody Set them Free", the pop-rock hit; "Russians", a cold-war commentary to the beat of goose-stepping soldiers and sustained throughout by the sound of a ticking clock (bomb?), each verse interspersed with an ironic Prokofiev theme; "Children's Crusade" laments the loss of young lives, 'virgins with rifles'; "We Work the Black Seam" has a prescient pre-climate warming message; and "Moon Over Bourbon Street", an atmospheric eighteenth-century feel with excellent alto(?) sax playing by Branford Marsalis.

But the gem in the series is, for me, the final song, "Fortress around Your Heart". Astounding lyrics ('let me set the battlements on fire') sung with commitment sends shivers down my spine. It's a shame that it ends on a simple fade-out.

His own sound
Okay, the Police were massive but to produce this gem which appeared to owe so little to his past and packaged in such an original sound is real genius... brilliant and timeless popular music