Why The Police’s Most Controversial No. 1 Hit Would Never Be Released Today

In 1983, The Police topped the charts for eight weeks with a song that, to this day, is the greatest hit the band has ever had. “Every Breath You Take” was included on their most successful album, Synchronicity, and at the time, it seemed like a perfectly normal, if a bit urgent, love song. But as time went by, fans started noticing how unsettling the song was. One can argue that the lyrics are sung from the perspective of an unreliable narrator, but it’s hard not to feel like this song is glorifying, or at the very least normalizing, toxic love.

To make matters worse, “Every Breath You Take” has been once again causing controversy when Sting’s former bandmates filed a lawsuit against the singer, claiming he had been cheating them out of their royalties for decades. The in-fighting about the rights to the song has made this track into a divisive topic in more ways than one.

The Disturbing Lyrics Of ‘Every Breath You Take’

“Every Breath You Take” was the gem of The Police’s 1983 album, Synchronicity. It topped the charts in the US and the UK for multiple weeks, won two Grammy Awards, and it’s still the most successful song the band has ever had. But despite the raging success it enjoyed in the 1980s, this is one of the most perfect examples of how a song can only be appropriate in its specific era. Listening to it through the lenses of 2026, it’s clear the lyrics of this song would not be well-received if it was written today.

“Every breath you take / And every move you make / Every bond you break / Every step you take / I’ll be watching you,” the song opens. It follows this same formula through all the verses, but the chorus only gets more unsettling. “Oh, can’t you see / You belong to me? / How my poor heart aches / With every step you take?” Not only is the chorus extremely possessive and disturbing, it also portrays the narrator as the wounded party. After all, it was the person he’s stalking that broke his heart, right?

When Sting first came up with the idea for the song, though, the plan was to take it in a completely different direction. He was sleeping, and woke up in the middle of the night with the phrase “I’ll be watching you” stuck in his head. “I think I was thinking of Big Brother, surveillance and control. These were the Reagan, Star Wars years,” Sting told The Independent. “The tune itself is generic, an aggregate of hundreds of others, but the words are interesting. It sounds like a comforting love song. I didn’t realize at the time how sinister it is,” he went on to explain.

But the “sinister” lyrics aren’t the only controversial thing about the song. Sting said he woke up with that phrase in his mind, sat on the piano, and wrote the song in half an hour, but his bandmates would definitely disagree with that.

The Messy Lawsuit Over This Song

Sting didn’t only receive backlash for the content of the lyrics. Despite the lightning-quick way the song came to him, his bandmates, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland, insist that not only did the song take way more than half an hour to put together, it was also not a good track when Sting first brought it to the band.

“That song was going to be thrown out,” Summers argues. “Sting and Stewart could not agree on how the bass and drums were going to go. We were in the middle of Synchronicity and Sting says, ‘Well, go on then, go in there and make it your own.’ And I did it in one take. They all stood up and clapped. And, of course, the f***ing thing went right round the world, straight to No. 1 in America.”

Despite Summers and Copeland’s contributions to making this song great, “Every Breath You Take” ended up being credited solely to Sting. Through the years, the bandmates constantly requested that the singer share the royalties with the rest of the group, but Sting refused, and that led to Summers and Copeland filing a lawsuit against him in 2025.

“This has been coming for quite some time. Lawyers tried repeatedly to reach an out-of-court settlement but hit a stalemate,” The Sun reported. “Andy and Stewart decided there was no alternative than the court, so they pressed the button. They say they are owed millions in lost royalties.” Sting has since had to make payments to his former bandmates, but the lawsuit is still active.