Chapter One

Up there, the atmosphere was thin. They lived in a bubble, protected from the rigors of the world but also trapped inside a pressurized container that amplified every thought, every action, every sound.

The odds of ever reaching that rarefied position had been stacked heavily against them. But somehow they made it, catapulted to the stars in a junk bucket powered by hubris and jury-rigged for success. The junk bucket transformed into a juggernaut that hurtled around the globe two, three, four times over. Inside, an umbilical cord connected all three occupants, sustaining them while constraining all movement. As time went on, they yearned for individual freedom. They struggled, pushed and pulled against one another until, eventually, the cord snapped. The juggernaut ran out of fuel and ground to a halt. And there it remained for twenty-five years, like a rusted satellite floating in space; always visible but in perpetual stasis, evidence of a distant memory. A monument to the time when the Police were the biggest band in the world.

Pop music is a dream. The promise of a perfect moment deferred. The music business is a machine in perpetual motion, passion conscripted into the service of industry. Music culture is born of tempestuous change and an incestuous genealogy. Each iteration of genre birthed by, but also forged in reaction to, the one before. Each owing a debt for its existence to the last.

And then there was the Police. They seemed to come from out of nowhere. A group with no discernible parentage, no distinct musical lineage, no acknowledged antecedents. Orph