Nothing Like The Sun; Sting; 1986

…Nothing Like The Sun was the first taste many of us had of the Policeman’s solo outing. The first single from the album was Englishman In New York. To put it simply, it had us hooked. The slippery jazz-inflected reggae would reveal its true self much later, as would saxophonist Branford Marsalis.
Nothing Like The Sun also served as a passing introduction to Afro-Cuban music, especially with They Dance Alone (Cueca Solo) — not to mention the uniquely personal school of songwriting that characterises Sting.
The album was dedicated to Sting’s mother, who had passed away months before it’s release. Always the troubled son, a brooding sense of loss pervades his sophomore record.
Achieving the melancholia was only half the task — with someone like Gil Evans on board, it wasn’t too hard to achieve as well. The other half was creating a sound that would straddle jazz and mainstream pop, without alienating the so-called serious listener. Given its strong political subtext, this is as serious as mainstream pop can get.
As a parallel to the pop-jazz analogy, the album also strides the political and the personal; being written following Sting’s Latin American sojourns. As much as there’s They Dance Alone and Fragile, there’s also Be Still My Beating Heart and Sister Moon.They Dance Alone is a direct commentary on Chilean dictator Augustus Pinochet’s rule, written on the tragic Mothers of The Disappeared. These were women who lost their sons, lovers, husbands and brothers to the Pinochet regime. The fugue here steps on the Latin influences, while Straight To My Heart completes that cycle.
One of the most intriguing tracks of the album is Be Still My Beating Heart. You can literally peel the layers one after another off this track, each one revealing the genius of arrangement.
Years later, a whole new generation would revel in the arrangements of A Thousand Years, Desert Rose and Ghost Story. Quite like his former bandmate, Andy Summers’ surreal guitar-work on Be Still My Beating Heart is evocative of his solo direction.
Then of course, there’s Fragile — still a potent commentary on man and his politics and a great nylon-string piece by itself. Even the sprightly Englishman traces the tribulations of the gay fiction writer Quentin Crisp, forced to move to New York from the homophobic Britain of the Twenties and Thirties — a “ legal alien” in the country of his asylum.
The brilliant version of Little Wing, to which the Gil Evans Orchestra provides a different facet altogether, is arguably one of the best versions of the Hendrix classic.
Sister Moon — where Shakespeare’s sonnet #130 (“My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun”) is quoted — is where the album gets its name from. The other treasure that this track reveals is Branford Marsalis — whose inimitable saxophone would go on to play a defining melodic role in much of Sting’s later music.
The records dedicated to his parents — …Nothing Like The Sun to his mother, The Soul Cages to his father — are Sting’s darkest yet. While the latter is more layered and complex, quite like his lifelong troubled relationship with his father, …Nothing Like The Sun can succinctly be described in his own words about his mother: beautiful but sad.