The Police: music's most arresting superstars: In the six years since those three guys named Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers teamed up to form a rock group and called themselves the Police, the three have earned a succession of hit singles, gold records, platinum albums and glowing reviews. They've done sold-out international tours and are one of the hottest bands in the world today. This past summer, they released their fifth album, 'Synchronicity', and the reviewers couldn't find enough superlatives to describe it...

The cavernous hangar is black and empty - except for thousands and thousands of candles, flickering and shining, laid out in arcane and symbolic patterns. And right in the middle of a spiral, as if trapped by the candles and yet entranced by them, moves the graceful figure of a young man. Carefully, I move closer to observe his bizarre dance, waiting for some ritualistic chant to surface from behind the altar of light, and fully expecting a tap on the shoulder by a hooded and faintly menacing figure...

Stop in the name of rock! - Sting and the Police pound the beat on the summer's hottest tour: His spiked hair might have been coiffed with garden shears. Some might say his clothes often show more Goodwill than good taste. At times, his confidence flirts unapologetically with arrogance. None of that matters, of course. When Sting, ne Gordon Sumner, struts out as point man for the Police, what shines forth is the sort of feral sexuality that can fill baseball stadiums at $17.50 a pop...

Are the Police on the verge of a breakup...? The thing about being really successful is that it can make or break you," muses Police guitarist Andy Summers at his home in south-west London. "Once the spotlight is on you and you're up there on that public platform, you really have to deliver. If you don't, then down you go. And I think that one of the main reasons the Police continue to go on is because in the end we do deliver..."

Police Brutality - A monster called Sting: "I'm quite interested in finding me again," Police singer and bassist Sting confessed to the press last summer. I used to be the same sort of person on-stage that I was in private life, but now it's sort of a monster. He looks wonderful with the lights and the crowds, but in the kitchen, it's a bit much. I'm just trying to find out who is the real me - is it this monster or someone more normal? Right now, he's a bit worn at the edges..."

Twilight of the Gods - Being an account of how three musicians and two entrepreneurs turned the music business upside down and an inquiry into why the Police won't give up the ghost. Toronto - The theme is priorities; the name of the game, ambition. To illustrate: when once, in adolescence, life itself hinged on whether the New York Rangers could at long last win a Stanley Cup, it now doesn't so completely dominate the daily passions as much as that peculiar filigree of pain and pleasure known as "the girlfriend..."

Approaching it from New York in a big black car, Shea Stadium looks like the spaceship that lands at the end of 'Close Encounters Of The Third Kind'. It's almost round and completely bathed in light; a warm halo glowing against the night sky. Driving closer, an atmosphere of intense excitement and activity is evident. 67,000 people have bought tickets to see the Police play here tonight. Thousands more have been disappointed...

Led by superstar Sting, the rock trio has beguiled U.S. audiences with its mix of reggae, rock and charm. Watch out the Police are in town. It's the fourth night of their current eight-month world tour, and backstage at Detroit's Joe Louis Arena the three winsome blondes known collectively as the Police are preparing for a performance. Lead singer Sting, a.k.a. Gordon Sumner, is hanging from a gravity device that forces the blood to his head. "I feel like a bat," he shouts, flailing comically. "Somebody get me a field mouse." A few feet away, wearing a pair of black roller skates, drummer Stewart Copeland is lost in 'A History of Warfare'. Nearby, equally absorbed, guitarist Andy Summers winds his way through Jorge Luis Borges's 'Labyrinths'...

The Breathing Method. Sandy Robertson welcomes the resuscitation of The Police. I can never quite get over the rise to prominence of The Police. I always find my mind trailing back to those awful nights when they supported at that terminal of punk thrash, the Roxy, Covent Garden. They stunk, but they weren't punk. A sort of mutated, flailing breed of HM and Jazzfunk it was. Dire...

Breathe slowly, Breathe slowly and deeply. Do not get sick. Not now. Not crammed like a sardine in the back of Andy Summers' Datsun 280-Z on a late night London cruise. Not while my head is hovering just inches above the tousled manes of two-thirds of Britain's most successful pop group. Make a note: never order eggplant in a wine bar. Particularly when you're in a country that imports its vegetables and then calls them by their French names. Quick, distract the mind. What was it about Sting that was so perplexing, so out of synch with what I was anticipating? Well, what was I expecting to find? A bright, brash, somewhat arrogant young muso? A witty, ambitious, strong-willed Apollo about to make the jump from Pop Icon to All Around Beautiful Person? And did he fulfil those expectations? Well, yes... and no. Mostly no...

A Policeman's guide to good and evil: You might not have noticed, but there's been little activity on the Police front recently. This year, apart from a few sporadic live appearances, has seen various members all heading off in different directions. Andy Summers is about to release a solo album with Robert Fripp, and also preparing a book of his photographs...

The Police have their own look, the blond aryans in motorcycle leathers, now as characteristic as the sixties' mop-top haircuts and stovepipe trousers. The Police also have their own sound firmly rooted in the present yet characteristically unlike anything else. A great part of their uniqueness is in their songs. A major aspect of this sound is the hidden composer alias frontman, Sting. His contribution is the most instantly recognisable because his is the distinctive voice, soaring over the polyrhythmic cushion of harmony to which he supplies the bottom notes. To many fans, Sting is the Police. Very few know that beneath the teen appeal lies a profoundly musical vision...

Boston: It was if the Police had parachuted out of the frigid New England skies like some sort of latter day counter-insurgency mission. Coming off the first leg of extended world tour, Stewart Copeland, Andy Summers and Sting had just spent the last seven hours on a plane from Europe, endured the customs routine and arrived at the Meridien Hotel only five hours ahead of their sold-out concert at Boston Gardens. This was shaping up as the ultimate test for one of rock's most fuel-efficient vehicles. Jet-lagged and disorientated, without even the benefit of a sound check, the Police would have to reach down for something deeper than mere show-must-go-on professionalism if they were going to establish a real rapport, a sense of intimacy with over 15,000 people in the acoustical confines of a hockey rink...

The Police - Working the rock beat; inside the machine with Sting and friends: Andy Summers sinks his small, rumpled frame into a tattered backstage couch. His face wears the sallow gray of sickbed and night patrol, and a vein throbs a blue sentry over his right eye. Seated, Stewart Copeland squints determinedly into a Stephen King horror story - a wasted attempt to stare down the wall of noise around him; one leg waves a tired surrender over the chair arm. Sting, meanwhile, is in an anteroom, testing the flexibility of the twice-sewn stitches in his right hand...

Between the pleasant song hooks and facile photogenia of the Police there lies a sophistication and urgency that has justly brought Andy Summers, Sting and Stewart Copeland to the top of everyone's pops. August in the Canadian woods sure beats the hell out of August in the sweaty East Coast city where I spend most of my time, so I can easily appreciate why the Police had chosen Le Studio in the tiny village of Morin Heights, Quebec, to mix their upcoming live album. With clear skies above and cool, clean air all around. the group displayed its outdoorsy side as we talked; Stewart Copeland repeatedly slammed a baseball into his mitt, confessing that "I haven't got a clue of what to do with it," while Sting decided to undergo his interview while paddling across the small lake behind the studio...