King Of Pain
Sting meant the first line literally. He had been staring at the sun during a period of personal collapse, watching an actual sunspot, and the black spot on the sun was a real thing he saw before it was a lyric.
So the song opens with a fact, not a metaphor. Then it keeps going in the same register. A dead salmon in a waterfall. A blue whale beached by a spring tide. A little black cloud in a corner of the city. He lists them with the calm of a man cataloguing his own ruin, and after each one he tells you the same thing: that’s me. He sat down and made a list of every small doomed thing he could see from where he was standing, and signed his name to all of it.
“There’s a king of pain / That is where I’ll always, always be.”
The specificity is what gets you. Another songwriter in 1983 would have written something vague about suffering. Sting named it. He treated his pain like a naturalist treating a field observation — here is what I see, here is its equivalent in the world, here is what it tells me about my condition. The result should feel cold and strange, and it does a little, on first listen. Then it becomes one of the most honest things that came out of the New Wave.
The album was Synchronicity, recorded in the summer of 1983 at AIR Studios Montserrat, the facility George Martin built on a Caribbean island. The Police were falling apart while they made it. Sting and Stewart Copeland couldn’t be in the same room without it becoming a fight, and Andy Summers was somewhere in the middle, playing guitar on songs that were increasingly Sting’s songs, for an album that was increasingly Sting’s album. They recorded in separate suites where they could. The sessions were documented, and the documentation is not pretty.
Somehow it is one of the tightest records they ever made. Listen to Copeland on this album — the way he plays against the keyboard washes, the way he finds a pocket and refuses to sit comfortably in it. It gets overlooked because it serves the song instead of announcing itself. “King of Pain” has that enormous Oberheim synthesizer wash under everything, Hugh Padgham behind the board, and the drums sitting right at the edge of it, barely. Copeland never overplays. On a song this exposed, that restraint is the difference between the song working and it tipping into melodrama.
Sting has said the Jungian idea of synchronicity — events meaningfully connected without being causally connected — was genuinely running through his thinking that summer. You can feel it in the structure. The black spot on the sun does not cause his suffering. The dead salmon does not explain it. They run parallel. They rhyme across the gap between the human world and the natural one. He isn’t asking you to believe the universe is talking to him. He’s asking you to notice that he sees himself in every broken or stranded or extinguished thing he looks at, and that this is what depression actually is — not darkness exactly, but a suffering mind finding its own condition reflected everywhere.
That is precise. That is true. Most songs about pain are neither.
The song has a particular afterlife. It soundtracks films and television moments, almost always shorthand for a character whose loneliness is about to become the plot. It’s easy to let it wash over you as mood, as the background radiation of a certain kind of 1980s melancholy. Padgham recorded that keyboard swell to do exactly that, to rise and spread and get inside the room.
But the list is not mood music. The dead salmon. The black spot. The blue whale beached by a spring tide. That’s a man standing very still, looking very hard at everything around him, refusing to look away from what he sees. A king of pain isn’t the one who suffers most. It’s the one who has accepted the residency. Who has stopped waiting to be dethroned.
He sat down, looked at the sun, and saw the spot. Then he told us where it was.