The Dream of the Blue Turtles
The Dream of the Blue Turtles is the debut solo album by English musician Sting, released in June 1985. The album reached number three on the UK Albums Chart[19] and number two on the US Billboard 200.
The Dream of the Blue Turtles
1 June 1985 [1]
November 1984 – March 1985
Blue Wave Studio, Saint Philip, Barbados and Le Studio, Morin-Heights, Quebec, Canada
41:40
Sting and Pete Smith
Five singles were released from the album: "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free", "Fortress Around Your Heart", "Russians", "Moon Over Bourbon Street", and "Love Is the Seventh Wave". The album earned Grammy nominations for Album of the Year, Best Male Pop Vocal Performance and Best Engineered Recording; the instrumental title track was nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance.
Background and release[edit]
Sting initially worked on tracks for his debut solo album with producers Torch Song: William Orbit, Laurie Mayer and Grant Gilbert.[20] These sessions were more synth-driven and 'electrofunk' in nature than what eventually was recorded and released; Sting eventually decided against this direction, and instead decided to pursue more jazz-oriented music. The initial 1984 Torch Song sessions remain unreleased.
The album is named after a dream that Sting had.[21]
Although the single "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" reached No. 3 in the US, it only reached 26 in the UK, where the album's track "Russians" (about Cold War nuclear anxieties, which had peaked in the 1980s) proved more popular.
In the UK the album was kept off No. 1 in the week of its release by Marillion's Misplaced Childhood and Born in the U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen occupying the top two places. However, in the US, the album reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200.
The film Bring On the Night documents some of the recording work that produced this album, as well as the subsequent tour.
Songs[edit]
The songs include "Children's Crusade" (paralleling the destruction of the younger generation in World War I to the devastation brought about by heroin addiction in modern-day London);[22] a new, re-recorded version of the Police song "Shadows in the Rain" (featuring the original uptempo arrangement); "We Work the Black Seam" (about the UK miners' strike of 1984–85, and musically based on "Savage Beast", a song dating back to Sting's days in Last Exit); and "Moon Over Bourbon Street", a song inspired by Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire and on which he plays double bass.[23] "Consider Me Gone" references the first quatrain of Shakespeare's Sonnet 35.