“Walking on the Moon” by The Police

"Walking on the Moon" floated out of Reggatta de Blanc, the Police's second album, in 1979, the follow-up single to "Message in a Bottle" and the band's second number one in Britain. It's white reggae stripped down to its bones: Sting's bass takes long, loping strides, Andy Summers drops chords like pebbles into a pond, and Stewart Copeland ticks and splashes around the edges, leaving so much air that the whole thing seems to hang in low gravity. Nigel Gray engineered.

Sting says the riff arrived one drunken night in a Munich hotel room after a gig, when he stumbled around singing about walking round the room. He wrote it down the next morning and swapped in a sillier, better title. His memoir traces the feeling back further, to walking home from the house of his first real girlfriend, Deborah Anderson, weightless with love.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.