Outlandos d’Amour is the debut studio album by The Police and it was released on November 2nd, 1978. The album title is French for Outlaws of Love.
While their subsequent chart-topping albums would contain far more ambitious songwriting and musicianship, the Police’s 1978 debut, Outlandos d’Amour is by far their most direct and straightforward release.
Although Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland were all superb instrumentalists with jazz backgrounds, it was much easier to get a record contract in late-’70s England if you were a punk/new wave artist, so the band decided to mask their instrumental prowess with a set of strong, adrenaline-charged rock, albeit with a reggae tinge.
Some of it may have been simplistic (‘Be My Girl-Sally’,'”Born in the ’50s’), but Sting was already an ace songwriter, as evidenced by all-time classics like the good-girl-gone-bad tale of ‘Roxanne’,and a pair of brokenhearted reggae-rock ditties, ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ and ‘So Lonely’.
However like all other Police albums, the lesser-known album cuts are often highlights themselves — the frenzied rockers ‘Next to You’, ‘Peanuts’, and ‘Truth Hits Everybody’ as well as more exotic fare like the groovy album closer ‘Masoko Tanga’ and the lonesome ‘Hole in My Life’. Outlandos d’Amour is unquestionably one of the finest debuts to come out of the ’70s punk/new wave movement.
Tracklist:
1. Next To Yo
2. So Lonel
3. Roxanne
4. Hole In My Life
5. Peanuts
6. Can’t Stand Losing You
7. Truth Hits Everybody
8. Born in the 50’s
9. Be My Girl-Sally
10. Masoko Tanga
