1981 · Behind the Songs
Before it closed out side one of Ghost in the Machine, it was a Grace Jones single.
Sting wrote “Demolition Man” and did something unusual with it: he gave it away first. Grace Jones recorded the song and released it as the A-side of a single in 1981, making the Jamaican-born icon the first voice the world heard singing Sting’s demolition anthem.
The Police weren’t done with it, though. Later that same year they cut their own leaner, tenser version and placed it on Ghost in the Machine, their fourth album. Same song, two 1981 lives — one filtered through Jones’s commanding art-funk persona, the other through the trio’s clipped reggae-rock attack.
The double existence says a lot about Sting’s writing at the time: the song was sturdy enough to survive two radically different interpretations in the same year. Jones found the menace and the theater in it; the Police found the groove and the edge.
“Demolition Man” never became one of the band’s signature hits, which is exactly why it’s worth revisiting — it’s a window into a songwriter confident enough to hand his material to another artist, then confident enough to take it back.