The Police / The Police (Remastered) / 1978
Next to You
frantic, half-comic urgency
A compressed blast of obsessive desire dressed as punk-pop, where the narrator catalogues increasingly reckless acts to close the distance to a lover. The song barely pretends to develop an argument; it just escalates and then repeats itself into exhaustion, mirroring the mania it describes.
obsessive infatuation loss of self-control impulsivity vs. stability desperation as comedy repetition as emotional state
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses an absent lover directly, admitting to escalating irrational behavior; the voice is self-aware enough to question his own sanity, which makes him oddly reliable even as his actions are absurd.
What happens
The song opens with plain complaint about distance, then rushes through a series of sacrifices and fantasies of crime to close that distance, consults a doctor who offers no real help, and ends by essentially giving up on explanation and just repeating the central desire until the song runs out.
How it's built
Short verses carry what little narrative information exists, each ending on a near-identical capitulation line, before collapsing into a call-and-response chorus. The final minute abandons verses entirely, looping the title phrase as a kind of controlled breakdown, structurally enacting the obsession rather than just describing it.
Section by section
Opening verse
The complaint starts conventionally enough, framed around distance and dissatisfaction, before pivoting to a phrase suggesting the narrator has been overtaken by something beyond his control.
Second verse
“I'd rob a bank maybe steal a plane”
The escalation into absurd criminal fantasy signals the song is not interested in realism; it's dramatizing the irrationality of infatuation through comic overstatement rather than sincere confession.
First chorus
The call-and-response shape, question followed by the same flat answer, enacts powerlessness formally: no new information arrives, just the same desire restated.
Third verse
A claim of extensive romantic history is undercut by the admission that this feeling is unprecedented, a familiar seduction trope that adds a note of flattery to the obsession.
Fourth verse
“I saw my doctor he said give it time”
Introducing a doctor briefly gestures toward treating the obsession as a medical condition, but the advice is useless, and the narrator immediately reverts to wanting to be delivered into the affair rather than cured of it.
Extended outro
The song abandons narrative entirely and loops its central line more than a dozen times, a structural choice that turns repetition itself into the content, leaving the listener inside the same loop the narrator can't escape.
Craft
- hyperbole
- Selling possessions and imagining bank robbery and plane theft exaggerate ordinary longing into criminal fantasy, played for both urgency and dark humor.
- anaphora
- The repeated declaration of singular want, especially in the extended outro, turns a simple line into an incantation that mimics obsessive thought patterns.
- refrain as diagnosis
- The recurring question about what can be done functions less as genuine inquiry than as a tic, reinforcing the narrator's lack of agency.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a comic, slightly self-mocking portrait of infatuation as temporary insanity—the humor in the bank-robbery line and the doctor's visit suggests the band isn't asking to be taken too seriously. An alternative reading hears genuine desperation beneath the exaggeration, with the repetitive outro functioning less as a joke and more as a sincere enactment of obsessive thought with no resolution. Both readings can coexist; the song doesn't clearly resolve which tone wins.
Context
This track appears on The Police's 1978 debut album Outlandos d'Amour (reissued/remastered as noted). It reflects the band's early new wave/punk-adjacent period before their more reggae-inflected sound matured, and the lyric's simplicity and repetition fit the economical, hook-driven songwriting typical of their first record. I don't have reliable biographical detail connecting this specific song to real events in Sting's life, so I'm treating it as a text rather than autobiography.
Listen for
- the shift from narrative verses to the looping outro, and how the repetition changes the song's emotional weight
- the deadpan or urgent delivery of the criminal fantasy, which signals how seriously to take the lyric
- the call-and-response structure in the chorus and what it implies about the narrator's agency
- the brief, almost throwaway appearance of the doctor and how little space it's given despite being the song's one gesture at outside perspective
About The Police
The Police were an English rock band formed in London in 1977. Their core line-up comprised Sting, Andy Summers (guitar) and Stewart Copeland.
1977 - 2008 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue