Klark Kent

While The Police were still a struggling band after their first A&M single Roxanne flopped somehow A&M was persuaded to release this single by drummer Stewart Copeland under the alter ego of Klark Kent. Would it have been a contender for The Police? The answer is no. As Sting notes in The Police Released book Stewart’s forte was dry wit in his songs which this song has in spades and which Sting didn’t perform well.

He explains why the alter ego which is the poor reputation The Police’s had at the time.

The Police had been exposed by British critics as a band of carpetbaggers—which was true. The Police was dead in the water, uncool, unloved. And so I thought, “Well, why don’t I do it with a secret identity?” Every interview I did, I came up with different stories about this character. It didn’t last. NME busted me at some point, but it was just a fun way to do it. For 20 seconds, the zeitgeist in London was asking, “Who is Klark Kent?” That made it a lot of fun. KATHERINE YESKE TAYLOR, 28.11.23, Flood Magazine

Somehow it got onto the Radio 1 playlist and began climbing the charts, so much so it got him a spot on Top Of The Pops and pipped The Police to the first hit.

It’s a catchy number but arguably only vaguely new wave and to my ears sounds a bit like They Might Be Giants or rather they sound like him.

Anyways who can resist a line like “If you don’t like it you suck my socks.!” The bright green kryptonite vinyl is a nice touch.

Here’s the press release which is typically dry and tongue in cheek.

Mark Kent first materialized in Llandyckkk, a Welsh fishing village where, despite only speaking in a New Orleans’ patois, he became the church organist. It was the first in an increasingly bizarre sequence of events which was to culminate in New York at the height of his fame. His personal manners began to excite adverse attention following the unfortunate ‘lasagna affair’ when the beautiful eponymous triplets, stricken into sadness after he had rejected their sexual advances, threw themselves holding hands from the top floor of the Mobil Oil Building singing ‘Ave Maria’ before splashing themselves on to 42nd Street below. Kent, claiming he was the author of this traditional song, sued the grieving parents of the dead girls on the grounds that they had ‘gained unwanted notoriety’ for a song which he had written in some previous life and which, as he put it, ‘belongs to posterity and not to me.’ Some weeks later the Daily News ran a front page picture of Mark Kent urinating on the graves of the sisters, thus signaling an abrupt end to his short-lived popularity.

Sting is in a gorilla mask, Andy Summers in a Brezhnev mask and on drums

One more single in 1979 for our timeframe Too Cool To Calypso but it wasn’t a hit and by then The Police were starting to go stratospheric.

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