[Sting]: Russians (1985) is a song that's easy to mock, a very earnest song, but at the time it was written - at the height of the Reagan-Rambo paranoia years, when 'Russians' were thought of as grey sub-human automatons only good enough to blow up - it seemed important. I was living in New York at the time, and a friend of mine had a gizmo that could pull the signal from the Russian satellite. We'd go drinking and then watch Russian morning shows in the middle of the night. It was apparent from watching these lovingly made kids shows that Russians weren't quite the automatons that we'd been told they were. The song was also precipitated by my son asking me if there was a bomb that existed that could blow up the world, and I had to tell him, "Actually, yeah, there is." So he was introduced to that horror, the horror we've all lived with for most of our lives. It's very cheeky to have stolen a bit of Prokofiev and stuck it in a pop song, but in that context it was right.
[Sting]: Russians (1985) is a song that's easy to mock, a very earnest song, but at the time it was written - at the height of the Reagan-Rambo paranoia years, when 'Russians' were thought of as grey sub-human automatons only good enough to blow up - it seemed important. I was living in New York at the time, and a friend of mine had a gizmo that could pull the signal from the Russian satellite. We'd go drinking and then watch Russian morning shows in the middle of the night. It was apparent from watching these lovingly made kids shows that Russians weren't quite the automatons that we'd been told they were. The song was also precipitated by my son asking me if there was a bomb that existed that could blow up the world, and I had to tell him, "Actually, yeah, there is." So he was introduced to that horror, the horror we've all lived with for most of our lives. It's very cheeky to have stolen a bit of Prokofiev and stuck it in a pop song, but in that context it was right.