Walking on the Moon

Sting said he wrote the riff in a hotel room in Munich after a concert, drunk and slumped on the bed, and wrote it down the next morning. The first title was Walking Round the Room, and he renamed it with something even more stupid, as he put it.

The arrangement is sparse and centers on a three-note bass riff that Sting called weird and jazzy. Summers found the chord that hits after the bass notes, and he used a guitar synthesizer. Early versions were recorded as a rocker before the song was reworked. The B-side was Visions of the Night.

It was released in late 1979 as the follow-up to Message in a Bottle, and became the Police's second UK number one. It reached number one in Ireland and number nine in Australia but did not chart in the US. The video was shot at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on 23 October 1979 and directed by Derek Burbidge. It shows the band miming among spacecraft displays, with NASA footage, and Copeland striking his sticks on a Saturn V rocket.