Over a five-album span beginning in 1977, the Police won Grammys, racked up smash hits and fought. Flirting with pop, punk, jazz, reggae and rock, and finding success in all directions, the Police could have gone any which way they wanted after the release of 1983's multi-platinum Synchronicity. Instead, they simply went their separate ways, as singer/bassist Sting broke up the band in favor of a solo career, turning his back on the group that gave the world "Every Breath You Take," "Roxanne" and "Message in a Bottle." All are included on the new anthology, The Best of Sting & the Police. Drummer Stewart Copeland served as the Police's backbeat during their seven turbulent years.

How do you feel about greatest hits records?

I like 'em. I like the original albums to be available as well, because my favorite tracks are often not the ones that are the hits. But then sometimes when I feel like some Santana I go get the compilation because you get three different albums' worth of sort of your favorite songs -- it's just a different animal. And a slightly different running order kind of illuminates different aspects of the tracks too. I get into, "Ah, this is an early one, this is a later one, listen to how different the snare sounds," professional stuff.

Is that what you hear when you listen back to these records?

To my own records, yeah, how different the snare drum sounds, important stuff like that.

What other kinds of things like that?

What pizza we were eating that day, that's the strangest thing, whenever I listen to the music I've made I remember whatever food was from the nearest restaurant. In the last two Police albums in Montserrat there's this kind of Caribbean cooking and actually the whole experience of being on Montserrat off of this emerald isle in the middle of the Caribbean, a twelve-hour flight away from the nearest record executive. It got really ugly towards the end of Synchronicity, but if I listen -- as I had cause to do recently -- we actually had a great time doing Ghost in the Machine.

Was there anything you wanted on here that isn't?

Yes and no. The tracks that are on there, the ones that have every aspect of the group more or less, and there's other tracks that are personal favorites like "Shadows in the Rain," "Tea in the Sahara" and "Regatta de Blanc." They're kind of personal favorites, because they're obscure aspects of what the group did.

What are your favorites that made the cut?

"Message in a Bottle," "Can't Stand Losing You," "Roxanne," "Every Breath You Take," of course -- actually I'm just making that up. This compilation was released in Europe, and it was amazing what happened there: It went straight to Number One and the interest was quite startling, so it's come out here and the tracks have been slightly reconfigured. I'm not actually sure what's on it. I think the really cool thing about it is the fact that there's two artists that are related but quite distinct on the album and I think when Sting went off to do his solo career there were a lot of Police fans that didn't buy into the jazz vibe, didn't follow Sting into the many places he went musically after the Police. There's an even larger group of people who discovered Sting as himself doing the music he did without the Police and developed a taste for that and he built up a pretty distinctly different fan base on his own music. And the Police guy who never followed Sting and the new Sting fans who aren't really aware he was in the Police, I think both sides would benefit from exposure to the other.