Spirits in the Material World
1981 single by The Police
"Spirits in the Material World" is a song by the British rock trio the Police, written by Sting. The opening track for their 1981 album Ghost in the Machine, it was released as a single in 1981 and reached No. 12 in the United Kingdom and No. 11 in the US in early 1982.
Background
"Spirits in the Material World" was written by Sting on a Casiotone keyboard while in a truck. It was his first experience using a synthesizer.
'Spirits in the Material World' was written on one of those Casio keyboards while I was riding in the back of a truck somewhere. I just tap, tap, tap and there it was, just by accident. That was the first time I'd ever touched a synthesizer, that album.
Andy Summers' presence on the studio track is considerably less pronounced than on the vast majority of Police songs, and in fact, Sting wanted to record it without him entirely.
“Spirits in the Material World” enters the record as 1981 single by The Police. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Spirits, Material and World can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Spirits in the Material World” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Spirits, Material and World provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2282696. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1981 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spirits in the Material World” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.