4 October 1980
It’s just the same vocal top-line repeated over and over, notwithstanding a trouser-tightening octave leap for added drama, plus there’s the rhyming of ‘shake and cough’ with ‘Nabokov’. But those are the least of the problems with ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’. Even hearing this as a kid in the late ’80s I was creeped out by its sweaty reliance on the sex-mad schoolgirl trope, as well as by its implication that our teachers were going around feeling horny.
The reason that Nabokov rhyme irks so many people is that it’s a blatant effort by Sting to buy some easy intellectual gravitas: my song, far from being Benny Hill with notions, is just like Lolita, an actual literary novel! Thankfully the larky video (below) steers away from depicting any flirty schoolgirl types, if only because showing Sting as an object of lust would have been a repugnance too far.
