Though not present on the recorded version of the song, there’s an additional verse that’s sung during live shows:

http://youtu.be/ITq7J88OLnI?t=3m21s

To me it’s a distinction
To laugh at our extinction
But you really ought to think hard
When you’re walking in your graveyard
Fifty million years ago
They walked upon the planet so
They live in a museum
It’s the only place you’ll see ‘em

Three talented musicians

I felt very strongly that this album should say to the world that we are individuals. We are not joined at the hip; we are not a three-headed Hydra. We were very much thrown together by accident and we’re very distinguished by strong egos. And we each have our own contributions to make.
- Sting, Musician magazine, June, 1983

The Synchronicity album art was produced at a time when the three members of The Police were not speaking to each other. The band had recorded the album in separate rooms in a studio in Monserrat, and tensions were high as band dynamics had drastically changed. Instead of three personalities each taking a turn of adding something to a composition, bassist and lead singer Sting would bring finished compositions to the studio and guitarist Andy Summers and drummer Stewart Copeland were left as session musicians – effectively killing off their creative input.

This struggle between being part of a musical collective but ultimately segregated talent led to one of the best albums of the 1980’s and the album cover justifies many of these issues.

Causally unconnected

…my idea was for each of us to have a separate strip and have the freedom to photographically do whatever we as individuals wanted, without knowing what the other two planned. I’ll just find out when the album comes out. Hopefully, it’ll be synchronistic.
- Sting, Musician magazine, June, 1983

The cover of Synchronicity features three strips of photos, one strip for each band member. In that strip is a collage of photos spliced together from the collection each member had taken with famed photographer Duane Michals. Each strip also has a band of color laid on top. Each band is a primary color which, more than likely, was done on purpose as they are completely separated in the color wheel, representing the detached personalities in the band.

Carl Jung’s theory of Synchronicity revolves around the idea of a connected principle that links related events from unrelated causes, or simple coincidences. The most widely released album cover (or at least this version which will be explained later) does feature relatable themes between each strip of photos. Copeland stands in front of a clock, representing time, whereas Sting is surrounded by skeletons and even peers out of the ribcage of a dinosaur, showing the affects of time, and lastly Summers features a metronome with a cut-out photo of an eye on the weight, symbolizing the need to keep watch of time and sequence. None of the band members had any communication between themselves during the process, and yet the listener is left with a myriad of possible connections, perfectly encapsulating the idea of “synchronicity.”

The visual artists

Duane Michals (born 1932) is an American photographer. His trademark as an artist is his use of photo-sequences to communicate an idea, often incorporating text to describe emotion or philosophy.

Art director Jeff Ayeroff hired Michals to work with the band and each band member had their turn with the legendary photographer. They would come up with the idea for a photo shoot and would then proceed to take a multitude of shots in different situations. Andy Summers, for example, had eggs placed of a piano keyboard, set fire to a telephone, nested under the water of a warm bath, and had a woman accompany him on some of the shots. He recalls one such situation that didn’t go entirely to plan:

My favorite idea, under the influence of magical realism, is to stand in a room with a cloud of butterflies around my head. This is a difficult photograph to pull off because you have to buy the butterflies from a farm and they come to you in a box frozen, as if in a coma… together [Duane and I] hover over a cardboard box… trying to get the iced insects to wake up, but it doesn’t work. We heat up the room, bring in hair dryers, turn up the radiators, but still nothing works apart from a feeble tremble of the odd wing as if to say, ‘Leave me alone, I am having a dream that I am a butterfly.’
- Andy Summers, One Train Later: A Memoir, pg. 329.

Jeff also has fond memories of working with Sting:

…we got permission to shoot inside the Museum of Natural History in New York. So we went in the middle of the night, and there was literally one guard in the whole place (like in the Ben Stiller movie Night at the Museum). We had free rein. We started taking pics, and Sting spontaneously ended up crawling inside the belly of this dinosaur skeleton.

Sting’s strip also contains passages from Carl Jung’s book Synchronicity overlaid on top of him and he is seen reading the book in another photo.

Though the photos were used primarily for the album sleeve (which was arranged and designed by Norman Moore), they would later appear in promotional materials, including a three minute album teaser that features clips from each song:

36 variations

Because of the massive amounts of photos that were shot for the cover, Jeff Ayeroff also had the idea to release multiple versions of the cover as a collector’s item. These various versions included a different arrangement of the photos in each strip, different colors on top of the strips, and in extremely rare cases included no color at all and left black and white.