“I left”: Why Andy Summers walked out on Sting
There’s no telling whether greatness will show itself the first time a band gets together. Even though people like that signature movie moment where lightning strikes and musicians instantly become best friends and start finishing each other’s sentences, nothing happens that smoothly in music history. It all comes down to whether or not someone is willing to work at it, and for a while, it was unclear whether The Police were going to even get off the ground after Andy Summers saw Sting play.
At the same time, no part of The Police seemed to fit into the zeitgeist when they first started out. There had been pieces of punk and reggae in their delivery, but the awkward new wave sounds of Sting’s melodies and the driving beat from Stewart Copeland always felt like they were slightly at odds with each other half the time they were playing.
That’s because no part of Sting’s upbringing was strictly rock and roll. He had been set on his path to be in a band by listening to acts like The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, but it was always about opening up the playing field whenever he joined a group, which normally meant returning to a lot more jazzy textures.
If anything, that should have made him a shoo-in for being best friends with Summers. While the guitarist had been following in the footsteps of artists like Eric Clapton at the time, the different jazz chords he put into tunes like ‘Murder By Numbers’ was enough to put him on an equal level with Sting when he saw the singer’s jazz fusion band performing for the first time.
It’s possible that Summers caught him on an off night, but the guitarist was less than impressed with what the group had to offer when he first saw them, telling Behind the Music, “The support band was called Last Exit, which was Sting. I seemed to remember watching them for about five minutes and not liking it, so I left.”
Then again, perhaps the problem was the amount of people in the group. Although Sting could hold a room together with his voice and his bass, it took his partnership with Copeland and Summers to have the entire song lift off. Regardless of how many tunes he made during his solo career, the reason why ‘Message in a Bottle’ resonates so well is because of how Summers approaches the guitar riff and the urgency that Copeland plays with compared to Sting’s laid-back delivery.
Despite being able to put together the kind of magic that most bands only dream of, it didn’t take long for Summers to want off once the 1980s kicked into high gear following their album Synchronicity. Even though they could still play to the best of their ability, it was clear that they had done all they could do together by the time they called it quits after the tour.
But while Summers’s initial pass on Sting may seem laughable today, it’s all about finding the right time and the right place for everything to click. Most people don’t know when they have true greatness in front of them, but when the power trio took time to flesh out every song, there was no limit to what they could do.
