The artist Stewart Copeland said hid his love of The Police
The number one crime that any punk rocker can commit is taking their instrument too seriously when they get into the studio.
The genre is meant to be what brought down any of the pretentious prog acts cluttering up the album charts, but it turned out that The Police were the comfortable middle ground for a lot of the punk faithful.
Because, as much as the Sex Pistols may not have known the first thing about the strange chords that The Beatles used on their records, there came a point where they needed to have at least a little bit of theory under their belt. Anarchy is all well and good as a concept to sing about, but if the rest of the album consists of nothing but noise and screaming with no real chords, it’s hard for anyone to really nail down the tone that anyone is going for.
And like all great musicians, Sting only saw punk rock as another musical garnish to throw into the mix. Each member of the band was a virtuoso on their own instrument, but there’s a certain aggression that comes when listening to their early record that couldn’t have happened had they not come out of the CBGBS punk scene in their first few tours of America. But as they started to change, so too did the glory days of punk rock.
Even though everyone likes to think of the utopia that took place in 1977 when bands like the Ramones and Blondie debuted in New York, they sounded virtually unrecognisable on their next records. ‘Heart of Glass’ was enough to break a few punk fans’ hearts, and the thought of any of the Ramones working alongside someone like Phil Spector was unheard of during End of the Century, but on the other side of the pond, The Clash were slowly shifting their sound as well.
Looking at their first album, they had already begun to dabble in everything from reggae to classic rock, but London Calling and Sandinista were proof that they could work with any genre they could think of and still be true to themselves. And while that may have come from Mick Jones and Joe Strummer blending together perfectly, Stewart Copeland remembered a few people taking a liking to what they were doing.
In an interview later, Copeland remembered that bassist Paul Simonon was among the few to get along with the power trio, even if it was in secret, saying, “We were on a bus with The Clash and The Damned and a lot of other crap punk bands for two days. The only one we got along with was actually Paul Simonon, and [he and Sting] were talking about bass technique out of earshot from the rest of The Clash because they didn’t want to know there was someone who actually gave a shit about his instrument.”
Even if there was a little bit of a musical rub there, both The Clash and The Police played off each other incredibly well on their respective records. Simonon’s attention to bass technique came in handy when hitting those musical slides perfectly on ‘London Calling’, and since Copeland did indeed give a shit about his instrument, a song like ‘Synchronicity I’ had the kind of intense groove most punk drummers could only dream of matching.
The Police were coming from a different world than the punk crowd, but that was no reason for them not to learn from what the new school was doing. They were grown-up musicians in every sense of the word, and the key to fully maturing in your field is knowing that there’s always something out there that will make you think about your instrument in a completely different way.
