The one girl that made Stewart Copeland a drummer for life
For most drummers starting out, the speed and agility of Stewart Copeland feels almost superhuman. When he started laying down different grooves while in The Police, Copeland became a massive presence in the emerging New Wave movement, inspiring everyone from Dave Grohl to Neil Peart to expand their vocabulary behind the kit. Long before he started pumping out different grooves, Copeland was the last child in a family destined to be musically inept.
Though Copeland had said that his father had a massive interest in music, he quickly realised that every instrument in the house would not be played by any of his children’s hands. As soon as young Stewart took to the drums, though, it was off to take drumming lessons for him, pounding away at the skins for hours until he could make something work. Although Copeland knew his way around a kit, it would take a few more years before he took the whole thing seriously.
After starting on the drums at seven years old, Copeland was 12 when he got to play in a band with a few older kids. Being stationed with his father in England, Copeland went with his brother Ian to jam with a band before the rest of the musicians learned that Stewart took to the drums much better. When the group played their first gig, Copeland found his calling by seeing one person in the crowd for the first time.
As he started hammering away at the drums, Copeland was greeted face to face with his first crush, recalling in This Little Light: “Playing in this band at The British Embassy Beach Club, we’re banging away, and there’s Janet McRoberts. We’re playing The Animals’ ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’ and she’s dancing to my drumbeat. That was such a powerful jolt of what life is all about. That was all I wanted to do with my life that it kinda stuck.”
As time went by, Copeland started progressing beyond the sounds of traditional rock and roll and into the seedy sounds of punk rock, where he met future Police members Andy Summers and Sting. Throughout their first record, Outlandos D’Amour, Copeland would give a clinic on how to make a rock star drumset work, from reggae on ‘So Lonely’ to thrashing punk on ‘Next To You’.
Copeland’s brothers would also become prominent figures in the music industry, founding IRS Records, which would soon become home to the hottest names in alternative music like The Go-Go’s and R.E.M. Then again, The Police were going to far outweigh any of the other bands that were to follow.
Throughout their short time together, Copeland would go on to play some of the most inventive drum beats behind pop songs like ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’, even making a drum metronome sound massive on ‘Every Breath You Take’. Rather than become too big than they could handle, the band decided to cut and run before their rock star lives caught up with them, disbanding in 1983.
Copeland wasn’t done making people move, though, later scoring different films and also lending the odd drum track to albums by other legends like Peter Gabriel. The seeds of musical genius were already planted in Copeland’s brain, and the rest of the music world had Janet McRoberts to thank for turning it into his passion.
