Police brutality: How Sting broke his rib over a newspaper
To say The Police had an intense relationship is akin to saying that the sun has an intense heat. You’re not wrong, but you may still be underselling it somewhat.
The only reason that the stories surrounding how much Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland aren’t as famous as the band themselves is the fact that they were responsible for some of the most beloved pop music of the entire 1980s. Nothing less would eclipse how bad the antipathy between the band members got.
We’re talking Stewart Copeland walking on stage to find his drum kit graffiti’d with the language that the darkest depths of Twitter would call a bit much. We’re talking entire album projects cancelled because the arguments got so vicious and personal. Normally, we’d be talking about how the arguments between Sting and Copeland could get so bad they’d lead to actual fistfights, but in an interview with Rick Beato, Copeland said that it was actually more complicated than that.
He said that the fistfights actually came on the few occasions that he and Sting were actually friendly with each other. This may sound like a strange prospect, but Copeland doubles down on it, saying they were nothing more than boisterous horsing around, though they did get out of hand, as playfighting often does. He talks about one particular incident that left a very real mark on Sting, or at least his ribcage, before one of the biggest gigs of their lives.
He talks about soundchecking for a gig at the iconic Shea Stadium in New York City, and says “we do our soundcheck and we’re having a great time. Sting grabs my New York Times, I’m like “fuck, gimme my newspaper!” So we end up in a tug of war with my New York Times!” While spirits were high, things got slightly out of hand when, as Copeland puts it “I finally had to apply a knee to his chest to get my fucking newspaper back.”
How badly did this fight between Sting and Stewart Copeland end?
Stewart Copeland is keen to remind us all that “we’re both laughing hysterically, by the way” before impersonating Sting rolling on the floor in pain, shouting “‘Goddamit Copeland, you always take it too far!'” Before detailing the two important parts of the story. That first, he got his paper back and second, that they went on to play one of the most transcendently brilliant shows they ever played later that night. Always worth remembering that The Police were always an incredible live band, despite the antipathy.
However, that’s not the end of the story. The day after, Copeland said, Sting was still feeling something in his chest. So he gets an X-ray and discover that Copeland had wanted to read his newspaper so badly that he’d left a hairline fracture in Sting’s rib to get it back. Must have been a hell of a news day. Now, this may sound like a man sick to death of talking about a man he hates and trying to reframe the old stories so he doesn’t have to talk about them again. However, I think the truth is a little deeper than that.
Because the sad fact is that The Police really did sound like mates when they weren’t at each other’s throats. They’ve said on a number of occasions that when they weren’t doing anything music related, they got along famously. In particular, they said that shooting music videos was the unabashed highlight of their time together, since they couldn’t bicker about anything music-related and thus, could just hang together as friends.
So, I actually buy this, and hope that there were enough times like it that being in The Police wasn’t the slog of bad vibes that it gets remembered as. Possibly with a few less damaged bones, though, that would help.
