The Police song Taylor Hawkins wishes he wrote
During his cruelly stunted tenure as Foo Fighters’ drummer, Taylor Hawkins brought thunderous presence and unique style to unquestionable virtuosity. Hawkins was brought on board in 1997, and beyond his drumming abilities, the ever-discerning Dave Grohl could sense Hawkins’ unbound passion for rock and roll.
Very few things in this world can bond a pair of drummers so irrevocably as a shared taste in music. Beyond Beatles and Queen small talk, the former Nirvana drummer and Hawkins, who had cut his teeth on tour with Alanis Morissette before joining the Foos, discovered a bond over hard rock and post-punk groups of the 1980s.
“When he joined the band, his drumming was the least important factor,” Grohl told the NME of his friendship with Hawkins in February 2021. “I just thought, ‘I want to travel the world with this guy; I want to jump on stage and drink beers with this person.’ That was my biggest concern.”
Like Grohl, Hawkins’ taste spanned the years and genres, venturing far beyond the most apparent grounding in classic and heavier rock genres. Whatever one’s opinion on The Police, the band that brought pop to post-punk with a hint of reggae in the late 1970s, it’s hard to deny the intricate talent of the band’s beat-keeper, Stewart Copeland.
As for Hawkins, The Police were a class act, but naturally, Copeland receives the lion’s share of the plaudits. “Stewart Copeland is one of my heroes,” he revealed in an interview with Rolling Stone while selecting five songs he wishes he had written. “I love him to death. The best music that Sting ever made was with Stewart Copeland. That’s the fucking truth”.
Adding: “That’s partially because he had some guy in the back going, ‘Nah, that’s stupid! Let’s try it like this.’ I understand Sting was probably like, ‘Fuck it, I don’t want to deal with that shit.’ I think they still loved each other, though.”
One of Hawkins’ five selections for the ‘Five Songs I Wish I Wrote’ feature was ‘Synchronicity II’, the fifth single to be taken from The Police’s fifth and final album, Synchronicity.
“I love how the song tells the story of how everyday simple life drives you bonkers,” Hawkins said, praising Sting’s lyrics. “I think by that point, Sting was like, ‘I don’t want to be in a band anymore.’ There are certain guys like David Bowie and Sting that just aren’t band guys, never were. They’d rather just do it themselves, or at least not hear from the nosey asshole drummer in the back. They were a democracy to a certain degree, but they slowly faded out of democracy, and I don’t think the other guys could handle it.”
“Synchronicity is definitely the record where you could hear them changing,” he continued, discussing the album in general. “It was the poppier version of Ghost in the Machine. Something about Synchronicity is kind of bright. I mean, once he wrote ‘Every Breath You Take’, he could go be Sting. It was definitely signalling the end, but they were a machine at that point.”
Taylor Hawkins made a habit of befriending his heroes. In the below video, Stewart Copeland reflects on his relationship with the late Foo Fighters drummer.
