The one song Stewart Copeland said should have never existed: “Didn’t nail it”
It’s never easy trying to get any power trio off the ground. Everyone has to hold up equal weight for the entire band to function properly, and while that can be an incredibly fun challenge, it can get to be a little bit testy when one person tries to assert themselves over every other member of the band. It’s bad enough trying to balance power in a standard four or five-piece band, but Stewart Copeland knew that there had to be a little bit of accommodations for the kind of songs Sting was writing in The Police.
When the band first started, though, it wasn’t clear whether they were going to last more than a few months. Some of their biggest early hits, like ‘Next To You’ and ‘Roxanne’, went nowhere on the charts. While Copeland’s side project Klark Kent did end up getting enough airplay to land them on Top of the Pops, it wasn’t until their second time around that people started to realise the kind of bassist they were working with.
The job of holding down the low end and being in charge of melodies is no easy feat, but Sting was a craftsman after only a handful of tunes. He could appreciate the nervy energy of punk rock, but he knew the ins and outs of music theory in some respects, so when people got to hear a song like ‘Roxanne’ with its strange chord movements, the band stood out far better than whatever The Clash were putting out.
So if Sting wrote that many great songs, why the hell did they have to worry about anyone else in the band making their own tunes? It might all be in the name of democracy, but when Andy Summers came out with ‘Be My Girl’, all about a blow-up doll, it was clear that he was going for something that was almost the exact opposite of the mainstream. And by Copeland’s admission, not all of his songs were much better.
Regatta de Blanc may have helped them establish their sound more, but Copeland felt his song ‘Contact’ didn’t really need to be heard, saying, “I wrote that one. I like the idea of where the lyric was attempting to go, but didn’t quite nail it. The fact that ‘Contact’ made it onto the album is an indication of how short of material we were.”
Then again, the fact that Copeland’s songs are rough around the edges is kind of endearing looking back on everything. It’s nowhere near what Sting was writing on tunes like ‘Walking on the Moon’, but if you look at a song like ‘On Any Other Day’, it’s almost funny hearing Copeland’s amateur attempt at songwriting, especially hearing him paint the picture of a blue-collar man having one of the worst days that anyone living in the 1980s could have imagined.
Compared to the rest of the record, they were moving well beyond the garage-rock tendencies of their early records. You could hear them figuring stuff out on that first record, but listening to them on their second time around, ‘Message in a Bottle’ felt like getting a front-row seat to a little piece of musical history being channelled on the spot.
That’s not to say Copeland couldn’t still find an appreciation for other Police songs, eventually working up his own versions of Sting’s tunes and turning them into more jazzy versions of themselves. ‘Contact’ might not be the kind of record most people were itching to go back to, but every artist needs to spend some time woodshedding, and even if it could be a little embarrassing, it’s that one threshold every single artist needs to get over to reach the big time.
