Stewart Copeland on the musician who “expanded the vocabulary” of guitar
They will make the story of The Police into a film one day. It will probably be a load of self-serving old nonsense like all band biopics are, but it’s going to happen. To be fair, though, you could have Darren Aronofsky directing a Quentin Tarantino script and still not cover half of how much Stewart Copeland, Sting and Andy Summers absolutely hated one another at the height of their fame.
Now, bands hating each other is nothing new, obviously. It’s a fact of living in close proximity to other human beings, but it takes a special degree of hating someone to paint the C-word on their drumkit moments before you take to the stage for your biggest concert yet. Sidenote: Do you know how all band biopics begin at a famous concert? The Police absolutely have to begin there.
The sad truth is, though, that The Police’s relationship with each other was always more complicated than basic hatred. Case in point, if you had to guess who Stewart Copeland said this about, who would it be? “He expanded the vocabulary of the instrument beyond guitar solos, guitar parts and rhythm guitar.” Johnny Marr? The Edge? Jimi Hendrix even? Nope. He’s talking about Andy Summers.
While the story is that being in The Police was a non-stop nightmare of creative differences, screaming arguments and semi-regular fistfights, that’s not technically the case. While at times they would rather chew their own toes off than admit it, the three of them wouldn’t have started a band together if they didn’t have incredible respect for each other. Maybe it took more maturity, you only have to look at any of the interviews they’re giving today to see Copeland rhapsodising about Sting’s songs and Summer’s technical ability.
However, there were points where this camaraderie came through even at the time. All three have said multiple times that the video shoots for the band were almost always fun. They look it too, clowning around an empty high school in graduation gowns for ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’, Copeland gurning into the camera as he drums on the actual Apollo 11 rocket in ‘Walking on the Moon’ and the band strutting around Montserrat in comedy straw boaters for ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’.
The strangest thing happened after the band came to an acrimonious end in 1986. All three members remembered they liked each other. They weren’t champagne-clinking best mates obviously but catching up outside the band didn’t feel like tense exchanges with your ex, it felt like catching up with an old friend. So much so that when Sting married Trudie Styler in 1992, he invited the boys from the group. They were having such a good time that they decided to give in to the people begging them to take over from the wedding band and give them a few tunes.
In Copeland’s words, “After about three minutes, it became ‘the thing’ again”. It took three minutes before they remembered why they spent the entire early part of the 1980s wanting to kill and eat each other. That right there is the tragedy of the situation.
Music, the very thing that brought these three men together and made them one of the best bands of the decade, was also the thing literally tearing them apart. Even after all that, though, the one thing they can agree on is that the legacy makes it all worth the pain—even if they didn’t know it at the time.
