Stewart Copeland on the artist that “fucked everything up”
When he was first getting into the drums, Stewart Copeland was handed a copy of a Buddy Rich record by his jazz-playing father. At the time, he had been busy adoring the punkish simplicity of The Kinks. Thus, this sudden complexity created a dichotomy in his influences, which he carried to The Police. As any drummer will tell you, although it might not be clear to the idle listener, Copeland’s subtle fills are supremely hard to play right.
His complexity, however, had great self-awareness of what it was servicing. “I think it’s hysterical that both Ginger Baker and Charlie Watts called themselves jazz drummers,” Stewart Copeland humorously remarked when Far Out interviewed him back in 2022. “They were ‘Rock Gods’. Saying ‘I’m a jazz drummer, not a rock drummer’ is the equivalent of saying, ‘I have classical training’. But we all have these moments. I mean, I’m an opera writer!”
Nevertheless, there was one virtuoso who remained proudly within the remit of rock, and yet, he achieved such spell-binding results within the limited vocabulary of the genre that he irrevocably changed popular music. “Jimi Hendrix fucked everything up,“ Copeland said when appraising his 1967 record, Are You Experienced. The Police sticksmith opened a can of worms by twisting the blues with such bombastic ability that it no longer looked like the blues at all.
However, it was the energy of his creation that changed things for Copeland. “That was it for trumpets and trombones,“ he said, ditching his old classical records by the likes of Igor Stravinsky for a while. “Now it’s gotta be guitar with a row of giant Marshall amplifiers. I would sit in class and draw Marshall amps, which was pretty easy to do, actually, even with the angled top cabinets.“
It was the whole band who blew his mind, too. He concluded: “Mitch Mitchell blew me away, of course. Just recently I was on a plane and I watched the Hendrix documentary about the Isle of Wight. It’s one of the only live recordings on which you can hear the drums; on all the bootlegs the guitar is so loud. And you can see Mitch playing – the shit he did was remarkable. All of this stuff I did that I was rather proud of, I thought I came up with it. But no, I got it from Mitch.”
His love of Mitch was based on the way he eschewed ego and way happy to play second fiddle to his riotous frontman, simply adding to the blend. As he told us of his other drumming hero, Ringo Starr: “At long last, he’s being appreciated for the musician he is. Normally, singers and guitarists just want a backbeat: ‘Give us a simple backbeat, nothing flashy.’ Ringo did more than that, and it was refreshing to hear a drummer who did.” All the same, he played to the song’s needs, offering up a rhythmic embellishment that served to elevate the ensemble without ever showing off.
But then there are stars like Hendrix who showed off in premium style and threw a curveball into rock.
