Andy Summers was never interested in Eric Clapton: “Way past that”
There’s no rulebook saying which artists need to be praised to the high heavens. The Beatles might be considered one of the greatest bands to ever walk the Earth, but there’s always going to be a chance that some people aren’t going to be as thrilled listening to ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ as everyone else is on first listen. It all comes down to personal taste, and while Andy Summers did have a more refined palette than most, he was far less interested in following trends whenever he played.
Even before The Police had begun, Summers was already interested in something beyond the traditional lead guitarist role. Looking through every one of his solos for the Police, nothing that he played was normal, whether that was the strange solo in the middle of ‘So Lonely’ or the complex harmonies that he layered on top of each other for the riff to ‘Message in a Bottle’.
That’s because he wanted to make a sonic space with his music rather than worry about traditional rock and roll. Everyone had heard the traditional punk bands making something loud and aggressive, but as soon as Summers hit that first chord on ‘Walking on the Moon’, it was like the audience had been thrown into orbit for the first time, even when he started using the reggae “skank” rhythm on his tunes.
It may seem cool today, but that was far from the flavour of the day when Summers started. He was born at a time when the biggest names in music were all descendants of the blues, and while that was a good foundation for anyone, it wasn’t the kind of music that Summers wanted to be in for too long.
There was no way The Police were going to make a bluesy tune, and Summers especially wasn’t that thrilled when he first heard Eric Clapton, saying, “People like Clapton came out of the woodwork, and the American blues singers took off, but my heart was in jazz – I liked Thelonious Monk, not Howlin’ Wolf! Blues is very simple to me and was not that interesting to me when everybody copied Eric back in those days; it’s too much simpler music to play because it’s based on a five-note scale, and I had come way past that.”
Anyone who said that kind of thing today would have come off as incredibly pretentious, but Summers had the chops to back it up. Looking through some of the deeper cuts on The Police’s albums, tunes like ‘Murder By Numbers’ have some of the craziest chords to be found on any pop song, and with any luck, Summers could have been a member of Steely Dan had the power trio broken up a bit earlier.
But that kind of musical knowledge also comes with knowing when to stay out of the mix as well. ‘Message in a Bottle’ is one of the greatest guitar songs of all time, but the only time he pulls out the tasty guitar bends is towards the end of the tune and the odd fill in the middle of everything. Sting’s baseline for a tune was already perfect, so why clog up the space by throwing mindless artsy pieces in for no reason?
The blues is a perfect foundation for most people to start when playing rock and roll, but Summers’s strength was in knowing that it was far from the only place to go. There were far more interesting places to go, and seeing how current many Police songs sound today, Summers had a knack for finding the few guitar licks that no one else seemed to touch on yet.
