The ludicrous tale of Stewart Copeland’s giant spacecraft drum
By virtue of sitting at the back of the stage most of the time, drummers tend not to get much opportunity to show off, but if you let them hit a big metallic object, that’ll keep them happy most of the time. If you somehow don’t believe this to be true, Stewart Copeland can attest to it.
Of course, plenty of other drummers often give themselves little party pieces, offering them the chance to become the centre of attention for a short period. For example, John Bonham would regularly turn to a gigantic gong during his live performances with Led Zeppelin, and Rush drummer Neil Peart was rarely ever seen on stage without his rack of toms lined up in front of him.
However, as flashy as both of these might sound, neither of them stand up to what Copeland managed to get his hands on for the video of The Police’s ‘Walking On The Moon’.
Given the space theme of the song, the band were flown out to Cape Canaveral in Florida, the site of the Kennedy Space Centre, to shoot a music video. While both Andy Summers and Sting were given their standard instruments to pose with for the video, Copeland didn’t have a drum kit available to him for the shoot.
However, that didn’t mean that he was just pottering around in the background during the shoot, and instead of playing a secondary role to the other members, he chose to go one step further and do something that the majority of his peers can’t claim to have done – play drums on a spacecraft.
Speaking to Smooth Radio in 2024, he boasted about this unusual opportunity that he was blessed with, and explained how the music video came about. “I got to play a Saturn 5,” he bragged. “Not many drummers can say that. Most drummers play a Ludwig Classic or a Rodgers or a Gretsch – I got to play a Saturn 5. For ‘Message In A Bottle’ I was banging on a chair [in the music video], and here I am on a spaceship.”
The music video was obviously overdubbed with the actual recording of the song, but Summer and Sting would have been able to hear the rhythms that Copeland was tapping out on the exhaust of the vessel, which the drummer protests was actually far better than one might think. “The sound was not bad actually, a pretty good sound,” he continued. “Kinda tinny, it was more high-pitched and tinny-sounding than you might expect from such a substantial piece of engineering, but it’s all actually pretty lightweight.”
There’s no denying that being flown out to a spaceport for a music video is ridiculously cool, but being able to claim that you’ve played drums on the chassis of a famous spacecraft is infinitely cooler. “There was no concept, no storyline, no nothing,” Copeland concluded.
“I just banged some stuff and tried to look as cool as possible while someone else was doing the actual singing.”
