The multiple fights that introduced The Police to America
Ironically enough, perhaps the least rock ‘n’ roll thing about The Police was their music.
To be perfectly clear, that’s not a values judgement on Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland. Quite the opposite in fact; their brand of reggae, jazz and post-punk inflected new wave led to some of the best music of the 1980s by a country mile. Fitting for the band who, at the start of the decade, were arguably the biggest in the world, it’s more behind the scenes that their story has all the aggression and bad behaviour of a biopic about The Who.
The best examples of this come from the band’s earliest days, though, long before packed-out stadiums, number-one singles, their debut and global fame. Put it this way, their debut album was eventually titled Outlandos d’Amour to match the romantic, pretty-boy image that tracks like ‘Roxanne’ and ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ gave them. The working title is one that sounds hilariously ill-fitting until you read any account of the band relations at the time.
After that, Police Brutality becomes an almost unnervingly apt name for the record. The album was made in a cloud of bad vibes between all three members of The Police, but Sting and Copeland in particular. The kind that more often than not blew up into very real fistfights between the two bottle-blonde rapscallions. Copeland has tried to call the fights nothing more than two overgrown boys being rambunctious and that they were having fun at the time.
Honestly, that reads more like a man sick and tired of talking about these fights, trying to change the narrative about them. A bold thing to do after nearly half a century of discourse about precisely three things. First, just how much The Police hated each other. Second, just how many times it made them try to rearrange each other’s perfectly sculpted facial features. Third, and most importantly, the fact how it was arguably the thing that powered their strange, undeniable chemistry and made them such a special band in the first place.
How did their fights make The Police so unmissable?
The band has said on a few occasions that the great tragedy of the group was that when music wasn’t involved, the trio got on famously. Their music video shoots are remembered with great fondness because, since they couldn’t argue over the music, they could just clown around and be friends. Unfortunately, they were a band, and arguing about the music was entirely the point.
This was long before fame came calling as well, as Sting said in a 1991 interview with Rolling Stone. He was talking about the early days of The Police, when they were three tough-nut rockers carrying their own gear and playing punk clubs full of people gobbing on them. Not quite for the reason that many would spend the 1980s wanting to do, though. Their early notoriety led them to book their first gig in the US, at New York City’s notorious punk dive CBGBs. The band had everything to prove, and went into the gig like they were fighting a war.
As Sting put it, “We really thought, ‘Fuck it, we’ve got to survive here’.” The band, always a phenomenal live act, absolutely crushed the show. However, that combative attitude wasn’t just saved for the music, as Sting noted, “Stewart and I had a fight in the dressing room after the show; I thought he was speeding up, he said I was slowing down”. This resulted in a fistfight between the two, as most things did at the time. However, something happened which showed that despite the bad vibes, that attitude wasn’t for nought.
“We were strangling each other, and then we heard the calls for an encore. We stopped strangling each other, did an encore and then came back, had another fight and then back for another encore. That was our first night in America.” For both good and bad, The Police started as they meant to go on.
