The 1997 hit The Police will always regret: “One of our riffs”
It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say that The Police were one of the most easygoing bands in the world.
Throughout every piece of their history, it was hard to find a single moment where everyone seemed to be having a good time, and even if their feuds were blown out of proportion more than a few times, it only took that one wrong move for tensions to start flaring up all over again. But despite Sting leading the band through each era of their career, everyone wasn’t always happy with seeing what happened to their songs once they were sent out into the world.
Because even if Sting was the one with his name on the final product, the music was always meant to be a group effort between everyone in the band. There was no way that ‘Message in a Bottle’ was going to sound the same without Stewart Copeland’s drumming, and even if ‘Walking on the Moon’ was a fairly ordinary rock and roll song in Sting’s original form, anyone would have been shellshocked when they first heard how Andy Summers was approaching the guitar part when the song started.
But a lot of the biggest pieces of Sting’s career afterwards weren’t about being a rock and roller anymore. The idea of him continuing on as the same old rock legend wasn’t going to get him anywhere, and if he could learn a thing or two from the greatest names in jazz, he wasn’t going to jump in with both feet. There was a lot more that he had to offer than a bunch of decent pop hits, but there were a few times when the band had some opinions about what he wanted to do with the material.
There had already been plans for them to get back together again and redo some of their older tunes, but since that stopped after none of them could agree on the remix of ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’, it was pretty clear that they had done all they could do together. It was important for them to stretch themselves out a little bit more, but the idea of turning one of their greatest songs into a hip-hop break was a step too far over the line for everyone else in the group.
Granted, it’s easy to look at the interpolation of ‘Every Breath You Take’ on Diddy’s song ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ as a bit heinous nowadays. Knowing what we do about the rap mogul these days, it’s understandable why no one would want to be within a five-foot radius of him, but aside from Sting contributing the main chorus melody of the tune, Copeland remembered that neither he nor Summers tended to get any credit from the track.
Sting may have owned the copyright, but Copeland felt that Summers’s guitar part on the track was at least worth a casual mention, saying, “One of our favourite in-band riffs is that, when Puff Daddy sampled ‘Every Breath You Take’ on ‘I’ll Be Missing You’, he sampled Andy’s guitar figure, not the melody or the lyrics. Me and Andy go, ‘Go on Sting, pay Andy his royalties.’” It might seem a little bit petty when they talked about it then, but it’s a lot more real than you would have thought.
You have to remember that Sting was already becoming one of the biggest solo artists in the world, and even if he didn’t think that The Police was where he wanted to be anymore, leaving his bandmates out to dry wasn’t the optimal way of handling things. The key aspect of every power trio is being able to hold up every part of the band together, and even if Sting wrote the basis of the songs, everything else would have collapsed if Copeland and Summers hadn’t done their part as well.
The original version of this argument may have all been harmless chiding on the band’s part, but if the public thinks that Diddy shouldn’t see another cent for his tunes, why not give it to the people who made the original record? The song is still one of the biggest hits in rap history, so there’s more than enough room to add Summers and Copeland to the credits so they can have those residual checks, too.
