The one band Andy Summers thought stayed together the best: “One of the only”
A band dynamic is much tougher to manage than most people think, and no part of it looks easy. The whole process can feel like a marriage spread across an entire group of people, and when making any major decision, it’s easy for one person to think that their voice isn’t being heard or that their bandmates are changing things behind their back. It might be easier to divide the credit or the blame among multiple people, but Andy Summers found out that the power trio is one of the trickiest to manage when working with The Police.
Then again, there was never any question that the band all contributed equally. Sting was obviously the standout when looking at the countless hooks he could cram into one song, but with Stewart Copeland’s virtuosic drum fills and Summers’s jazzy approach to the guitar, every one of them had a different sonic image they carried. ‘Every Breath You Take’ sounds nothing like ‘Walking on the Moon’, but that’s what made them so interesting.
They would have rather kept innovating than put out the same thing over and over again, but that’s also what split them apart. Each of them had a different idea for what their music should be, and listening back to some of their final albums, it’s easy to see where the tensions began to set in. Summers managed to get a few more ideas in on Synchronicity, but no one includes a song like ‘Mother’ on an album unless they are going through emotional hell.
Although the world has been heartbroken since the band parted ways, none of them seem interested in making a new album or anything. They are more than happy knowing that they dominated the world once upon a time, and looking at the arguments they had during their reunion, it’s not like any of those pent-up resentments went away with all the years of hindsight.
According to Summers, that kind of tension persists in every single band, so it befuddled him how a group like U2 kept things rolling, saying, “It’s the typical process where you become incredibly famous and they throw all of this money at you and then the rot starts to set in. It’s very hard to stay away from that. In fact, maybe one of the only bands that never happened to was U2. They all seemed to hang together very well. I don’t know if it’s because they’re Christians or what it is. Although I don’t think people were ever as hysterical about U2 as they were the Police.”
Compared to what The Police were doing, U2 always had their own specific approach to rock and roll. Sting had written a handful of socio-political songs in the past, but when Bono sang his songs, he was always coming from a place of passion. He was the leader in many respects, but everyone of them knew that they worked better together than apart, and when it came down to it, each of them would have gladly taken a bullet for the other.
And over the years, U2 have proven to be as curious about their new sound as The Police were back in the day. Each of their albums still sounds like U2 from front to back, but even if one of their albums hits a sour note like No Line on the Horizon, it’s better for them to be taking risks than making the same effects-laden ballad for the 800th time.
Or maybe it has to do with the fact that U2 have the same definition for what got them into music in the first place. By the time The Police split up, all of them were making music for different reasons, but whether you talk to Bono, The Edge, or Larry Mullen Jr, all of them have hold onto the belief that rock and roll is a powerful force capable of changing the world, if it’s in the right hands.
