The Police song Andy Summers struggled to play live: “We couldn’t do that on stage”
The Police were massive in a way vanishingly few bands have been before or since. That may sound like a strange thing to say, akin to pointing out that The Beatles were “pretty good” or that Keith Richards “likes a drink”.
However, I do think the sheer Police-mania that Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers’ band of peroxide prodigies induced gets forgotten in the sheer face of every other mental thing that happened to them.
Everywhere you look, there are narratives to be found. Before they formed, there was the overarching question mark of just how legit they were. Like how these three dyed-in-the-wool (and hair) jazzers suddenly decided they were “punks” at exactly the right time to become massive. Then, while they were together, there was the fact that wars have been fought between nations that didn’t hate each other with the ferocity with which Sting and Stewart Copeland did.
Even after they split, there’s the fact that Sting’s solo career has, if not quite matched the success his old band, pushed damn close to it. There’s just so much to talk about The Police that their reign as “the biggest band in the world” becomes something of an afterthought, which speaks to just how compelling those other stories are, because when you think about it, their size is arguably the most unlikely part of it all.
Sure, they were three remarkably pretty boys who had an absolute dab hand with a pop hook. However, there have been countless bands with exactly those attributes who never even saw a record deal, let alone a hit. The Police were also, for lack of a better term, musos. They might have looked like Ralph Lauren models, but the three of them were generational musicians who had put in their 10,000 hours on their respective instruments.
Which song did The Police struggle to play live?
This was a blessing and a curse for the band after they broke into the mainstream. It was a blessing because, with their live show, they could show a pop world convinced they were a manufactured boy band exactly where they could stick it. Not only could they play, but they could comfortably shred any other bunch of wannabes with stupid hair out the building with aplomb. Seriously, any live video of The Police at their peak is staggering stuff to this day.
However, the bigger the band got, the more their ambition led them away from the fairly straightforward new-wavey pop-rock that made them megastars. On record, this led to hits like ‘Walking on the Moon’, ‘Every Breath You Take’ and ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’. The problem came when they tried to take those songs out of the records and onto the world’s biggest stages.
Suddenly, these world-class instrumentalists had to work out how to play the damn things. Especially because, if you think for one second that an ego like Sting’s is going to accept welcoming a few other backup musicians into the band, you’ve got another thing coming. Andy Summers talked about one song in particular proving a problem for the band in an interview with Ultimate Classic Rock. A song that they really did have to work out because a Police concert without it would start a riot.
“Synchronicity proved to be more sophisticated,” he said, noting, “We were adding other instruments onto the tracks. It was slightly less of a trio album, although it was trio-dominated. ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’ is too keyboard for me. We couldn’t do that on stage, so I had to figure out a fancy guitar part to cover that.” Fortunately, if you need a fancy guitar part for anything, chances are that Andy Summers is just the man you need!
