The Police song Stewart Copeland said was written by AI: “They were really cool”
The Police were never a band to take the easy way out.
The power trio always wanted to explore different avenues with their music, and even if it meant Sting writing most of the material, it was up to Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers to bring their own sense of personality to songs like ‘Walking on the Moon’ or ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’. But if there was one thing that they drew the line at, it was trying to make a machine do most of their work for them behind the scenes.
That’s not to say that they were into a raw sound whenever they played. Their first records may have been indebted to the styles of punk that were emerging around England at the time, but none of them were afraid to make something a little more daring. Bands like The Damned weren’t going to have the creative chords of ‘Roxanne’, and even when they went poppy in the 1980s, every single aspiring guitarist would have been dumbfounded trying to get the chords of ‘Murder By Numbers’.
But even if Copeland didn’t have the best sonic fingerprint from a melodic perspective, you could hear hooks across every single drum part he laid down. From the minute that someone listens to a track like ‘Message in a Bottle’, that tom-tom groove is forever lodged in their brain once the chorus rolls around. When they reached Ghost in the Machine, though, something else was at work.
How AI inspired The Police’s ‘Spirits in the Material World’
Keyboards had never been out of question, but when listening to ‘Spirits in the Material World’, Copeland remembered how the song came out almost computer-generated, saying, “‘Spirits in the Material World’ in a way was written by AI. A very crude form of it. In those years, Casio used to make these little keyboard players. [Sting] was inspired by that. Those little riffs that they had on there were really cool. The bassline didn’t come from Mr. Casio, but the inspiration of the song came from him doodling.”
And it’s not like the song is cheapened by starting from the automatic playing keyboard, either. Sting’s lyrics about socio-political relations and how no revolution will save people from themselves are something that speaks to the human spirit, which is actually a much more clever songwriting trick when used with AI. Because while Sting is singing about issues that break humanity down, the AI inspiration for the riff may as well be the cold and calculated issues of modern life.
For someone of Copeland’s calibre, though, it was hardly going to be a challenge trying to find the right drum part. The presets on those keyboards might be rudimentary compared to everything else, but if there’s one thing that he knew how to do, it was play to the song, and that meant always having the right feel and knowing the exact moment when to sprinkle in a few percussion tricks into the mix.
It’s not like Sting was cheating here, either. In fact, Damon Albarn seemed to take the exact same idea when working on ‘Clint Eastwood’ over a decade later, taking the same presets that he found on an Omnichord and using them as the entire basis for the track when Del the Funky Homosapien came in to lay down a verse.
So while the modern version of AI is still one of the scariest things that any creative person has ever faced, the 1980s still saw the art of automatic composition as simply another tool in the toolbox. But like all great musicians, the AI riff would have meant nothing had there not been some authentic human beings playing it.
