There is only a small industry crowd of 100 or so, gathered in the cavernous
dome that is the Staples Center, LA, home to the Grammys. It’s a technical
run-through. It’s boring. Beyoncé has an unfortunate fringe cut that is
sucked into her mouth each time she sings the opening strain of Listen, her
Dreamgirls anthem. The crowd stare glumly at the giant monitor and her giant
flapping fringe.
Then there is the sound of a distinctive drumbeat. Perched behind the big drum
kit is Stewart Copeland, last seen on TV in Britain as a gauche judge on the
reality-TV show Just the Two of Us; last seen on stage properly with the
Police over 20 years ago. You can discern concentration on his face. There’s
an intensity a long way from the languid arrogance of his TV persona. When
Sting and Andy Summers come on, a wave of excitement erupts through the
small crowd, which rises to its feet. Sting says: “It’s been a long time.
It’s good to be back.” There is a nervousness in the way he says it that
draws you in.
They start to play Roxanne. Sting struts, and you don’t notice all those years
that have passed. From a distance his hair is a halo of blond, his body
lithe, his bottom high and round. He has the same slinky moves. The band is
an odd-looking trio: Copeland tall, gangly, no bum at all; and Andy Summers,
short, his face – once as pretty as a pussy cat’s – impossibly young-looking
for 64, a decade older than Sting. The music and its power are
extraordinary. Whatever trauma they have inflicted on each other, the songs
remain and they seem effortless, even affectionate with each other.
Backstage after rehearsal, everyone is excited. The band is jumpy, a box of
playful puppies, though not from the same litter. Andy exhales: “Wasn’t it
great? Who’d believe that after all those years I just slipped back as if it
was yesterday. It was really emotional.” Sting looks at him and says:
“You’ve got groceries on your mouth.” Sheepishly, Summers wipes his lips
clear of a large sandwich crumb.
Copeland, who seemed the most determined on stage, is the most detached off.
He’s on his BlackBerry and talking on his Bluetooth headset. Sting is now in
a tight-fitted cashmere coat and hat. He hugs me hello and his wife, Trudie,
comes up. “Wasn’t it so exciting?” She presses my hand. She had wafted into
the auditorium earlier in a black coat dress and boots, with Robert Downey
Jr at her heels. He told me in an interview once how much he loves Sting.
The next day, their Grammy opening performance thrills America. The secret is
out and they are riding high. We go backstage after the event. Sting is
wearing a satin suit. Is this Sting of the Police, or Sting of Sting? “It’s
Police Sting, or a bit like him, anyway. I think I’m more mellow now, but I
did enter that persona for the performances.
“I was a hard case back then. I come from Newcastle,” he says, all
glinty-eyed, knowing I too come from Newcastle, where men are hard and don’t
cry. They wear T-shirts when it snows. “I used to live up to my name. My
silly name.”
He’s happy and giggly. “Why have I done this? I’ve done this because it’s some
kind of healing.”
You do wonder why. And is this answer enough? He ran away from the Police when
they were the bestselling band in the world. You might wonder why he did
that too. But he needed the freedom to write songs without the fighting. So
why now? Certainly not because he needs the money or acclaim. His lute
album, Songs from the Labyrinth, topped the US classical charts for 13 weeks
and the UK charts for four. He has a sumptuous life, a comfortable one, but
he doesn’t thrive on just comfort. He needs the highs and lows.
He realises Trudie is missing and she must be found as the Police and its
people, in which I am included, must attend a party honouring Herb Alpert
and Jerry Moss, two sweet old chaps who founded A&M Records to which the
Police were signed. After the party, I don’t sleep. I lie in bed with
Copeland’s film, Everybody Stares: The Police Inside Out, playing on my
laptop, Summers’ memoir One Train Later in front of me, and the
transcriptions of several Sting interviews I’ve done over the years to the
other side. I am piecing the fragments together. Not so much of why they
fell apart, but what connected them in the first place? These three alpha
males from totally different geographical and artistic places fighting for
musical territory. Maybe the fight was the bond. It was Copeland’s band
first. He asked Sting to join when he saw him play with the jazz-fusion band
Last Exit. Then they enlisted Summers, known to both of them through his
pedigree as a rock guitarist. Almost instantly they locked into a power
struggle: the founder member, the more experienced player and the front-man
star.
The next day they play the Whisky club on Sunset. Here they make an official
announcement that they will tour the world. An archive Sting interview is
being played, with him saying: “If I ever reformed the Police, I’d be
certified insane.” Sting announces: “Yes, I have the white coat.” They play
Message in a Bottle. News hacks and musos alike hold out their mobile
phones, sending the song to whoever is No 1 on their speed dial. I do that
too. They say they are not going to fight and they only fought because they
cared. They say as individuals they no longer have the need to express
themselves so totally in every song. Everyone is smiling.
Arthur Fogel from the promoters Live Nation scoops me into his car to await
the band in a buttery-coloured suite at the Four Seasons. He was the
mastermind behind last year’s Madonna tour and previously the U2 tour, which
is said to have grossed over £200m, and this tour could make the Police the
same sum. Arthur only does global. “I’d been asking for years, would Sting
consider it? I got a call in December and it was Sting saying yes. It took
me off guard.”
The mood is innocent excitement. Is it naive or is it impressive? Certainly,
Summers is not fool enough to think it’s all going to be easy. “We’ve had a
massive couple of days and I feel like going into battle. I need to strap on
psychic armour.” He’s quiet but not without edge Do you think you’ll be
going into battle with each other?
He hesitates. “I don’t think so, but we are a rock band, so by definition you
have to be somewhat at the edge of battle with each other. It lends to the
right kind of tension in the music. You’ve got to have this slightly
oil-water situation.” We muse who is oil and who is water. He says he’s
water with gloopy bits floating in it. We decide Sting is oil and Copeland
is water, not a glass of it, but Niagara Falls.
What’s interesting is that in Summers’s book One Train Later there is a sense
of catharsis. He felt the need to place himself, to explain that with Eric
Burdon & the New Animals he had the longest guitar solo in the history
of guitars. His contemporaries were Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. His life
hadn’t been just the Police.
But after the band broke up, he stopped practising. For him this represents
the ultimate act of self-destruction. Imagine Gordon Ramsay on a diet of Cup
a Soup. In the book he talks about clamouring for expression. He unleashes
the story of the collapse of the band, the three giant egos, the relentless
fighting. And just as he said that the Police was an open wound that would
take years to heal, Sting, contrary as ever, decided to re-form the band.
Does Summers think it was because you had finally let it go, that’s why it
came back, in an if-you-love-someone-set-them-free kind of way? “It’s very
odd, but I cannot dismiss that element. The urge had been with me for many
years to write that book. I wanted to describe my journey before arriving at
the Police and how I felt that all these people like Jimmy Page were the
same age as me, but it wasn’t my time until later. When the Police happened
I felt I surpassed everyone else. The dream was realised. Then the dream was
gone. I do tell the truth in that book. I don’t pull back from describing
difficult behaviour. I was slightly paranoid that the boys would never speak
to me again, but they loved the book. Sting e-mailed me to say he’d read it
from beginning to end, and didn’t just read the parts that were about him.”
Summers’s reaction to being on the road was to not come home at the end of the
tour; it’s not an unusual phenomenon. Sting’s first marriage broke up in
peak Police, as did Copeland’s later. Summers says that when he went off to
take photos, he swapped his marriage for 40 rolls of film. Summers’s wife,
Kate, divorced him and he garnered the nickname Randy Andy. But by 1986,
after the Police folded and he’d failed to find solace in anyone else, he
and Kate had got back together and remain so.
“It’s a cliché, but that life is hard on marriages. My wife is an
intellectual, private person who went, ‘I don’t need this bullshit around
me.’
“I wasn’t angry with the Police for ruining my marriage, I was angry with
myself, and devastated and numb.”
Did you have a drug phase? “I grew up in the 1960s, so I’ve always loved the
odd hallucinogenic. I can’t say we were good boys all the time, but I never
crossed the line to getting into the abyss. I was driven by the need to
preserve the ability to do what I love, which is play the guitar. It was odd
that my dialogue with the instrument after the Police stopped happening. I
just stopped practising. It came back though, and now I love my guitar and I
loved it last night. Exhilarating and frightening all at the same time. And
we actually played well together.”
His eyes light up and his face brightens. “I have never really forgotten those
songs. We all have them burnt into our cores. Stewart and I practised
together before going up to rehearse in Vancouver. I had dreams about us
playing together again. I can’t remember whether they were happy or sad,
they were just big and deep and haunting. I never stopped thinking about
Sting and Stewart. I didn’t see very much of Sting because I live in LA and
he was only here once or twice a year. But when I saw him recently after he
read my book, we couldn’t stop chatting. There was a flow between us that
made me think something had shifted. We are always going to be bonded.
Sting’s had a fantastic career on his own. I started to play in a lot of
jazz festivals. I played Carnegie Hall last year, I’ve had photography
exhibitions and three photography books.” And while you know he’s glad to
have done these things that have helped redefine him, none of these things
mattered as much as the Police.
For many years, Summers described himself as walking around with an open
wound. The wound couldn’t heal because there was unfinished business, no
closure, no “this is the last album, this is the farewell tour,” just slow,
painful, passive-aggressive splintering. “I do not ever remember us sitting
down and formally saying, ‘This is the end of the band.’ We just went away
and didn’t come back.” There was speculation in the tabloids as early as
1981 that Sting had had enough and was culling the band, that Copeland had
punched Sting, that he had a broken rib. By the time the band played their
last gig in 1986, they knew it hadn’t been going well for a long time. Maybe
this is the goodbye they needed to say. “For a couple of years we were told
not to say anything. But after a while I couldn’t lie any more. I knew we
weren’t coming back. But we never had the talk.”
Sting arrives and by now it’s late afternoon. The room becomes a darker golden
but the sunlight makes Sting’s hair impressively lemony. He hugs me hello;
his cashmere zip-up is soft but his body is hard. He has a look that can
only be described as naughty, and he says: “I’ve just had lunch. I’ve been
well oiled.” It seems that a few celebratory glasses of Pinot were taken.
I’m not sure that he’s drunk on alcohol, but he’s drunk on the buzz of the
past few days.
There’s a sense that the years that have haunted him are suddenly released.
“It was painful. The Police was a painful seven years. Everything you
thought that would make you happy was given to you, and then it did not make
you happy. It’s a horrible but also wonderful lesson to learn where real
happiness comes from. It’s not from success or money. It took me a while to
find that out. I know myself better now. But, you know, we still fall into
the same patterns, we just can navigate them better. And there was a need to
heal. I escaped this band. I meant it when I said it would be a sign of
insanity if it ever came back. I said that every day before I made the
decision to get back together. But one day I just woke up and thought,
‘Let’s do that.’ My instinct said this is what you should do. My instincts
have nothing to do with logic. The logic of leaving the band when it was the
most successful band in the world was odd.
“I needed the freedom to write songs on a wider palette, and I did that for
the next 25 years. Every time I had a successful album, the Police went
further away. Then one day I woke and said now is the time to deal with this
thing. I’d just done this lute album that was more successful than I could
have ever imagined. I could do another but that would be painting myself
into a corner. Do I want to do another Sting record? I thought, I’m not
ready. What will really surprise people, really surprise me? What kept
coming into in my head was, ‘Phone the boys.’ Then I made the call. They
were thrilled, disbelieving and joyful. And so am I.
“There is such a feeling of warmth for us out there, even with the press.” The
press usually hate him, send him up, talk about his tantric sex and his love
of yoga. But for today the snideness is shelved. When you last released a
Police tribute boxed set, you said you begged the record company to package
it in a coffin. “Did I?” he giggles. “Oh, God, what was I like? I hope that
I’m nicer now, more relaxed, less driven to control everything. We were
hugely successful on one hand but hugely dysfunctional on the other.”
Arthur told me, when he saw the band rehearsing in Vancouver, that they were
not very good. “I had this idea we’d re-form and slip back in there,” Sting
giggles grimly. “There is a lot of work to be done. I have developed a lot
of these songs as a solo performer, so they are very different. There are
rhythmical and structural differences I’ve woven in and haven’t shared with
the others, and they were like, ‘What’s this?’ They said they want to do it
the way it was in 1982. I said I want it to represent who we are now as
musicians. We had a negotiation about the way to keep things fresh and also
respect what we did before. And that’s ongoing and I think it’s exciting. We
never really wrote songs together, that was part of the problem. I wrote in
isolation, brought them a finished product. When you start a band, your
roles aren’t defined but they get defined pretty quickly, causing all kinds
of machinations and alliances, but it’s hard. I’m a singer-songwriter.
Stewart’s a great drummer, and Andy is a great guitarist. Within those roles
we can move forward, but at first it was difficult.” Because they all wanted
their moment? “Yes, and that’s understandable.”
Particularly understandable, as the band was founded by Copeland. It was he
who introduced Sting to the blue-eyed reggae rhythm, the drumbeat that
established the Police sound in songs like Message in a Bottle and Walking
on the Moon. It was an accidental chemistry that drew the band together in
the first place. “Most bands are from the same neighbourhood, they have the
same background and education. Ours couldn’t be more different.
Stewart was born in Beirut with American diplomatic parents, Andy was from
the genteel south coast, and I am from Wallsend. We didn’t have that common
bond. Our bond is that we were in the Police and we can make music together.”
The bond that started off so unlikely and ended up so fragile suddenly seems
terribly important. “It was a very important performance for us last night.
We were very exposed. It had to work because of the premise of going on tour
and that we were still a band. Before we went on I got them both together
and said, ‘Look, we’re doing this for each other, we have to play for each
other. And we’re playing for Kim, our tour manager who died, and we are
playing for Ian, Stewart’s brother who died. We all started tearing…”
And here come tears now. He’s mumbling; not whole sentences, just odd words. I
make out “bond of brothers”. He looks at me, full, fat tears now rolling
down his face. “You know, we are doing it for each other.” I start crying
too. It’s easy to feel Sting’s emotion when he’s projecting it in stadiums;
in a hotel room, it’s shattering. Then we laugh hysterically. They never
used to have those moments of group bonding, a convergence of souls before
the show. “We never had that. We grew apart within this vortex of tension.
We stopped connecting and I want to fix that.”
Part of the compulsion to get back was the fixing and the unfinished business.
“This business will never be finished. Relationships are never finished,
either. When I was in it before, I felt trapped. Now I can enjoy it.”
It can’t have been very enjoyable to read Summers’s book and see Copeland’s
film. Neither were particularly kind to Sting. Yet the opposite happened.
“Andy’s book and Stewart’s film gave us reasons to meet. Stewart was in
Sundance promoting his film and I was there with Trudie. Everyone has their
version of the truth. There is no one truth. I wrote my book [Broken Music]
… well, actually, I didn’t write about the Police at all.” This is
interesting in itself, that he wrote an entire autobiography where they
didn’t register on his emotional thermometer.
He wrote about his parents. “What happened spun me further away from their
orbit. That’s one of the sadnesses of my life. That I never quite made the
circle back. I found a way to communicate with my parents now that I didn’t
have when they were alive.” As he sees the band as his family, it seems
imperative that he doesn’t lose them as well.
“When I first was in the Police, I felt very much like an outsider. Andy and
Stewart had been in the business for a number of years and I was just this
guy from Newcastle. I was brutal. I was into the forward momentum more out
of insecurity than anything else.” Every relationship was distorted.
Everybody’s marriage fell apart.
“Yes, badly. But we all managed to survive and pull back from the abyss.”
These days, touring is less alienating. Supporting the Police on the US leg of
the tour will be Fiction Plane, whose singer is Sting’s son Joe. “You
probably think this is nepotism. He is aware of this and it is a huge
problem for him. He says he doesn’t want to be associated with me. But this
is a huge opportunity for him to shine.”
You once said that ambition is stronger than friendship. He laughs, squirming
slightly. “I must have just said that to get a rise out of them. Did I mean
it? Maybe partly. Now I believe friendship is much stronger.”
It feels the time is right for a tantric-sex question. Can he really do it for
hours and hours? “Yes. You can have sex for six hours, but it includes
dinner, a movie, and maybe a lot of begging. Tantra is a well-documented
science; it’s not just about sex. It’s a devotional exercise to express
adoration. Sex is a sacred act and incredible fun.” He fiddles with his
silver bracelet. It has something inscribed in Sanskrit on it. “I think it
says, ‘Don’t do any harm to other human beings.’ ”
I tell him I have described the band as a box of puppies. He says that he had
a beautiful black-coated retriever, but he died. “I am a retriever. Send me
to fetch and I’ll do it. They are loyal and steadfast.” Are they
intelligent? “No.” Are they loving? “Yes.” Are they attractive? “Very. They
don’t bark a lot, they keep themselves to themselves.” Do they do what they
are told? “They seem to. My wife breeds irish wolfhounds. We got eight last
week. They’re so stupid.”
He told Copeland he was an irish wolfhound. Copeland liked it because they are
“goofy”.
Copeland arrives. He has an exhausting presence in that he talks at you in
well-crafted and sometimes delicious soundbites, but not necessarily
answering your question.
“I sacrificed all of my musical credibility in England and now I’m a
front-of-camera TV schlock guy and it’s okay! And I enjoyed the hell out of
it. The music is crap. The production is brilliant. The songs are
pukeworthy. But that’s not the point. It’s not about music, it’s about human
drama, watching people sweat bullets.”
So now you have to sweat some of your own bullets. “No, no, tears of joy.
Although we did sweat some bullets in Vancouver. We are all alpha males, and
in the context of the Police, Sting is our top dog. When I was younger I had
a problem with that. Now I’m older, I am wise. I do have a life I am
president of, in which I am a film composer and all kinds of things on which
to hang my alphaness. Within the band, I’ll just play my drums and be
honoured and inspired by having great songs. During this past week we’ve
struggled and every so often, and this is a little icky, we did indulge in
group hugs. In the rehearsals we reassured each other that if we were
frustrated and angry, ‘My anger is not to do with you, I am not angry with
you.’
“If you were to watch my movie…” he says, raising his eyebrow above his
thick-framed glasses in a chastising way. I try to interrupt, “But I have
seen your movie,” and he continues. “After our first week practising
together I realised that I’m incapable of giving Sting exactly the drum
pattern he has in his head. I will do my best. I am a third-rate session
player but a first-rate tornado.”
The tornado phrase still rings in my head. For all his playfulness now, I tell
him it seemed like a matter of life or death when he was playing so
earnestly at the Grammys and at the rehearsal. “I don’t know whether death
comes into it. My heart is full of joy. For 10 years after the Police I did
not play at all, I lost interest in it.”
So he fell into the same silence as Summers, then around the same time he
found a need to document that. He came across 8mm home movies he’d taken of
the band left in canisters in his wife’s shoe boxes. Some of his film is
tainted with sweetness, some of it is not. Some of it is sad, bitter even.
In the film he says, when you get to where you’re going, the ride is over.
Were you curating your own emotions?
“No. I did it so I could integrate back into my life, put it on a shelf,
encapsulate it, punctuate the Police, the whole story finished. I was going
to have a really good year because all this stuff was coming my way because
of the film. Then I got the call from Sting that blew everything out of the
water. I’d never have dreamt of calling Sting. He owes me not another
calorie of effort. The account is clean. We are good.”
By making this film, it is clear that Copeland stopped hoping the reunion
would ever happen. Now he is grateful it did. Then he was cynical. “I say in
the film I had a car that I never drive, a family I hardly know, I am a
shell of a person, I am a can of beans, I am a product.”
Do you know the family you have now? “I know that family and I have also had
more family. I have seven children.” There have been two wives. “I am a
father of many and a suburban dad, that’s really who I am. My family
is really important to me, I don’t want to be an absent dad. I will be doing
this for one year. I might go crazy after three months and have to write a
ballet because that muscle needs to be moved for the endorphins to work
properly.”
Yet Copeland’s drum-playing is the one place where he can hone his tornado
spirit. “The funniest part of the transition from rock star to professional
human being was the sartorial one. About five years after the last Police
concert, I hung around my buddies in the polo club and realised I was the
only one in the room in leather pants. But I’m not a rock star any more,
composers don’t need to wear leather pants. I bought a new wardrobe with
button-down shirts and chinos from Ralph Lauren. I thought, ‘I look like
everyone around me, I’m anonymous. I’m fitting in.’ ”
I cannot imagine it would have been the pleasure he says it was to fit in, but
he insists he enjoys it. “By the way, in the movie there is a moment of
self-provocation about which there is much self-confusion. I’ve written on
my drums ‘f*** off you c***’. The assumption is normally made that it was an
address to our illustrious lead singer. But it was just an idle moment not
addressed to anyone. There’s another rumour: that I broke Sting’s ribs in a
fight. It’s true. I did break his ribs, but what we were fighting about was
that he was in pursuit of my copy of The New York Times, which he snatched
from me in a moment of monkey-like frivolity. We were joshing around, then
there was a cracking sound.” Can you imagine that happening now? “No, he’d
kick my arse. He runs 20 miles a day and works out every day.”
So what has changed about you? “There is little any one of the three of us
could do to change each other’s opinions of ourselves. There’s nothing
brilliant I could say that would make Andy or Sting think, ‘Gosh, Stewart is
smarter than I thought.’ And there is nothing stupider I could do that could
make them say, ‘I never realised Stewart is such a dick.’ Their opinions are
solidified, and that’s kind of relaxing because there is nothing I need to
do or say to impress them, because that won’t happen,” he says, a little bit
impressed with himself that he has been able to reach this conclusion.
Although the three band members say they are siblings from opposite ends of
the Earth and who look nothing alike, they do all wear the same huge smile
on their face today and the same brightness in their eyes. Sting told me
that he didn’t sleep the night before the Grammys. “That was unusual for me,
but I was wired. The excitement is absolutely tangible. It’s the thing you
feel between a band and an audience. I’ve kicked and screamed against this
for a long time. The others were always ready and I wasn’t ready. But this
feels right. It was a long time to wait but my instinct says it was the
right time.”
Andy Summers’s book of photographs, I’ll Be Watching You: Inside the Police
1980-83, is published by Taschen in a limited edition at £300 per copy.
Orders: www.taschen.com
. For details of tour dates visit: www.thepolicetour.com
