The guitar legend who built his career on not playing solos

Mention the Police – the band, not the law enforcement agency – and we tend firstly to think of Sting: he of the boyish voice and blithely melodic songs. Drumming aficionados will certainly remember Stewart Copeland’s flamboyant, reggae-tinged playing, and only then do we come to Andy Summers, the trio’s virtuoso guitarist.

Yet, Summers did just as much to make the band unique. No other guitar-based band boasted a player who combined such sophisticated chords and orchestral thinking with the absence of the howling solos that made his peers into gods.

“That is because we came out of the punk scene,” he explains via Zoom from his Los Angeles home, “where you were not supposed to be able to actually play a solo. Stewart [Copeland] in particular was very sort of mean about that: ‘No guitar solos!’”

Andy Summers was an integral part of the unique sound of the Police.

Summers says that the orchestral approach was partially driven by the advent of more refined pedal-boards that allowed for a much wider palette of electronically treated sounds, with which he tried to keep the show sonically interesting across two hours.

The unusual chords, meanwhile, came from his long-term immersion in jazz – something he shared with the younger Sting, and which directly collided with the way they were selling themselves. “We were in a so-called punk band – a fake punk band,” he says, with a laugh, “and we had to play punk music … But absolutely one of the reasons the Police worked was because Sting and I both came from sort of the same place, and so harmonically we would agree on a lot of stuff. I would play weirder stuff on the guitar than most guitar players behind the vocal, and Sting was able to hang with what I was playing. He got it because his ear was more sophisticated than being just a simple rocker or folk player. So I was able to do stuff that I might not have been able to do with a different singer.”

The Police sound was rooted in an orchestral approach.Credit:

While Summers came to worldwide fame with the Police in 1978, he had been central to the 1960s London scene as a member of Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band – a scene brimming with notable guitarists. Indeed, Summers, his then-friend Eric Clapton, his later collaborator Robert Fripp, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, George Harrison, Brian Jones, Keith Richards and John McLaughlin were all born within four years of each other. So why England, why then, and why guitarists?

“We all had the same mother!” he quips. “You were just in the crowd, and there were all these other guitar players that you’d have to be checking out. Rock music really started to come into its own, and the electric guitar was in the front of it all. So there were all these guitarists around, most of whom I knew, especially because we were all in London. It’s odd looking back now that so many of the names are legendary and sort of guitar heroes. I don’t know what was in the air at the time. It was an unleashing of guitar, as it were.”

‘I would play weirder stuff on the guitar than most guitar players behind the vocal, and Sting was able to hang with what I was playing.’

Andy Summers

Where many on that list had been influenced by US blues guitarists like BB King, Summers was steeped in such great jazz players as Wes Montgomery. “The blues permeated rock guitar playing because of bending strings and fairly simple – basically pentatonic – scales,” he observes. “Jazz was more harmonically complex. You’d have to know a lot more about how to play through chord progressions, whereas the blues was pretty straightforward: more about emotion and feeling, and that, of course, got into rock guitar playing. So you’d pick up all these different influences and what scales they were playing and all this guitar language, I suppose.”

Summers’ solo show interweaves guitar improvisations with his photography.Credit:

“Some people were pretty po-faced about the style they would play. Eric, in particular, only played the blues and wasn’t interested in anything else. But it’s all interesting, and you learn things off one another. So there was a sort of melange of guitar playing going on in London at that time.”

Summers is currently touring a solo show called The Cracked Lens + A Missing String, in which he interweaves guitar improvisations with his photography – a passion since his Police years. “I’m marrying my guitar playing and the sonic qualities that I use to the different sequences of photography,” he says. “I talk quite a lot because I basically realised I should have been doing stand-up all my life, and I finally got there! Who needs to play guitar?!”

Do the Police get a look-in?

“I do some Police at the end,” he replies, “because I don’t want to get killed! I’m actually able to play with the original backing tracks. So I do three or four numbers at the end with photography, playing against the original tracks, but obviously what was a vocal becomes a beautiful instrumental.”

Summers was musical from infancy, “always singing songs and melodies”. His mother made him take piano lessons from a young age, for which he’s eternally grateful, and, five years later, he was given a guitar with a missing string. “It was just like, ‘Man, this is it!’” he recalls. “I was completely dedicated at that age to nonstop playing ...

“My phrasing and sense of time all came out of American jazz.” he says. “But time moves on, and you learn other things on your instrument. Of course, I can play the blues and rock. You become more of a master of the instrument and music generally.

“So at this point, I feel like I have my own style, my own harmonic ear, and I don’t really feel particularly tied to any particular genre. I have influences that I came from, but I’m not out making bebop jazz records. I’ve gone way past that. So I don’t really bow to any particular style.”

Andy Summers will perform at Melbourne Recital Centre on September 24, and City Recital Hall in Sydney on September 26.