Stewart Copeland: Sting runs quiet and deep while I run noisy and shallow
Police drummer Stewart Copeland is suing his former bandmate, but can still laugh about how a studio session was like a battlefield. He’s taking his speaking tour to Australia in January.
Halfway through our interview I ask Stewart Copeland about the legal case he and Andy Summers have launched against Sting, alleging lost royalties for their part in the Police. “Representatives of myself have been unresponsive,” Copeland booms. So he can’t talk about it? “No.”
It’s an uncharacteristically terse response from the otherwise garrulous drummer. The Police were a famously combustible entity but a phenomenally successful one: Copeland’s Arabic-influenced rhythms, Summers’s jazz-schooled guitar and the poetic brilliance of Sting’s songwriting led to Message in a Bottle, Every Breath You Take and many other classics of the late ’70s and early ’80s.
Sting unquestionably wrote the hits but never matched those heights away from the Police, so you can see why their claim is complicated.
Copeland is happy to talk about anything else, and indeed has done in promoting the book Have I Said Too Much?, an authorised biography by Johnny Morgan, a childhood friend at the American Community School in Beirut. He’s doing a speaking tour for the book in Australia next month.
“Back then it seemed like everybody’s daddy was a spy,” says Copeland, whose father was indeed a CIA agent, and instrumental in installing Gamal Abdel Nasser as president of Egypt.
“Kim Philby was a close friend of my father’s, always pinching women’s bottoms at cocktail parties. And it was not about politics; it was about keeping the oil flowing to the US and not the Soviet Union. As my father used to say about the various monarchs, dictators and dickheads in the region, ‘They may be sons of bitches but they’re our sons of bitches’.”
Copeland knew from an early age that the life of a spy was not for him. He started his professional career as a road manager for progressive rock band Curved Air, later becoming their drummer. What did he learn from the experience?
“That all musicians are insane. Particularly guitarists. Drummers only need an innate rhythmic pulse, but guitarists need hours and hours of not having a life to get those chops. I also learnt how band members interact: who is the leader, who are the passengers.”
All good training for the Police, who formed after Copeland witnessed Sting performing in Newcastle in a band called Last Exit and saw an opportunity.
“The punk thing happened and I wanted to be in one of those bands because the business model was so much better,” he says. “I wanted a three-piece with a bass player who could sing. I looked at Sting as a golden ray of light descended on his magnificent brow, and thought: I’m going to be rich.”
Fame and glory, Copeland claims, did not change the man he calls Stingo. He was the Lion King from birth. What about the person away from the stage? “Very quiet, diffident, a bit of a mystery. He’s not a quick conversationalist, but give him a minute and he’ll come back with an argument that’s devastating.”
Copeland agrees Sting’s songs were better than anyone else’s, and says he had written sketches of early favourites such as So Lonely and Can’t Stand Losing You before the band formed.
The Police didn’t really have much in common with punk. “The only thing punk about us was that we cut our hair and dyed it blond,” Copeland says.
“We were spotted by the London critics right away as charlatans and carpetbaggers, which was correct. We were the older teens at the tween party: not supposed to be there. But when we played at (London punk club) the Roxy all the other bands were there to cop chops off us, because we were light years ahead of them professionally.”
The correlation of Sting’s songs and Copeland’s and Summers’s musical personalities gave the Police their magic. It also set the template for a career’s worth of blazing rows.
“Sting wrote Roxanne as a bossa nova one night at Andy Summers’s place and I immediately f..ked it up because we didn’t believe in it. But we played it to my brother Miles (Copeland, then the Police’s manager) and he ran down the street naked, screaming ‘Eureka!’.”
Copeland describes the Police’s formula as “punk attitude, Arabic influence, schoolteacher intellect”. He says that for the first three albums, relationships between the band members were for the most part harmonious, with Sting only too happy to let Copeland and Summers take his songs and transform them, as they did with Roxanne.
“But after he wrote 10 hits in a row he was a little more assertive. He started coming in with fully fledged songs, and by the latter albums that’s all I got. From Zenyatta Mondatta onwards he showed me the chords, I would do a take and it was on the record for ever.”
Things got really fraught with Ghost in the Machine, recorded in 1981 in Montserrat. The album abandoned the immediacy of the earlier albums for lengthy sessions featuring brass and synthesisers. “We were ending up backing a singer doing his pop songs,” Summers said of the process, while Copeland believes it took another 25 years to recover.
“During the reunion tour in 2007, we had band therapy, where we figured all this shit out,” he says.
“Back when we were easily triggered youngsters … it was nothing to do with the ego, pride and jealousy we thought it was about. We’re all on the spectrum, we all give a shit about what we do, and it turns out we’re on different missions. I want to bang shit and raise hell. Andy … wants to play stadiums. Sting wants to write the perfect song. He sees himself as a poet, and having World War Three going on behind his left shoulder does not help.”
Nonetheless the reunion tour, originally planned for six months, went on for two years and grossed more than $US360m ($541m) – more than the Police’s entire previous career earnings. How did they manage without killing each other?
“Outside the band we got along well,” Copeland says. “Sting runs quiet and deep, I run noisy and shallow and we have a bond – as long as we’re not making music. But there were sound checks when we weren’t shouting at each other, so it was, ‘Hey guys, want to add another six months to the tour?’.”
It isn’t entirely sorted out, as the court case proves, but the Police do not dominate Copeland’s life any more. He first escaped by writing the score for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film, Rumble Fish, which led to a second career as a film composer.
“What a relief to escape the scorn of my colleagues,” he says, sighing. “We all brought songs to the Police but it was no fun working on them, because I couldn’t write for Sting’s persona. That same material I used for Rumble Fish and got a Golden Globe nomination, so it didn’t suck. It just wasn’t suitable for the Police.”
These days Copeland writes operas. “I lead a very simple life in Brentwood, California,” he explains. “I no longer need seven chateaux now that my kids have grown up and left home. I can afford to do opera, where the goal is to lose money.”
He would, of course, make a lot of money by doing another Police reunion. Could it happen?
“We did what we had to do; it was brilliant. I can’t see any reason for doing it again – I don’t see it happening.” So that’s that then.
THE TIMES
Stewart Copeland is booked for his speaking tour at the Regal Theatre in Subiaco, Perth, on January 11 and the Forum in Melbourne on January 14.
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