My favourite place

Stewart Copeland on loving Los Angeles

The former Police drummer on the joys of the open road, flashyfood –andchewingthefatwithcyclingbuddies

I’d recommend anyone visiting LA to take a trip to Death Valley. Make time for a two-day trip as it takes a good four to six hours to get there. The adventure begins 45 minutes outside of Los Angeles: driving north you hit the Mojave desert. All around you is this incredible landscape, the huge perspective, the big sky. You get to see the naked earth without any forest or pretty stuff. You see God’s workshop.

Back in the day when I used to smoke cigars, I would blow out the cigar smoke and in the heat it felt like a cool breeze against my cheek. How is that even possible, that the smoke is cooler than the air? I like to listen to Wagner, Stravinsky or Jimi Hendrix when I am there. It is a place for receiving beauty and it is an antidote to claustrophobia. It makes you feel secure as one atom in the big beautiful universe. The majesty of the landscape frees the soul.

I have lived in Los Angeles for 20 years, as my work as a composer brought me here, and it’s still my favourite place. What makes it a good place to live? It is hard to choose between the rattlesnakes, the mountain lions, the mudslides, or the earthquakes. But I think my favourite is the fires. I have loaded my hard drive and my daddy’s trumpet into the car three times in the last 12 months. My buddy [the record producer] Trevor Horn’s house burned down a few fires ago. The last fire, I woke up at 2am as

I heard helicopters and sirens. An hour and a half later, my wife, my daughter and I were all in our cars driving down the hill along with 20,000 other people.

I jest, of course. LA is a wonderful place to live. The sun never ceases to shine.

Santa Monica – where I live – is actually a city within a city, even though it is kind of enveloped by Los Angeles. I spend a lot of time on the bike path along the beach, where the locals hang out. I don’t actually listen to Beach Boys songs, but that is the vibe… Every Sunday, Tuesday and maybe Thursday too, I meet up with a crew of chuckle buddies and we just ride along the cycle path.

Most of the exercise is in the girth region – from laughter. We talk about crackpot theories, get-rich schemes, conspiracies… A favourite pastime in Los Angeles is counting other people’s money.

‘Do you know how much that person earned from that movie?!’ ‘Really? Well…’

If you want to check out the music scene in LA, then head to Sunset Boulevard. The Roxy and Whiskey a Go Go are the places to go.

For posh food, I’d recommend Porta Via (portaviarestaurants.com) or Jon and Vinny’s Italian (jonandvinnys.com) – and I love Katsuya (katsuyarestaurant.com), which is nouvelle Asian in Brentwood. What is really great about it is the music and Philippe Starck decor, so you feel that you are grooving with the in-crowd when actually you are just a middle-aged parent there with your family, finishing dinner at 7.30pm. No doubt the 20-somethings turn up later, so it is probably proper groovy then.

Stewart Copeland’s three-part series Adventures in Music is on Fridays at 9.30pm on BBC Four

Above, from left Death Valley; Copeland in Santa Monica. Below Hollywood Boulevard

Beach Boys vibes along the coast