Ex-Police man Stewart Copeland’s rhythm of life behind Sting and a spy
EVERY Friday, national arts reporter Geoff Edgers hosts The Washington Post’s first Instagram Live show from his barn in Massachusetts. He has interviewed, among others, comedian Tiffany Haddish, infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci and musician Elvis Costello.
Recently, Edgers chatted with Stewart Copeland, the drummer best known for helping found the Police. Here are excerpts from their conversation.
Q: So Sting, he seems to have gotten a bad rap over the years. People like to criticize or attack him. And I’ve determined that that’s because they are generally jealous, because Sting is incredibly talented. I remember being that 13-year-old kid walking around with the AP news clip that the Police were breaking up in 1984. And then the next thing I knew, Sting was playing jazz. It made you think he was the villain. But the tension, the arguing – that really wasn’t Sting’s fault. It was the product of the three guys. Am I right?
A: Yeah. And he was not the villain of the piece. He was the hero of the piece, because it became apparent on our third album that he knew exactly how to make a hit record himself. He didn’t need any input. He didn’t need any collaboration. He could hear the whole thing. He didn’t need us anymore. And it got to the point where he’d show up in the studio with his new song, with a platinum demo that’s already a hit. That’s when a younger version of myself started shouting and screaming. It was very frustrating because I wasn’t there to just play on something like a metronome or a session player. I’m the world’s worst session player. I can never remember the arrangement. So there was this conflict that he had something that in his mind was already kind of perfect and was, but I wasn’t about to mess it up in some way. So that became apparent on the “Zenyatta Mondatta” album – when the tension started to get in there, when he started to feel, “Wait a minute, my idea in my head is better than what I’m hearing coming out of the band.” Yet he stuck with us longer, perhaps, than we deserved.
Q:The only time I got to see the Police was when you made your comeback tour. I saw you at Fenway Park in 2007, and it was a really great show. And you wrote about it beautifully in your book, “Strange Things Happen.” Obviously, everybody is saying, “Hey, guys, you played well together. You’re older now. Are you getting along? Just make a record.” But you went to Sting and sort of liberated him from that. But why? Isn’t it natural that when you guys were still at the top of your creative game you would actually make something good together?
A: Well, we fit together when we were young and we created the material when we were codependent, that we could play and perform in front of an audience 30 years later and make it work. Creatively, we’ve gone different directions. We now speak in different languages on different instruments and have different journeys, and playing those songs is more like liturgy than an artistic expression. It’s very different from creativity. It’s a connection with 80,000 people singing songs they know. A new song in that setting wouldn’t be the thing. “Message in a Bottle” and “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” have that power. And the idea of me going into a studio without the audience – you know, I’m just the wrong guy. And we were having a tough time on tour. There was this tension building. So the liberating Sting part was saying, “Dude, there’s not going to be another record. Relax, we got 20 more shows to play. Let’s enjoy those shows because this is kind of fun.”
Q: You have an Audible Original podcast series, “My Dad the Spy,” about your father, Miles Axe Copeland ll, who was in the CIA. And that’s why you lived most of your childhood in the Middle East.
A: Right, in Cairo. And you know, when I was born in McLean, Va., which is a suburb of the CIA, my daddy was away on business. He was busy installing a dictator in Egypt, the name of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was actually a very good dictator for Egypt. And when I was about 2 months old, we moved to Cairo and didn’t get back to the States until I was about 18. But all that time I’m American. And then when we moved to Beirut, I was in the American school, where I played in my first band, the Black Knights. But my father, meanwhile, I didn’t know this at the time, was busy machinating on behalf of the United States to keep the oil flowing to the West. So the podcast is about “Who was this guy, my father?” — The Washington Post