We fly to Hong Kong to play at Today's World disco. The reason we are playing in a disco is that it is the only gig we can get at this time in Hong Kong and it fits in with our scheme about playing around the world. I have a temperature hovering around 102-the actual Hong Kong flu in Hong Kong, which is rather pleasing. But overriding health concerns is my burning desire to get a suit made; I have been told that in this city you can get a suit knocked up in a few hours, and we decide to put it to the test. We arrive at a funky-looking tailor's shop and go in to order our suits. With a great deal of confusion on the tailor's part, I describe a powder blue number with zips from hell, across the lapels, on the pockets, up the arms, until it looks like a Vivian Westwood creation on steroids. The tailor is babbling away in Mandarin, not understanding this latest fashion from the West until a faint glimmer appears on his face and he finally twigs that it might be a joke.
I am still running a temperature when we turn up to play the disco. I feel quite ill but I get a B,, shot and I make it through on that and adrenaline; strangely, after the performance I feel a whole lot better, as if I have just sweated out the virus. A group of young men are led into the dressing room wearing uniforms with the word POLICE emblazoned across the chest; it turns out that they are British cadets from the Hong Kong police academy, and we all agree to swap T-shirts. We get theirs and they get ours: a very satisfying exchange. After the show Anne Nightingale presents us with some awards for Best New British band and Best Album. The ceremony is televised by satellite live to England, and like martians, we all wave from the disco across the globe to those back in Blighty. I imagine my mum and dad sitting on the couch with cups of tea, smiling as they nudge each other, and Mum murmuring, "Be careful, love." I wonder if Kate and Layla are watching; with the vast time difference, we haven't talked lately.
Driving into Bombay for the first time is an assault. Trapped between the past and the future, the city is a disordered emblem of two competing civilizations. Each time the car stops at a traffic light (if it stops at all), beggars begin clawing and shouting at the window. Other than a piece of rag around the waist, they are naked; many of them have a limb missing. Hands are outstretched for alms, and mothers of fourteen or fifteen years old extend their palms with a look of ancient sorrow. I sit in the back of the car with all sense of what I had previously called reality blown away because nothing prepares you for this. We are here to entertain, which seems incongruous in this first confrontation with Bombay. Billboards stare down onto the masses below encouraging them to brush with fluoride toothpaste and to eat chocolate, as if all can suddenly drop the sham of poverty and go home laughing at their little bit of playacting. After what seems like a torturous and circuitous route designed to say "this is India," we pull up in front of the Taj Intercontinental. Compared with what we have just passed through, the Taj, with its luxurious Western version of India, is a haven of peace and security. Passing through its regal lobby to the main lounge the dichotomy is visceral. Outside, chaos, pressure, disease, and white glaring heat: inside, American Express, room service, and sparkling mineral water. The idea to play in these countries was originally mine, and Miles has flown to Bombay with no previous contact to see if he can set up some sort of concert. He has made contact with an organization called the Time and Talents Club, a committee of middle-aged Indian ladies who work for charity and occasionally put on concerts to raise money. They are charmed by Miles, and as the word gets out about the Police pop group, the gig changes from a small club to a crumbling auditorium that holds three thousand people.
We are taken to a lunch by the river to meet the ladies of the Time and Talents Club. They are excited to meet us, and in their multicolored saris they chatter and flutter about like exotic birds. These ladies all speak in posh English accents and are a different type of Indian altogether from those outside on the streets of Bombay. They are Parsis and hold a religious belief that belongs to Zoroastrianism, which originated in Persia about 1500 B.C. with its prophet Zarathustra. One of the tenets of the Parsi faith is that the elements earth, water, fire, and air are sacred and must not be polluted by human waste. Therefore, when they die Parsis are left in concentric concrete structures-the Towers of Silence-to be picked apart by vultures. As coffee and cake are proffered and announcements are made in voices that echo the Raj, it is hard to keep your mind off the fact that the bones of these sweet enthusiastic ladies-our promoters-will one day be ripped apart by scavenger birds. We are introduced to their president of the box office, a tiny and shrunken woman who must be at least 120 years old, but she has her infant-size fist on the money with a glint in her eyes that says "don't fuck with me, bub."
We have a couple of days before the concert and we go out into the streets of the city to pass through the swarming streets of Bombay. A simple word to describe it would be fucking insane. As you struggle through the crowds with the babble of Hindi penetrating your eardrums, you are confronted by sadhus with gouged limbs who endure horrific acts of penance, merchants leaning across every stall with imploring eyes, naked children, honking taxicabs, and giant billboards showing the latest Bollywood extravaganza in lurid colors. It is a steaming and ancient povertyridden version of New York, India style. With nine million people, and more like the movie Blade Runner than a city of antiquity, Bombay remains a magnet for all of India. We stop for a moment and watch a mongoose rip the head off a snake. So much for Rikki-tikki-tavi, I think as we stagger off into the heat. Life here is so locked in time and tradition that people seem to accept this grinding reality as normal. At night in the stultifying heat, people sleep in heaps in the streets and squares as if just falling down wherever they happen to be. Later we find out that they do so because it beats the other choice-the crowded and disease-ridden horror of the tenement buildings.
In the cosseted security of the Taj Mahal Intercontinental we pop stars lark about for the movie cameras, camping it up in Indian costumes and fighting with swords. We sit around the tearoom and play sitar, tamboura, and tablas, coming up with a warped raga version of "Walking on the Moon." The English press have come out for this show, including Paul Morley, a cuttingedge pop music journalist and arbiter of taste for New Musical Express. At twenty-three years old, he is a star writer for NME and writes well although mostly with a morbid narcissism. As he is notorious for cutting musicians to pieces, we imagine that he must hate us and our music, so we are not sure what to make of his appearance other than the fact that if he has been flown at great expense to India, he will be nice to us if he wants to live. There is no place for stars in the Paul Morley universe, but when he returns to England he writes a self-obsessed piece about his love of Sting, how Sting is a supercool star, and how stars like him are necessary. This happens because Sting deliberately sets out to get him, make the kid fall in love with him. "Love is the ultimate cruelty," Sting says later.
The concert at the Rang Bhavan auditorium is sold out, with a crowd of 3,500. We turn up late in the afternoon to sound check in a scene of mild chaos. This is India and nothing really works. All things eventually succumb to the heat and rot. We have anxieties about the electrical power: Will we get electrocuted? Will we play in darkness? Should we go acoustic? But after lots of shouting, hand waving, and invocations of various Hindu deities, everything comes to life as if waking from the afternoon slumber. I am excited; to be playing music in India seems like the achievement of at least one life ambition, and I gaze out over the rows of folding metal chairs, smiling on the inside. The night arrives with its mosquitoes, arc lights, and soft greenness, and we wait in the wings to go onstage. Before we go on, an excruciatingly long speech is made about politics, the Time and Talents Club, the officials themselves, what a historic occasion this is, and the hopes and dreams of India. This takes so long that, decimated by the heat, we are almost ready to call it a night and go back to the hotel. Finally the colonial tones of the Time and Talent president announces, "And now without further ado, the Police," and we charge (or rather, exhausted by hum
idity and lassitude, flop like fish) onto the stage. The entire audience explodes to surge forward like a herd of wildebeests and presses up against the stage in crazed abandon, with rolling eyeballs and upward thrusting arms.
Unfortunately, the first two or three rows, which have been carefully roped off for the city's elderly officials and a night of genteel entertainment, are now totally annihilated by the seething mob and we never see them again. We hear later that one of them ended up in the hospital, and we send along flowers and a letter of regretful condolences. The concert is mayhem from beginning to end, with clouds of insects swarming against the glare of light, heat bursting through the floorboards, and a wall of screaming faces a few feet away. It's hard not to laugh out loud because you feel as though you're surfing a giant wave or in the middle of a riot in the madhouse. We finish with possibly the best live "Can't Stand Losing You" that we ever perform, and it feels more like an uprising than a concert of pop music.
Afterward we are taken along with two of Bombay's top models, Indian beauties hovering around the six-foot-one mark, to a small room above a record store in the center of the city. This is the Police party, and in the suffocating heat of a fifteen-by-twenty oven one flight up from the pustulating street we mill about with the buzz from the concert and the smell of rice and chapati fusing with the glasses of vodka that are rapidly placed in our hands. Indian gentlemen in dhotis and turbans come up to us one after another to pronounce that "we are going to play the bloody hell out of your record." One kind soul by the name of Raji Singh tells me that we will sell fifty thousand records in India and that we have a great future on the subcontinent. I swallow a piece of chapati and tell him that I have always loved the place. Through a haze of Smirnoff and curry, I stare out across the room and think of the Four Noble Truths, suffering, attachment, liberation, the Eightfold Path-just like being in this band-and then sign another album with a Bic.
Two days after Bombay we arrive in blast-furnace heat at the Holiday Inn in Giza, Egypt. The only hotel of its kind in the world, with a view of the Great Pyramid, it is slightly unnerving to gaze out of a bedroom window and there, like a relic from an old Peter O'Toole film, is the four-sided triangular tomb erected by a million slaves, or possibly extraterrestrials. The restaurant, with its potted palms and slow-moving ceiling fans, needs only Sydney Greenstreet to complete the picture. We order lunch: eesh baladi, to iniyya, babagahannuugh. We have no idea what we will get but offer up a prayer. The service moves at about the speed of building a pyramid. We wonder if it wouldn't be quicker to nip back to England for lunch, and when it does arrive, it is terrible as if it has been pulled out of the refrigerator where it has been sitting since the time of the pharaohs, mostly just small brown things sitting on a white plate like camel dung.
We are in Egypt to play at the University of Cairo as part of our around-theworld jaunt. But already we have a problem. We have sent our gear by freight because it is considerably cheaper than excess baggage. But because it arrives on Friday, which is the Arab Sabbath, no one is on duty in the air freight section. Our gear is locked up and cannot leave the airport. This is a disaster because we have a concert on Saturday, and lockup is until the following Monday. At first there is a great deal of arguing with upraised chests and waving arms in the volcanic heat of the Cairo airport. Miles and Ian Copeland, who has joined us for the Egyptian gig, seem to be in their natural element as they go at it with the airport officials, the main theme of the dialogue being "I am fuck off, no you are fuck off." This deep command of language and culture gets us nowhere until Miles finally cuts the Gordian knot by making a call to a high-up government official, Colonel Hasan Tuhani, the deputy prime minister of Egypt, and a special government agent turns to open the doors on a holy day and retrieve our gear.
The afternoon before the concert is spent filming, with the three of us galloping through the sand past the Pyramids on horseback, doing our best Lawrence of Arabia imitations. With the sun drifting below the Pyramids, we return to the hotel and as I enter the lobby a small smiling Egyptian in a red fez, white dinner jacket, and bow tie presses a silver tray toward me. On the glinting surface is a small cream-colored envelope with a small ibis embossed in the upper-left-hand corner. Inside on a single ivory sheet are a few freshly typed lines-"Mrs. Summers and your daughter are in room 137. Cordially"-and a flourish of fountain pen signifying the hotel manager's name. I open the door and see Layla lying on the bed asleep and Kate standing there smiling; she raises a finger to her lips and points at the small sleeping form on the bed: don't wake her. I point to the bathroom-let's go in there. We go into the bathroom to kiss and reunite with passion, and as we do so, the entire ceiling in a great cloud of cement and plaster falls in on us, leaving a gaping hole through to the room above. We fall in convulsions on the floor-either it is the power of love or the skills that once engineered the Pyramids have grown rusty. Either way, the baby does not wake up.
The University of Cairo has been thrown into chaos by our arrival; a large group has already filled the hall, and the electrical power that runs all the way from the Aswan Darn underneath date palms, camel arses, screaming children, women in burkas, the Great Pyramid, the kharnsin sandstorm, circumcision ceremonies, and the tomb of Nefertiti is not reaching the stage. We are without juice, powerless.
"I hope abortions are legal in this country, because you are about to witness one tonight," says Danny Quatrochi as he struggles with the PA, which has been flown in from Greece but turns out not to possess enough power to get our sound past the edge of the stage. Along with this mess, the Egyptians have scrounged around and come up with six spotlights for the stage, but with only one bulb-clearly this is not the time of the pharaohs. Sting, Stewart, and I sit backstage with our families and wait, slightly relishing the situation with useful remarks like "I want my mummy," "I think they're in de-Nile," "Fez up, it's a fuckup," and helpfully whistle "The Sheik of Araby." Eventually we get out onto the stage with a barely adequate situation of half lighting and intermittent power, but Ramses III smiles down upon us and we get through the whole show without anyone getting electrocuted, although it occurs to me that if one were to die on a Egyptian stage, would you get mummified?
Somewhere in the middle of the show Sting sees what he thinks is a cop having a go at a kid in the front and tells him to fuck off. It turns out that the bouncer is in fact the chief of police, and a difficult situation arises later with Sting refusing to apologize. We all risk incarceration until Miles finally manages to calm the chief down by apologizing on Sting's behalf: honor is served and Anglo-Egyptian relations remain intact.
A day later we arrive in the cool Hellenic air of Athens, and it suddenly feels a relief to be back in the West. We are the first rock group to play here since the Stones in 1969, when the military took over the country and rock concerts in Greece came to an end. When we arrive in our large blue bus there is a huge crowd already surrounding the building and a phalanx of the police trying to control things. There are so many kids on the street that we can't get through, and with its engine running, the bus comes to a stop in the middle of the crowd. Knowing we are inside, they surround the bus and begin banging on its sides. The situation becomes impossible and frightening-clearly Socratic discourse isn't going to work this time; emotions are running high. But the real police get to the bus and make a pretty little corridor of truncheons, through which we are able to exit the bus and get successfully into the stadium. I carry Layla in my arms underneath the raised batons and sing to her, "We're off to see the wizard...."
We leave Athens and tour on through the rest of Europe; the shows become marked more by chaos, disorder, and uproar. In Italy we end the night trapped in the dressing room with a riot-police, tear gas, and burning cars-outside. This is the rock circus supreme. Like a force of nature, we whirl through each port, leaving emotional and physical wreckage in our wake. The three of us sit in the eye of the maelstrom, with a half awareness of what is happening on the outer fringes, the things th
at are kept from us, lies, collusion, emotional agendas. Distortion is creeping in, and we can regard it only with a sorry shrug, see it as theater. If we try to fix every little hurt, every little wound, we will get sucked into our own whirlpool. In the middle of this inferno we are the still point and in some ways the least damaged, but sitting backstage with my guitar and friends and inhaling the golden poppy of success, it's a drag to know that for some, the Police experience is less than life-affirming.
We perform and make the records, but already it's turned from a trio of unknown hopefuls into a machine that impassively chews people up and spits them back out. We hear reports of people who have been hired. They come into the operation of touring and running a successful band with smiling faces and then later-emotionally wrecked-leave sobbing and vowing never to do anything like that again. Beneath the crowing voice of triumph there is a shadow of power plays, hierarchy, and machismo; as we march forward, the operation balloons into a swollen monster-a queen bee surrounded by workers guarding the source of the eggs-and in a dreamlike moment, with a few songs giving the power to destroy, create, get you anything and with our faces staring out from lurid posters above teenage beds, we grow to an entourage of seventy-five.
One Train Later: A Memoir Page 29