Strange things happen: a life with the Police, polo, and pygmies

by Stewart Copeland

  (A couple of days later, Fiona is mortified to see shots of herself holding wrong stuff on offer to tabloids. I’m only partly able to calm her down by showing her shots of tout le monde similarly busted. On Wire Images there are shots of all the cool people holding uncool—but free—products.) We end up giving most of the stuff away.

  Getting into any of the parties on Main Street requires shoving to the front of a mob and shouting names through a half-opened door. Even your own party. This evening the Everyone Stares crew is participating in an event called Chef Dance. It’s a cook-off by the most famous chefs in the land who will provide dinner for me and twenty chums. There are several filmmaker groups in this large, busy restaurant. Andy has shown up, as well as a few of my favorite L.A. chuckle buddies. There is a bottle of tequila making brisk rounds of the table. My young postproduction crew, Brit Marling and Mike Cahill, are swaying to the beat of a great party. The room is alive with laughter and song. Andy is in fine fettle and we are carousing uproariously when I look up, gaping. Sting is here! In a moment he is among us, and the three of us are hugging and knocking over drinks. I always get a warm glow when the old band gathers up together. We go straight back into the old repartee, cooing and jabbing at one another. Across the table from us, a swarm of flashbulbs are going off as we grin idiotically. It’s a strange kind of friendship that the three of us have. It feels different this time.

  IT’S TIME FOR THE big premiere. In the bright snow outside the stage door, Andy and I are hamming it up for the cameras. I have been hammering away at the press for days, but this is the first glimpse they have had of Andy. He is on a roll and has the news teams lit up. Inside, the theater is packed and there is a distinct crackle of preconcert buzz. When Andy and I enter the big room and take our seats, there are hoots and whistles from the crowd. The hubbub dies down as Trevor Groth takes the stage. He says a few kind words about my little film and then summons me to the mic. I have a gag planned for this moment (suggested by the ever creative Doreen Ringer Ross). Halfway up the podium, I stop, reach into my pocket, and pull out my new T-Mobile camera phone. Swag, of course—this is why they give us the stuff. I put it into Record, raise it up, and film the crowd as I continue my progress up to the lectern. The crowd gets the gag and their hollering follows me to the mic. When I get there and I’m just about to hit the punch line (“My next film…”), I notice that I had the camera back to front. Aww, damn.

  “I just got a great shot of myself,” I confess. Then I turn the camera around.

  “Could you do all that again?”

  And they do! The place goes nuts as I hose them down again with my telephone-cam. This is going to be a fun evening.

  After a brief introduction to the film, I return to my seat and the lights go down. The film comes up. The first discernible dialogue is Sting saying to a concert crowd, “Say hello to Stewart’s camera!” and he looks over his shoulder at the camera. There is a cheer from the concert audience and a yell from the movie crowd. This could be described as a sympathetic audience, and as the movie picks up speed, the crowd is rippling, chuckling, and empathizing. Anything that could be construed as a gag gets a laugh. All of the little moments and nuances, and the subtle wry twists of phrase in the narration get ripples of approval. Scenes that seemed interminable on my computer screen flash past all too briefly. Sting looks way suave in the film, but Andy has turned out to be a real resource. His scenes get all of the big laughs.

  In no time at all, we’re at the end of the movie. There is a big noise from the house, the lights come up, and I’m on my way back to the stage for Q & A. Well, at this point it’s not too hard to face an audience like this. Love is in the air. One guy asks where all the fights are. I reply that I honestly don’t have any film of band strife. All fifty hours of my old footage show us enjoying one another’s company. Another lady wants to know about the short shorts that I wore. I remind her that self-respecting basketball players wore them back then. Then comes the question, “What’s that music? Are you going to release a soundtrack?”

  I like this question because it allows me to recount the excellent adventure that I had a couple of years before making this movie. I was cutting up and lobotomizing Police music to create new tracks. But the tale had an unhappy ending. After making these tracks, which I called “derangements,” my bandmates nixed them for release to the public. Until the movie came along they were orphan tracks, moldering in my vault. Unblessed. You could say that my brethren had put out the red light.

  “So how about it, folks?” I ask the crowd.

  “Andy is with us here tonight. You want to tell him what you think about these tracks?”

  There is bedlam in the house as Andy rises from his seat and faces the audience. Like a Roman emperor, he extends an arm, thumb of judgment outstretched. To cheers and laughter, the thumb goes up.

  “Two out of three!” I declare into the mic.

  PART IV

  ABNORMAL AGAIN

  EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT; NOTHING HAS CHANGED

  CHAPTER 26

  LOCK UP YOUR MOTHERS: WE’RE BACK

  FEBRUARY 2007

  I had intended to post this message on my little fan-site but….

  A

  s I hit Send on this message I’m walking out the door of my studio. There is a car outside to pick me up and take me to a press conference with Sting and Andy. We’re on our way to announce a five-month world tour as The Police. It all started, I think, on the night Sting unexpectedly showed up at the Everyone Stares party at the Sundance Festival. Suddenly there were the three of us head-to-head, laughing and joshing and carousing. There is always a buzz that we get when the three of us are together, but this time was different. Can’t even say how, but the bond between us felt like a current that had been switched on. The wires had been there for twenty years, but now there was electricity running through them. More than just a reunion of old friends, we felt like a band.

  Then Andy’s book came out, then Sting’s lute CD. In October, there were three of us crisscrossing Europe hawking something. Actually four when you count Henry Padovani, with his book and CD. My BlackBerry was full of messages from my old buddies. I missed Sting in Paris by a day and in Berlin by about twenty minutes. Andy and Sting crossed paths in New York and London.

  In my head, everything to do with The Police has been in a lockbox for two decades. Making the movie about the band didn’t change that. In fact, emotionally it was like house cleaning. Making the movie tidied it all up so that the lockbox could take up less space in my garage.

  So just when I’m about to resume my life as a film composer, Sting is on the phone.

  “The time is right,” he growls. “Let’s do it.”

  We make a plan to rehearse in May and then tour from June through October.

  It takes a few days to sink in. We are already talking about schedules and personnel, but it hasn’t occurred to me to pull out the lockbox and open it up. When Sting e-mails me a set list and I look at those song titles as something for my future rather than my past, the dam finally breaks. I’m laughing and shouting as I dance around my studio. We are going to burn it up! I’m in a band! I love being in a band, always have, but this is my band. This is the band. The Police has been so removed from my present life that it almost feels like Led Zeppelin called up and invited me to play drums with them. Odd enough that they should call a humble film composer for the gig, but here’s the kicker—I get to actually be the original guy! The icon is clean and I’m a part of it. The Police is me again rather than an accolade on the shelf.

  But there’s a snag. We have a lot to do before word gets out. For twenty different reasons we have to keep totally quiet about it. It’s November, and we have to stay mum until mid-February. And it’s not just about restraining exuberance. I have a life and career that involves many commitments to all kinds of people. I’m supposed to be producing a TV series, directing a film, and planning my summer concerts. But now I must be evasive and flaky. The peo
ple with whom I’m making all of these plans are wondering what’s wrong with me.

  After my few moments of hysteria, I bottle it up again. I tell Fiona but not the kids. To my friends I’m just abnormally cheerful. Funny thing, though. In my world, a part of conversation is the question “So what have you got coming up?”

  It’s a polite but loaded question. Due to the capriciousness of the art game, you never know if the person you are talking to is unemployed and dead in the water, or on the verge of something hot that they can’t wait to talk about. My own response to this banter now has all the marks of a belly-up film composer. The Everyone Stares cycle is done and dusted. I’m not taking any meetings nor reading any scripts. Nor do I appear to be on to any good scheme. “Going on holiday for six months” won’t cut it for anyone who knows me at all. And “Working on my solo album” is as good as asking to borrow money. Film composers do not do solo albums. If they are employable. I suffer the pitying looks with an idiot grin.

  MEANWHILE WE ARE E-MAILING back and forth, reassembling the machine for the big tour. Right about now some roadie in Ireland is claiming to have been hired for the 2007 Police Reunion Tour. Right on my Web site the speculation begins, and then spreads out across the land. The first tabloid past the post is the London Mail on Sunday. They only have vague quotes from the record company, but it’s enough for a page-three spread with color photograph. POLICE FANS MAY SOON BE WALKING ON THE MOON AGAIN is the rather poetic headline. Pretty soon the news is everywhere. It’s hard to keep a secret when you can see it in Rolling Stone and Billboard, and on CNN.

  “So, Stewart, what have you got coming up?”

  “Um…long holiday.” Idiot grin.

  Back in L.A., Sting has a lute show down at the Disney Center. We haven’t actually seen one another since before we hatched our plot. So Andy and I hire a car and take Kate and Fiona out for the show. Waiting to greet us is the multitentacled organization that is Sting World. We are slickly ushered into the best seats in the house. Trudie is there with two fully adult Stinglets. Jake and Mickey Sumner, in all their adult glory, stand before me…as complete strangers. Literally a lifetime has gone by.

  Onstage Sting reaches the furthest point in his trajectory away from our band with a commanding rendition of Elizabethan music and storytelling. He uses everything he has—his voice, his fingers, his stagecraft, his charisma—in the most extremely alien environment that can be imagined for a rock star. The Elizabethan singing style is very specific and rigorous. The lute strings are tuned upside down and backward. He walks out to an audience who are accustomed to amplified music and familiar songs, and has to craft an atmosphere of concentration and stillness. In classical music, the performer ranks a little lower than the composer. Sting must, on this night, serve someone else’s compositions—which is a new kind of body language for my old friend. But none of this is a problem. Piece of cake for Stingo.

  Back in the dressing room, the three of us are together in a room again for the first time since Sundance, almost a year ago. But this is not a big Police moment. Sting has just played a lute show, and the room is full of people who are attached to the lute. It’s a lute moment. We put our heads together only long enough to mutter “next week” and “jam” and “new” and then Sting is swept away by the celebration of his lute CD—which is the biggest-selling classical CD of the year. If he gets a Grammy for the fucking thing, I’m going to have to steal it.

  A couple of days later at Trudie’s birthday party we get a little more time to chat, but really, we are all waiting to get to Vancouver, where we will say what we really have to say, which is our music. I, for one, don’t feel the band vibe yet. I’m toying with the thought process of “I’m in a band,” but it still isn’t me yet.

  In two weeks we will meet up in Vancouver to rehearse for a surprise (hopefully) appearance at the Grammy Awards. I get down to working up my technique and muscling up my game. The Police songs are all lined up on my iPod Shuffle, and I blaze through them for a couple of days before realizing that they are all still hardwired onto my brain.

  Doesn’t seem like further attention is required, so I load up the headset with random music of every kind. Anything with an infectious rhythm has me bopping along in some way. Sometimes I use the music as a metronome while I work on myself. This is all about tweaking, training, streamlining, and calibrating the synapses. Actually it’s the only time, in the dark of my practice room, where I permit myself to listen to myself as I play.

  It is my music religion to immerse my mind in the combined effect of all of the players in an ensemble, and not to think at all about what I’m doing. It’s my job to harness all of the players to the rhythm, so as to provide a solid context for the focal point of the music. Listening to myself would be like a bartender serving only himself.

  Actually the mundane job of getting my biological tools (hands) up to scratch is the only part of the job where I have to use self-discipline. Forgetting myself and listening to the band is much more fun. Sometimes I’m deep in the pocket and sometimes I’m out riding on a parallel groove, but it’s always about listening to the music while my hands do what they do, driven by some deeply buried primal lobe of the brain.

  I’m counting down the hours until the black car comes to take me to my flight to Vancouver. Andy and I fly up to Canada to meet up with our charismatic singer and start cutting up the old tunes. He’s held up for an extra day in Cuba, so it’s just guitar and drums at first, with our old crew around us. Billy gets us to the soundstage, just like two decades ago; Tam Fairgrieve meets us at the stage, where we find Danny and Jeff. Just like two decades ago. Andy’s “new” tech, Dennis, has been with Andy for fifteen years.

  Everything is different and nothing has changed.

  On the first morning in Vancouver, I go down to breakfast and right on the front of the newspaper, taking up the entire page, is a picture of the three blond heads and a two-inch headline: POLICE SIGHTING. Just as I’m chuckling about this, Sting shows up, and here we are again. No lute, no birthday girl, nobody but us—and we’re in a band together again after many years. This is the reunion, right here, over coffee in the Four Seasons café. We’re still not sure what to say to one another, but the vibe is warm. We have a very strange relationship. Very deeply affectionate but very guarded. In spite of our intense adoration we are capable of hurting one another, which we do almost as often as we snuggle.

  CHAPTER 27

  WILL THIS FLY?

  2007

  VANCOUVER

  Police rehearsals are like bathing in razor sharp diamonds, then toweling down with barbed roses before donning a Prada hair suit. Quite beautiful but there is blood.

  A

  little silvery bell just went off in my head, you fucking toad,” I’m muttering to myself as he swings away from the drum riser back to his microphone. “And do you want to know what that means, you prick?”

  It means I’ve hit the limit, beyond which I can take not one more word from you about anything. Do not even make eye contact with me, let alone make another suggestion about how I should play my drums…you fucking piece of shit!

  Jeff hits the click and we start up the tune. Sting himself is rigid with frustration. He has explained, in as many ways as he can, that the blindingly obvious approach to the required stick technique is this, this and this. All afternoon we have faced each other with courteous masks, seeking to achieve musical unity in spite of drastically divergent musical philosophies.

  The morning started out quite cheerfully. I got to the soundstage early so that I could limber up with some groovy tunes in my player. Turned out that Sting was an even earlier worm and he’s already here, engaged in his strange rituals and tortures. He’s curious about the odd collection of ecclection that I’m grooving to.

  When Andy arrives, it’s time to work. We don’t play, we work. After twenty years of not playing together, we don’t jam or groove, we go straight to work. Before I’ve had a chance to play eight bars of mus
ic with my long-lost brothers, we are in classic Police attitude B. Now, I have a lot of patience for position B. When Andy and Sting put their heads together and start noodling, wonderful things happen. As they noodle over chords and fingering, I take my ease on the drum riser, silently conceiving a rhythmic envelope for what they’re doing. In olden times, they would reach a conclusion, and then we’d play the figure together. The addition of rhythm to the equation would light them up, and we would groove together, loving ourselves. Clever bastards, were we!

  When the stringsters come out of their huddle and turn up the volume to play with me, I kick up a groove and we’re about to start swinging…but no, we’re stopping. At this point Andy is still getting to grips with his own mission, so his mind is on his fingers—which are very busy. Sting, with a yeomanlike zeal for the job at hand is headed my way with what turns out to be a fully conceived plan for every aspect of my participation in the music. He’s very generous in this regard—he has plenty of time to help me play my drums. Any rogue instinct that might lurk in my timid heart is affably ignored. My own desire is to follow my beloved leader and to bring a glint of pleasure to his heavy brow.

  Remember that Sting has been arranging rock bands for almost forty years. He knows every aspect of how to use drums. Believe it or not, there are many ways to hit a drum and many different effects that can be achieved. Sting is fully conversant with all of them; different sticking techniques, different cymbal and hi-hat effects, bass drum techniques, and so on. He’s actually a proven genius at it. My measured response to all of this inspired expertise is: Fuck OFF out of my FACE!!! Sting and I got along much better when he didn’t have any idea of what I should be doing—and when I wasn’t so sure myself. Now I’ve been playing drums for fifty years and although there is still room for improvement, that little silvery bell just tinkled in my head. It told me that, after a day of badgering and scolding, one more word from Stingo will take us to Code C.