DEMOLITION MEN IN THE MACHINE: EVERY THING THE POLICE DO IS MAGIC!

DEMOLITION MEN IN THE MACHINE: EVERY THING THE POLICE DO IS MAGIC!

Chris Salewicz

I visit Police guitarist Andy Summers early one Monday evening at the mansion flat in Putney in Southwest London in which he has lived since the mid-70's.

Two days later he is set to move down the road into the grand Victorian house he has bought, a visible manifestation of the change in lifestyle the Police has brought him. “The Police is very hard work, and often it's a lot to handle. But I like it. and I like the life it's brought me. It's much better at this end than it is at the other.” he smiles at the memory of his years of scuffling.

At 38, Andy Summers, the most vital element in the Police's sound, is the oldest member of the group. He is also a seasoned member of the British music scene, having played with such classic mid60's British outfits as Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band and Eric Burdon's New Animals. In fact, it was after a U.S. tour with Burdon concluded in California that Summers remained in Los Angeles, embarking on a degree course in music at UCLA. This stood him in more than good stead when he eventually returned to England in the early 70s. Playing with highly credible, though hardly hugely successful. British performers like Kevin Coyne and Kevin Ayers. Andy Summers quickly was recognized as one of the finest guitar players in the country^

But when 1977 came along the decision. as he puts it, “to burn my boats" and throw in his ldt with punk was one he hardly has to look back upon: worldwide the Police indubitably is the most successful new outfit that emerged out of English purrk. even though Sting has himself admitted to me that a large amount of opportunism was involved in the trio’s espousal of that movement.

Andy Summers speaks in the' laconic, cultivated tones of his native ''Bournemouth. a seaside resort on>England's south cbast. In formal interviews .he tends to retain a knavish, ironic wit which all the same lurks in his eyes, and which no doubt helped carry him through his lean times as a musician: even the early years of the Police were not easy, the group having little success in England until their first album, Outlandos D'Amour, and the “Roxanne” single made the U.S. charts in late 1978.

In April 1982, the Police finally became massive U.S. superstars, as they'd been in Europe much earlier. Shortly before the band's U.S. tour—in support of Ghost In The Machine, their biggest-selling LP to date— British writer Chris Salewicz talked to the band, and, as always, the Police are as affable as ever. Come to think of it, why wouldn't they be?

I like everything that goes with success. I like the power. I like the money. I like all the opportunities it brings and the platform it creates. -Andy Summers

Recorded on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, the group’s fourth LP, Ghost In The Machine, is undoubtedly the strongest Police album yet, an assessment with which Andy Summers readily goes along: “I think it’s very strong. It has a supple quality 1 really like, and a very positive vibe I think was lacking on the last album. It’s a true reflection of the psychological state the band was in.

“In fact, Zenyatta Mondatta, the last album, was also a true reflection of the band’s state. When we recorded it we were a bit fucked up emotionally. On the point of possible break-up, in fact: for example, Sting was really chafing at the bit to do a movie and hadn’t been able to.

“This year everything’s different: Sting’s doing his movie; we gave ourselves more time to record in a much better place; we produced ourselves with a different engineer. The whole environment was very good.”

The songs on Ghost In The Machine are of far superior quality to those on Zenyatta: Sting had much more time in which to write them.

“For Zenyatta,” reveals Andy, “he brought in a lot of songs we’d heard before. They’d been around for a long time. He re-worked them a bit, but a lot of them were old numbers. But for this album he’d written most of the stuff specifically.

“He did have ‘Demolition Man’ previously, mind you—he’d already given that to Grace Jones to put on her Nightclubbing album. In fact, that was the song we recorded first. You have to break the ice with something, and that was an easy one to do. It’s a very simple song. We all listened to the Grace Jones version and thought, ‘Shit, we can do it much better than that.’ It was a one-take job. To me, our version is much more ballsy, which is what you’d expect from Grace Jones.

“So that’s how we started. It got us off to a good beginning, because everyone was really up from that.

“Also, the place contributed a lot, because we were feeling very good physically. We were out in the sun and swimming, and feeling very physical and energetic. It was just what we needed because we’d been very worn out.”

Andy Summers’ remarks about the emotional state with the Police during the Zenyatta recording would seem to confirm constant English gossip column speculation that the group is constantly at each others’ throats, and permanently on the point of break-ip.

“That’s not true,” Andy Summers shakes his head in implicit denial. “There’s always tensions and difficulties. There’s a lot of pressure in a situation like this. There are huge flare-ups. But we never hold grudges. We’ve been to the edge but we’ve always come back and been really good mates.

“You can’t have this kind of band,” he continues, “and all be affable easy-going guys that all think along the same lines. You need that tension. It’s like a constant rivalry between all three of us: every guy wants to come off the best. At the same time we have a lot of camaraderie...

“Mind you, at the time you’re having difficulties it’s always hard to be philosophical. You can go away gritting your teeth, saying, ‘I’m going to leave the group,’ which we all have done. But we’re not going to leave the group, because all-in-all it’s a very good situation and we all get so much out of it. The good times outweigh the bad times.”

The offstage life of many groups is often totally contrary to that suggested by public images of happy neo-family units: most groups communicate with each other rarely. Andy Summers insists, however, that this is certainly not the case in the Police: “We talk to each other all the time. About everything. For example, we’re about to do an English tour and we were asked if we wanted to travel in separate cars. But no, we all want to go together. We want to sit together and talk about everything.

“Even if we don’t agree at least it’s always upfront, whether it’s hostile or not. None of us goes off and sulks or seethes in a corner of his own. It all comes out. It’s like being in group therapy a lot of the time. It really gets heavy sometimes. You’re constantly having to deal with yourself, and somebody else as well. But it’s part of group life: I recommend it.

“I suppose I could go and look for a sweeter situation. But the group wouldn’t be as good, probably. Most groups I’ve been in have argued, but this one does argue more than most. But it is the most successful. And somehow I think the two things go hand-in-hand. It is rock ’n’ roll and it has to be edgy, and it has to have that extremeness to it. And this group does have it.

"I’ve got an American passport, but don’t have any feeling of particular allegiance to America. Nor to England. -Stewart Copeland"

“It’s pointless keeping up a myth that it’s all a lovely, sweet bunch of blond-haired guys. It just isn’t like that. We are mates, but there’s the other side as well. Just like the Beatles or the Stones or the Who who have always fought each other, and still do to this very day.

“The whole thing is so wrapped up in tension and emotion, and so much has been invested in it. It’s like a marriage.

“After all,” he adds, with satisfaction, “it hasn’t just been a question of doing Quite Well. We’ve been phenomenally successful and we’ve all had so much attention and praise lavished on us. The whole shebang, what everyone dreams about, we’ve had. And are continuing to have. It’s still getting bigger.”

The group’s colossal worldwide success, which has seen them take with ease not only all the traditional Western rock ’n’ roll territories but also has had the Police playing in such Third World areas as South America, India and Egypt, does at times seem to Andy Summers, who is not a man to take life totally seriously, to be totally absurd: “Often one is inside it and intoxicated by the whole thing. But other times you can stand outside it and say, ‘God, I lrea//y don’t believe it! It’s incredibleP Especially if you’ve been striving for it for a number of years and suddenly it’s in your lap and happening.

“I like it. I like everything that goes with it. I like the power. I like the money. I like all the, opportunities it brings and the platform it creates, and I feel ready and able to grab and take advantage of everything.”

Andy Summers is by far the oldest member of the Police—Sting is 30, whilst Stewart Copeland is a year younger. In New York at the beginning of the year, Sting had cited Andy’s age to me as one obvious reason why the Police could never have total credibility as a punk group.

“Usually,” Andy mildly defends himself, “Sting’s full of admiration for me. He thinks it’s amazing that I’m as youthful as I am. I hope that doesn’t sound like bragging, but it’s true...On the other hand, though, he did an English interview recently where he said that he thinks it’s totally ghastly for anyone over the age of 35 to be on the TV program, Top Of The Pops. See, sometimes he just doesn’t seem to think: if he’d thought about that he wouldn’t have said it. It’s so stupid.”

Controversy, and speculation around the group, Andy adds, is often created by comments Sting makes in unguarded moments during interviews.

In fact, Andy Summers is living proof of how fallacious is the old rock ’n’ roll cliche of desiring a young death. As was the case with jazz musicians, it is now apparent that many rock ’n’ rollers will be playing their chosen music until the day when they finally die of old age.

“Look at the Stones,” Andy points out. “They’re the biggest they’ve ever been. I’m healthier than any of the Stones. I shall be going on for a long time.

“The thing is, rock ’n’ roll has come of age. A lot of people who started in the mid-60’s can play more excitingly than they did years ago. You would hope that that would be the case—that as you went on you’d get better and become more exciting, and have more to bring people.

' “Rock ’n’ roll was always supposed to be a young people’s thing. But some of the most exciting performers and those who’ve contributed most are older people— Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis: the real rockers. I have to believe that you don’t get senile as you get near 40. You can go on being vital and energetic.

“It does also depend on what sort of life you lead and what sort of shape you’re in. I’m in really good shape. I’m very healthy.”

The break-up of the Police is unlikely to come from any petty arguments within the group, believes Andy Summers. “I think the end will come,” he expands, “if someone’s career just gets so amazing they don’t want to be in the group anymore.”

The success of Sting’s acting career, he insists, does not mean that it is necessarily the Police singer who will be the first to depart. “I think I’m as close to leaving the group as Sting is,” Andy insists, though one feels this is ego speaking more than anything else. “In some ways we’ve all outgrown the group and would like to go on and do other things,” he continues. “And we’re all doing them, though Sting’s had the most obvious big success in terms of moving on to movies.”

Currently, Andy Summers is setting up a deal for the publication of the photographs he has taken during his time with the Police. But his main extra-Police project is the album he has recorded with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, also a native of Bournemouth and a similar lover of the pedal-board devices with which Andy Summers creates and enhances much of his guitar sound: “I’ve got pretty good with the devices in the past few years. I didn’t get bored with them. I just kept following through.

There's a lot of pressure In a situation like the Police. There are huge flare-ups. But we never hold grudges. -Andy Summers

“I wanted to work with another guitar player and see if I could establish some sort of ongoing relationship. Robert to me is an obvious choice, because having heard him play and having heard about the sort of non-musical things he was involved in, I thought we were probably such disparate personalities that there would be a certain amount of tension there. It worked very well. We had two weeks of very hard working and recording together in a very structured manner.

“Fripp’s a very interesting figure in the fringe rock ’n’ roll world. He’s definitely carved out his own path and is doing his own thing. He’s hardly your normal rock guitar player—there’s a lot more to him than that.”

An album will be released next summer, after this guitar duo has spent more time together in the recording studio. Live dates are also planned.

So Andy Summers finally will get to have an album’s worth of songs with his compositional credits on all of them—certainly a very different state of affairs from his songwriting situation with the Police. Once again, on Ghost In The Machine, the group’s guitarist only has one song of his own.

“It does almost seem like the token gesture, doesn’t it?" he says with a shrug of rueful acceptance. "But it is very much of a three-way process in the studio. Some of the songs that Sting brings in just don’t sound like the Police at all. So we have to re-work and re-shape them until they do sound like the Police.

“But the credit goes to the guy who brings in the demo, because really it’s his song. And," he laughs resignedly, “he usually happens to be Sting. He’s a singer and he writes songs that he’s going to sing. So obviously Stewart and I are at a strict disadvantage when we have to write songs specifically for Sting.

“But I refuse to be embarrassed or feel like a lesser writer because of it. I wrote 12 songs for my own album. I don’t have any insecurities about not being regarded as a writer of music.

“We have to step back and admit that whatever Sting can sound the most convincing on is going to be the best for the group. What it has come down to in the end is what’s going to make the best album. It’s pointless to be worried about losing some publishing on a song if it just doesn’t work within the overall context of the album. Because in the end you’re only going to make the album weaker and you may not make as much money anyway.

“You have to see how the group is going to come off best.”

☆ ☆ ☆

In a blacked-out room at the rear of his neat terraced house in Shepherds Bush in West London, the gangly Stewart Copeland, who bears a curious resemblance to the Walt Disney character Pluto, is showing his home movies.

The Police are on screen. They are onstage Somewhere In England. The Super-8 camera is shooting from behind Stewart’s right shoulder as he sits at his drum-kit. As Sting goes into an extempore piece of vocal dub on “Roxanne,” Stewart, still playing, turns to the camera and speaks into its built-in microphone, commenting on the show and passing criticism on Sting’s performance.

Surely this is an all-time first!

Once again the Police spearhead multimedia pregression!

“I’m well aware,” Stewart Copeland speaks with controlled excitement of his film directorial ambitions, his permanently implanted contact lenses making his eyes appear as though they are about to literally pop out of his head, “that I haven’t got a part acting in a film, and that I haven’t recorded an album with anyone. All I’m doing is making Super-8 films which no-one’s going to see but my neighbors. But this stuff is real important to me. I’m not in any hurry. I’ve a long life ahead of me. I do not hope I die before I get old.

“I’m not particularly confident, though I know myself that I enjoy doing it and I hope my films are effective in some way. I’m just working at it and cutting it up and one day something will happen with just my own enthusiasm to carry me along. I got through two years of Policing under those conditions. I can actually thrive in my own little bubble. Also, I do have lots of neat footage of the Police.”

The founder member of the Police, and formerly the last of a series of drummers with moderately successful early 70’s “progressive" group Curved Air, Stewart Copeland was born in Virginia. He was the youngest son of three, his elder brother Miles now being the manager of the Police ("the fourth member of the group"—Andy Summers) whilst Ian now heads the FBI booking agency. Their father, now a highly regarded authority amongst conservative circles for his views on foreign policy, was a senior official in the CIA, ample fodder for those conspiracy theorists who felt the Police world conquest to have been achieved with too great an ease.

When Stewart was six months old the Copeland family was transplanted to Cairo in Egypt, where their father had been given a* posting. Moves to Syria and then Lebanon followed in quick succession. Stewart Copeland was 15 before he saw England for the first time: he was sent to an English public school for the completion of his education: “The atmosphere was that we were all a big upper-class family, and if we participated and obeyed the prefects than one day we’d get to be one ourselves.

I was never a prefect.”

Stewart was 18 before he returned to the States: “All the time I was thinking I was American, even though I didn’t know which words in my vocabulary were English and which were Arabic.”

Today, the currently London resident Stewart doesn’t necessarily think of himself as being American: “I’ve got an American passport, but I don’t have any feeling of particular allegiance to America. Nor to England particularly. Where I have allegiance to is to all those countries to which I can travel and perhaps live. Australia looks like a nice place. England I like, Germany I like. France, Bali, Canada, America I like. All are places where I could possibly live.”

Unlike his brother Miles, an intellectual Republican who regards the Police’s forays into Third World territories as a way of spreading Western concepts of freedom through rock ’n’ roll (an idea Andy Summers regards as quite loony), the younger Stewart has a more lateral perception of world events. Thus: “The United States has to decide whether they’re going to say to countries like El Salvador that they’re not going to deal with them because they’re a lousy government. Except that the El Salvador government replies, ‘Who the fuck are you to talk to us like that and to tell us how to run our country?’

No way are we going to break up. We’ve gone so far, and we actually have managed to arrive at this pinnacle of success with something we can take pride in. -Stewart Copeland

“But if there is a strong peasant uprising, at what point do we start talking to them instead? The tricky point is when the government says, ‘We need some of your weapons and some of your fire-power.’ Because America has treaties with all these people to protect them from outside aggression.

“Now if it’s a revolution from the inside where the people want to replace their own government than the rules of the game are that we can’t participate. So what the Americans do is try and prove it’s all down to outside influence—they just say it’s Cuban weapons coming in and that they’re protecting El Salvador from Cuba.”

Like Andy Summers, Stewart Copeland hasn’t read the Arthur Koestler book whose title Sting took for Ghost In The Machine. All the same, all three members of the Police are well-read to an almost self-consciously excessive extent: “I didn’t think the book had any particular relevance to my understanding of the album’s lyrics. At the same time we had a million titles written up on the studio wall, including ‘Blanco De Bunker,’ and a lot of similar ones we didn’t use.”

Stewart echoes his guitarist’s opinion of the third Police LP, and also his feeling that Ghost In The Machine is far superior work: “I knew the next one would be better. When we made Zenyatta the situation was not good, and we did the best we could at the time. It’s not a bad record. I quite like it. But I knew at the time we could improve on it.

“The relationship between ourselves was pretty heated under the condensed conditions under which we made Zenyatta. ‘We’ve got to do an album in four weeks, we know we can do it, we’ve done it before. But this time it’s going to go straight to number one.’ Whilst we were in the studio, our sales figures were being discussed by people from the record company—and we hadn’t even got the thing on tape, let alone on vinyl. We were very acutely aware,” he speaks in deliberate quotes, “that we were Creating A Product For The Market-place. The market-place was there in the studio with us.

“It made it a very commercial album, a very slick, clean album that showed we can do that. A lot of people use terms like Selling Out as though that’s the easy route. But it isn’t at all. It’s very difficult to make an album that’s tailor-made to go straight to the top of the charts. It’s not also not very emotionally inspiring.

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“When we did Ghost In The Machine we had a lot more time and the market-place was a 12-hour flight away. It wasn’t there in our minds. We were able to follow our instincts rather than our knowledge. We played the airwaves’ rules during the Zenyatta stage. When we were doing Ghosts we were able to escape from that, and take more chances.”

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CREEM SPECIAL EDITION

THE POLICE

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Everywhere else but in the UK, the first single put out off Ghost In The Machine was the instant, poppy “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” a song that recalls an indeterminate amount of Paul McCartney B-sides. For their home base, however, the Police released “Invisible Sun,” a song with the subject matter set in Belfast, the hometown of Sting’s wife, actress Frances Tomelty. The English media’s insidiously subtle self-censorship ensured that the video of the record—which contained footage of Northern Irish street carnage of a kind seen most nights on the channel’s news programs—would keep “Invisible Sun” off the top of the singles charts and negate the whole point of the group’s making the video..

We wanted ‘Invisible Sun’ out in England because we felt it was obviously pertinent to the country,” says Stewart. “It’s also a good tune, and if anyone can inflict the airwaves with something a little bit different, then we can. In fact, ‘Invisible Sun’ is not necessarily about Belfast, but about the human ability to survive in a crisis. It could be about Calcutta or Kabul as much as anywhere else.

“But as for the rest of the world, there was only one inevitable single choice, ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.’ Sting had a demo of it and people from the record company listened to it before we’d even recorded it and said, ‘Oh, that’s a number one single.’ So it had Massive Hit stamped across it before we’d even done it. Which is probably why that song took us five days to do—it had us stubbing our toes on it. The rest of the album is largely first takes. We just crashed through it.

“We’ve gone in a much different direction than we did with Zenyatta: we’ve gone quite musical. The next album hopefully will be something different again.”

Like Andy Summers, Stewart Copeland makes a marriage-like comparison with the relationships within the group: “Yeah, we argue all the time. But we also know that we’ve got a group that all of us feel is a very strong thing. No way are we going to chuck it in. We’re nowhere close to the brink. We have been. Many times.

“When we’ve been on tour for a long time it becomes pretty depressing. Even so, really we’ve never come anywhere close to breaking up—though there have been times when we’ve each individually said, ‘Okay, that’s it!’ I don’t think it’s ever got as far as anyone walking dut of the room. Because by then it gets to, ‘Okay, shall we go through that number one more time, and when we get to the chorus if you could...’

“No way are we going to break up. We’ve gone so far, we’ve got so much faith in if, and we actually have managed to arrive at this pinnacle of success with something we can take pride in. There’s a lot of people at the top who couldn’t play their records to their friends and feel it’s something they can positively identify with. Most people I know who are in bands don’t have a true feeling of pride in their group. They sort of know they’re lucky being successful.

“In fact, I know I’m lucky to be this successful, but at the same time I truly feel that it’s as good as I can do it.”

The world tour with which the Police supported Zenyatta Mondatta ended in Australia, not in Germany, the scheduled next and final leg of those dates: “We cancelled Germany, not because of the tension in the group, but because all of us were dragging ourselves onstage to play the numbers. We were beginning to hate the music we were doing, and just going through the motions. It’s really soul-destroying, when you know you’re doing that, particularly with something you have pride in.

“It really has been great to have that pride and it’s got to be maintained. It’s really worth holding onto. But under those sort of conditions morale does die and you start feeling really cheap and rancid. You don’t look forward to the gig, you don’t get a buzz when you walk onstage. When you play that bit that makes the audience go ‘WOAHHHH...’ you’re thinking ‘BLEURGGGHHH.’ Actually, we do work physically very hard. And there’s got to be some sort of fire burning within you that can charge you up to push it out of you and make it happen. Without that fire it really is mind-wrenching hard work.

“I’m afraid that the audience doesn’t necessarily notice when that’s missing. Nor do journalists. I personally think it’s possible to not enjoy ourself, but still put on a good show. It’s murder to do it, but it can be done—all the notes are present and correct.”

Contrary to what their detractors hope and believe, the Police do not seem at all to be on the verge of any break-up. On the contrary, they are at an all-time peak.

“Morale in the Police right now is very high,” Stewart reflects, pleased. “It certainly hasn’t always been. Sting has really been itching to do a movie and he’s had to turn down films because of touring commitments. In the end he’s better off making sure the Police album is a hit and touring the States. But at the end of it he looks back and says, i turned down that James Bond movie,’ and he gets into end-of-tour depression. But now he’s making a movie, and the last time I saw him he was looking very pleased with himself.

“We have a lot of faith in Ghost In The Machine. We didn’t have quite as much faith in Zenyatta. If this album wasn’t up to what we thought it should be, I’d be telling you something very different.”