INTERROGATING THE POLICE

INTERROGATING THE POLICE

J. Kordosh_

'Twas the day before Christmas and like a lot of good Americans I was watching All My Children as part of my holiday bonus. (Hey, gotta keep up on what the pretend people are doing, too.) Anyway, the Martins were decorating the tree and Tad— who’s about 15 or so—had locked himself in his room, depressed because his girl had broken off with him. The poor kid was killing his misery by laying on his bed, blowing reefer (try Crown Royal next girl. Tad) and -get thisLISTENING TO THE POLICE! “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” full blast on my American soap opera the day before Christmas? Real pretend kids who would rather listen to the Police than decorate the Xmas tree? Was this some sort of clue that the Police were gaining large national acceptance? You know how we Americans are...we will absorb no group before its time!

Skipping a month backwards, the Police were in the midst of their North American tour and Zenyatta Mondatta had hit *14 after only five weeks on the American charts. Another clue? A quick check showed that the LP was already well into the top ten in many similar countries like Italy, Australia, Belgium, Spain, and Canada. ZM—and the overseas single, “Don’t Stand So Close To Me”—had entered the British charts at *1. Yipes, it’s a message in a bank balance.

J. Kordosh talks to glamour boys Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers while Sting sits this one out; no longer confined to tiny U.S. clubs, the Police in April 1981 are no longer small potatoes.Here, the boys share tales of their rise to power...

"...being a rock star is overrated if you're interested in other things. --Andy Summers

I guess this all proves that the Police are much-loved or, at the very least, extremely well-liked all over the third planet. But, like Dylan once said, why and what’s the reason for? I don’t know and I doubt if the Police really know, either. 1 caught ’em between Chicago and South America on their seemingly never-ending tour and couldn’t figure it out myself. Wait, don’t get me wrong—I think they’re one of the cool groups, too. I actually bought their last album and have dispassionately assessed it one of 1980’s best. Not only that, the Police are genuinely nice guys: articulate, self-effacing, considerate... heck, I’ll be glad to have them for neighbors after I make my second million.

In keeping with their good-guy natures, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland graciously submitted to lengthy discussions with me over Police matters when their tour pulled into Detroit. The interviews were conducted in the band’s “shower and restroom” backstage, which, with one wooden chair and 50-watt lighting seemed pretty appropriate for a Police interrogation. Sting politely begged off; as Copeland told me, “Sting doesn’t actually talk that much because it hurts his throat." No matter, the other sixty-six-and-two-thirds percent of the Police told me enough to get a good start on my book, Police, Please Me.

Before we get to the excerpts, though, I don’t want to ignore you trivia fans out there. Here’s four quick questions, with answers to follow right after the interview. (1) How did the Police get their name? (2) Does Sting have another name? (3) “It’s a brilliant work of literature, well worth reading,” is Andy Summer’s opinion of what book alluded to on Zenyatta Mondatta? (4) One critic says Zenyatta Mondatta is a bastardization of “Zen," “Jomo Kenyatta," and “monde,” the French word for “world." What does Andy Summers say Zenyatta Mondatta means? Any reader who can answer these questions correctly wins absolutely nothing because he or she probably stole my notes! Now give ’em back so we can do this interview.

There seems to be an underlying pessimism to much of the material on Zenyatta Mondatta.

Copeland: It’s not pessimism. I suppose it’s a world thing; that’s because we’ve been all around the world.

“De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da?” That’s an optimistic song?

Summers: I think that’s one of the best lyrics Sting’s ever written. A lot of people confuse that, which is very annoying—like, “he’s written this baby chorus,” and they’re totally taken out of context. This is what is said in the verse; the chorus makes absolute sense. Copeland: Sting is not a bleak person, but he’s a serious person.

OK, “Driven To Tears,’’ “Bombs Away,” “De Do Do Do, ”...it seems like every other song on the album has this feeling of giving up. “When The World Is Running Down”... Copeland: Well, it is running down. It feels that way. It feels that in the future we’re gonna have to do without things we take for granted....things are running down. Our side is losing its lead. There’s another thing, which is the Third World, which you hear about and which you see in magazines. You think, “Well, they’re over there and we’re over here.” And you see pictures of them which might arouse feelings of pity or concern. And so on. But when you actually go over there and see it and see that it is a reality—and that they vastly, vastly outnumber us—and that, with modern communications, they now can see us. In the past, when they were just colonies, they couldn’t see us; they just lived their lives and that’s all they knew. Now that they all have televisions they can see us, they can see our television shows, they can see how we’re living off the fat of what’s underneath their earth. They know that we’re exploiting them; they can see what we’re getting out of I it—how come they haven’t got some of that J good stuff? Maybe they don’t even want it, g but we represent, like, some fat evil to z them. And they’re gonna have to get theirs, and we’re gonna have to accomodate the Third World.

"We're the first to emphasize the fact that we are not true reggae artists. --Stewart Copeland

How does America fit into this? What do you think of America?

Copeland: Uh, I think it’s a great place to bring up your food. 1 like a lot about it and I don’t like a lot about it...it’s a very extreme place.

Summers: I like America. 1 lived here for a few years—out in L.A.—and I have a very affectionate feeling for it. But you can’t really answer that question. When we see America, we get a very jaundiced view of it, rushing in and out of towns—it’s a very strange view. If you can generalize, I’d say I like it rather than not like it. It’s such a dynamic country: it’s full of horror and it’s full of really good things.

Copeland: I don’t subscribe to the Ugly American —I think America, as a world \ force, is the most positive. America is defins itely the most honest, the least bloodthirsty, 2 has the best conscience...America as af major power is a lot more dependable and £ honest, and there are more constraints on | American actions.

Are there any American musicians you particularly like?

Copeland: No. There’s the B-52’s, the Talking Heads, and the Devos and stuff— they’re good groups. But, they had to go to England to make it, you know.

How are things in England?

Summers: I think it’s in a great state of transition. It’s taking a long time to get from one thing to another, from being an empire to being a small, independent country. We’re having a terrible time with the unions—the Labor Party has virtually folded.

Copeland: In the music industry, England is the place to go, but that’s the only thing that England has in its favor in that respect.

How are other British groups doing? Say, the Clash?

Summers: In terms of popular success we’re much more popular than they are. Although I think the Clash have a niche for themselves and I think they were an important group about two or three years ago. And I don’t mean their music, I mean politically.

What about the older British groups? Summers: Specifically, 1 think the album Pete Townshend did last year was very good, much better than anything the Who have done in a long time. I think he’s great; it’s nice to see that he can still do it—put as much energy into it as he did on that album. Copeland: The really important legendary groups that’ll go down in history.. .for every one American band, there’s five English bands. Really: the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, all the really important ones, they’re all English. And when you consider the populations of the two countries—it’s not really putting down America, but it’s a fact, statistically—you can see that England, tor some reason, is a rrtuch more effective breeding ground. And it’s just a cross-pollination: we have to own up that. The ingredients of all these groups—even the Beatles, they started out on Chuck Berry tunes—the ingredients are American. Summers: And it’s really a shame about John Bonham; it’s really sad. I only met him last year for the first time ever. He came to see us play in Birmingham, he brought his kid, and he was fantastically enthusiastic about the Police. A very charming person. I’d heard all these horror stories about him, but he was a real nice guy. I think it’s very sad, ’cause he left a wife and a young kid... it’s sad. I actually like Led Zeppelin. A lot of people tend to be very snotty about them, but I think that Jimmy Page in particular is a really clever musician. Some of his riffs and his rhythms are very clever. And John Bonham was a great rock drummer.

It makes me wonder how your success is affecting you personally.

Copeland: The difference is, I suppose, that I’ve got more friends than I need. I suppose you soon learn to sort out; I end up with just as many friends that are meaningful. Summers: It’s really tough, especially if you’ve got really young kids. The first time I ever came here (America) my wife was heavily pregnant when I left—seven-and-ahalf to eight months. When I got home, it was like a dead rush. It was supposed to be a week off—the delivery date—and she had the baby two days later. The first year, the group was starting to snowball, and here we had this kid and we’re trying to keep ourselves together. And all of a sudden, big success. It’s very difficult. It was the hardest year of my life, 1 think. People who knew us intimately can’t understand how we could get through it and keep our sanity.

Copeland: It is an interesting phenomenon when it happens to you, yourself. I mean, 1 think a lot about it...what on earth is it, I’m the same Joe Blow that I was a year ago, but now, suddenly, all my old girlfriends want to call me up and suddenly I’m ten times more attractive to the people around me than I used to be. And I see normal boys and girls responding to me as if I was something mord than I really am. And what they’re responding to isn’t me, but their own imagination which has concocted an image they project onto me. It’s feelings and images that they already have inside of them and they just need someone to project it onto. And that makes that person ten feet taller. Or, in Andy’s case, six feet tall.

Is it worth it?

Summers: Oh, I think so, yeah. You know how transitory it all is. All the people calling you up, it’s a symbol of being very successful. There are too many plusses, there are a few small minuses. The biggest minus is the effect it has on family life. Those things I do take very seriously. I think being away from my little girl—she just turned two about two days ago—that’s very tough.

Copeland: We’re very fortunate in our generation of musicians that the road to the top is well-paved by now and well sign-posted. The drugs, the marriage breakdowns, the ego—you know, when you have this image projected onto you, it’s possible to forget your own personality that you started out with. You start believing in the image that shows up on the papers and that you see reflected in the eyes of the kids and you lose your own personality. We can avoid these pitfalls because we’ve read the papers about the Rolling Stones, who went through the drug abuse, and we’ve read the stories of Lee Marvin’s marriage thing; we’ve read all the stories of all the different people who fucked up. And we can avoid all the mistakes that all the others have made because we can see where it’s possible to go wrong. How did you get into reggae?

Summers: We didn’t start out playing it. Reggae was happening; we were all listening to it on our own. And it just became a part of what we were doing. We started actually playing it as songs after a while, in sort of a formal way, and we started to find our musical direction. It didn’t happen over night. It took a few months before we started to get a glimmer of where we were going to go with it. It really came out while we were in the studio.

Copeland: In Curved Air we used to jam a lot of reggae. But we never did it onstage... we just sort of tinkered around with it. And then, when the Police were formed, we continued it a little bit more. And at that time, where Sting was, they didn’t have an awful lot of reggae to listen to—until well after we’d already sort of established our own thing in that direction. We don’t actually listen to all that much reggae. It’s like we take the few ingredients in it that inspired us a lot.

Do people attack you — not attack you — but suggest that you’re not true reggae musicians?

Copeland: Oh, we’re the first to emphasize the fact that we are not true reggae artists. And the reason for that is—I mean, that’s the difference between us and, say, Eric Clapton’s “I Shot The Sheriff.” “I Shot The Sheriff’ was a reggae tune that they took from a reggae artist. They played it exactly the same in an attempt to recreate the Jamaican Sound. In fact, we wanted to avoid the standard rock ’n’ roll sound. We wanted to make our own sound. And so we consciously avoided playing true reggae. We don’t want to be considered a reggae band, we want to be considered a band that’s doing something new and making good use of a new ingredient—which reggae is. Reggae is the most important new ingredient to mu9ic since the blue note, or the backbeat. It’s the most different and, in the long run, I’m sure, will have the most effect. The backbeat—that rhythm has lasted us through about 30 years, through jazz, rock ’n’ roll, funk, disco, everything. The backbeat has been the basic format for the rhythm of all the different forms of music— contemporary music. And with the innovation of reggae, where the important beat is the third beat of the bar, that is completely different. You have to approach your drum set in a completely different way. It’s totally revolutionary, what the drummer and the bass player are doing together. And not only that, it’s very flexible—I’d say there’s another 30 years worth of exploring the possibilities of this different rhythm.

Do you take the press — rock press, that is — at all seriously?

Summers: I don’t really. There’s sort of a pattern that sets in; you can see it coming. Before we finished Zenyatta Mondatta we sort of made a game out of what the headlines would be. And we were pretty correct about it, as far as the English press is concerned. Press in America is totally different, it tends to be more enthusiastic, generally. We’ve been received much more favorably over here, whereas the British press are screaming cynics.

Copeland: I think it has entertainment value. The English press has been very hostile to us, considering how big we are. I prefer reading the NME—although I would like to kill every one of the journalists on that paper —I’d like to strangle them all; even so, that’s my favorite paper and I read it avidly every week. It has an entertainment value...the function of telling people what records to go and buy, I think, (a) it can’t do that, (b) it shouldn’t really do that, and (c) it doesn’t do that. But as an entertainment thing we read it. Like, the B-52’s...if I never saw a picture of them, I’d love their music anywat. But then, because I like their music I want to read about them and see pictures of them. And that’s a different kind of entertainment thing. In the same way, at the stage door of a Police concert in England, when there’s 22,000 girls screaming outside there waiting for us to come out,.—and when we come out they all flip out, they’re fighting and trying to rip clothes and everything—that’s entertainment as well, for them and for us.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 30

What do you want for the band and for yourselves?

Summers: Yeah, we’re still going up. I would like us to get into a position where we can keep the group, work when we want to work, enjoy making records together, but do lots of outside things together—so that being in the group isn’t the be-all and end-all. We don’t want to be one of those groups that makes another record or makes another tour of America, ’cause we all have a lot more going than that. I mean, being a rock star is overrated if you’re interested in other things. There’s too much in life to go down one narrow alley. The thing about being successful is that it does give you a certain amount of power. It’s sort of useful; that’s my pragmatic view of being a roctetar. Which is not all, of course; it’s wonderful, we travel, we have as much as we want of anything—but my main thing is to work. I enjoy workig at whatever it is I do. And I think we all feel the same way. I don’t want to be just in the group, only in the group, and that’s that. So I think, very specifically, starting next year (1981) we’ll all start branching out doing other things and then return together to be the group.

Copeland: Now what I want out of life is to be good at making movies. I enjoy playing drums onstage—I mean, just physically it’s good fun. And I also enjoy the experience of making records with Sting and Andy in the studio because, although at the time it’s traumatic, at the end of it when we’re listening to the playbacks it’s really a hell of a feeling of accomplishment.

Summers: I’ve already got plans to do a photography book; I've been asked to act in a film in France next year—Sting has more film offers than he can deal with; I mean, Christ, it’s ridiculous. But there’s a lot of other things to do, and I think when we return to be the group we’ll have a lot of energy for it. And hopefully fresh perspectives. When you’re on this sort of fwo-year routine we’ve been stuck in, it’s hard to get outside and see what we’ve been doing. We’re gonna take nine months off, actually, and we’ll be able to see what we’re doing. Once we started, we never stopped—we had to crank out records as we went along. It’s been great fun, but it’s been real hard to get any focus or perspective on what we’re soing.

See, I told you they were articulate. Hey, maybe that has something to do with their popularity. And being good songwriters and musicians, too. Hold on here... brains...music business...hey, pass me that weed, Tad.

Oh yeah, the trivia questions...don’t blame me for the trick answers, I’m just quoting the Police. (1) “We saw it written on the side of a car.”—Copeland. (2) “Yes.”—Summers. (3) Lolita. Read it twice, kids. (4) “It doesn’t mean anything!” — Summers. That’ll make the next album title a breeze, Andy.