Andy Summers is a Renaissance Man; which means he can do a lot of things very, very well. He is a guitar player with an extensive catalog of recordings – with his former band The Police, as a solo artist and with various other musicians (such as Robert Fripp, Carly Simon and Joan Armatrading). He is a prolific writer, penning his autobiography, One Train Later, in 2006, as well as a book of short stories and collections of his photography, including his latest, A Series Of Glances published in May. He is a producer, composer, collaborator and storyteller. Although he mostly talks with his guitar, he has been spending some time during his latest live shows connecting with his audiences. “It’s a very good way as a person onstage to bring the audience into your sphere,” Summers told me during our recent interview.
With only a few more shows left on his 2023 tour – Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on December 07, December 08 in Ponte Vedra, Florida, and December 10 in Clearwater, Florida – Summers is already thinking about what 2024 could bring: more shows, more photography and perhaps a new album. “I like to be doing things. I never really stop,” he acknowledged. And in truth, he really hasn’t, despite the pandemic, which shut down the original dates on this tour back in 2019.
From the time he was a young kid learning guitar, through his time in London with British blues and psychedelic bands, his fame with The Police and the after years of working on film soundtracks and exploring his musical horizons with solo albums, Circa Zero, Brazilian musicians and his love of Thelonious Monk, the Rock & Roll Hall Of Famer hasn’t let idleness seep in and distract him into complacency. “Playing music is a reward in itself. I play music. I don’t care whether I get paid or not,” he said during our previous interview in 2014. “I still love being a musician and I love playing music as being my life and I’m very happy about that, you know. It still thrills me.”
Summers touched on that as well as his current tour, book, and photography during our chat several weeks back.
You seem to be having a very, very good year – you have the tour, the book, music, photography. Is this your ideal life now?
(laughs) That’s an interesting question. I don’t know if I think along the lines of every project I can get because everything is a struggle to get done. It’s amazing if it comes off but I’m doing fine with it. I like to be doing things. I never really stop. I’ve got photo exhibitions and touring and they all have to fit together at the right times. So I’ve managed to pull off quite a bit this year.
Your book, A Series Of Glances, came out in the spring. When picking the photographs, was it more by visual context or the feelings they evoked?
It’s probably a mix between feelings, which can be sort of hard to pin down, and actually the formal laying out of a book; what makes sense, you know, and there are visual connections between each picture as you sequence them. Sequencing is a very big thing and it’s something that I enjoy. This book took about six months to put together in terms of the sequence and the layout and what I wanted to have in it. Each photograph should stand on it’s own, which is not always the case because every picture has to be super strong and there’s a sort of rhythm to the impact of each photograph. And this is a complicated, slightly abstract subject, which I don’t know if we can really get into here, but it’s very similar to music in a way, how you live with it, edit it, then move one thing and it suddenly enlightens up the rest. It’s very much like editing music with guitar solos. It’s a paradox so it’s an area that I’m used to working in cause obviously I edit my own records and mix them and all that, with an engineer, but it’s a process I’m used to. Sometimes you just have to sit and wait and let it reveal itself. There’s not a set of instructions (laughs).
When you first really became serious about photography, in those earliest photographs, how critical were you of yourself and what were you most critical of?
Well, you know, I didn’t have, in the very earliest stages, a whole set of critical faculties for photography. I was learning sort of on the job. Suddenly I had this great enthusiasm for shooting pictures and seeing them and most of my information came from the books of people like Cartier-Bresson that I would have looked at and tried to understand and then probably tried to somehow replicate in my earliest sort of rough attempts at photography. You know, again, like music, you practice, you practice, you practice and in terms of photography your eye gets better, your mind gets better, your taste for the abstract gets stronger and so on and so forth. It’s a process. It takes time and you usually start off in any medium basing yourself on someone else’s model and then you proceed on from there and try and find your own way.
As the technology advances with photography, how keen are you to advance with it?
I’m not very keen. Obviously, at this point, I pretty much 99% end up choosing digital. I went to that in 2012 after my last giant foray through Asia for three weeks. I shot ninety rolls of film. It was very difficult to deal with, going through customs and border patrols and all kinds of things like that and not to lose it and get it wiped out. But I don’t need the very latest Leica. I use a color M10 and a black & white M10 and I’m very happy with them. And of course, the superb thing about Leica photography is the lenses so I am there with that and I feel that’s the way I do it and I practice with it and that’s what I’m really comfortable with. So Leica cameras have advanced on from the M10 but I don’t particularly feel the need for it.
How about the advances in technology in terms of music and the guitar?
Well, all these things are like, to an extent, toys and you can play with them and spend a lot of time trying to get fancy sounds or fancy effects. I have some stuff but I’m not over the top with it. In my studio I have a plethora of pedals. That sounds like an album title (laughs). But I’ve got all these things, you know, and people send them to me and I have a sort of mild interest in all those guitar effects pedals. But I’m not like a dog for it, chasing after every single one, because I’m a player, a real player. And because I’m onstage at the moment and I’m alone on the stage, I have a fantastic guitar sound. But I’m only using a few pedals to achieve it. I don’t even have amplifiers anymore. So you find your own voice with it. For me, it’s all in the playing and the way you hear scales and chords, expression, composition. That’s music. Pedals are something else. Pedals aren’t music. You might make some music with them but they’re not music. Music comes from a lifetime of studying and practicing.
For the live shows you’re doing this year, which song would you say you twiddled with the most?
Twiddled with? (laughs). I like it. But it’s a bit deeper than twiddling; more like twaddling (laughs). You know, I have a show and I play to sequences of photography so it’s kind of the oldest one in the book. People have been doing this since the 1920s when piano players played to the silent screens. This is the modern version of that in a weird way but it’s a gorgeous guitar sound that comes out in huge stereo through the PA system and I have some fairly exotic photographic sequences and I play to them.
In the set, the overall almost two hours I’m onstage, I did bring some Police material in eventually, like “Tea In The Sahara” and “Roxanne,” and the ones that I do play I slightly adapted them to be played instrumentally. The melodies are strong and I worked out a way to play these in the show to keep people happy, cause they expect a little bit of that. Then I match the photography to go with it. A good example would be a song called “Tea In The Sahara.” In that case, the reality is that I actually went to the Sahara and I photographed the Sahara scenes – sand dunes and all that kind of stuff – and it goes beautifully with the lyric of the song, which people know. I hope they remember when I play it (laughs) but I’m playing the melody essentially and it’s very moody and very strong and it works really well.
So that’s kind of what I’m doing, as well as all other kinds of pieces. I do a whole Brazilian section and talk about how I was influenced by the film Black Orpheus when I was sixteen years old and I’ve spent half my life playing in Brazil. There’s quite a lot of backup to that one song so I play that and we have a beautiful set of film that goes with that. I’ve worked all this stuff out and it’s taken some time to really put it together to the level that it is now. But it’s very successful.
And you had started this before COVID-19, correct?
You’re right, I did start doing it. I don’t know why I didn’t do this like many, many years ago. I wasn’t alive then (laughs). But before Covid knocked it all out, I think we did about eleven shows. The last one was at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York and that was sold out and that was great and gave me great confidence in it. You know, I’m very good onstage and I can talk to the audience. I’m not some uptight guy who remains silent. I’m good at getting into it with the people.
But yeah, basically we developed it to a point, but it was not really sophisticated as it is now. Three years off or whatever and we’ve come back to doing it and the technology advances and we’ve been able to add a lot more in. Over the course of the tour that I’ve been doing since July, you’re making notes along the way and when we had a little break we added some stuff in and changed things around and before I do these last few gigs this year in Florida, we’re going to go back in and make a few changes. It always seems like it’s such a hurry and never time to really get it right. But in the next couple of weeks, without playing any music, we’ll just run the visuals on the wall in my studio and just say, okay, we can take that one out, there’s a better one we can put in, so on and so forth. You keep sort of upping the ante on what you’re presenting. And we learned a lot. You practice something, a show like this, in your studio, let’s say, and then you go out on the road and you start doing it and it’s when you’re doing it in front of a live audience that you really get the message of I’ll do this, I’ll change that, this should come earlier, so on and so forth until you knock it into a better shape.
You’re still playing “Round Midnight,” which you’ve been doing for a long time.
I do like playing that one. It’s a beautifully constructed song. It’s written by Thelonious Monk and it was always a favorite of mine. A great composer and it’s really nice on the guitar. It’s got a nice amount of complexity to it, beautiful chords that I’ve worked on to make it sound as sophisticated as it is and generally people tend to know the song so that’s good. I mean, I could play a million of these kinds of things but I did do a Thelonious Monk album a few years back [Green Chimneys]. But I just like doing that song.
You were in London in the 1960s when there was all that great music happening. Is there something from that time period’s music environment that you find you’re incorporating into your music today?
It all started in the sixties. I mean, what’s going on today really came out of the sixties, no question about it, and I was part of that. I was in a psychedelic band in the late 1960’s. We were getting into Indian music, which was really surfacing with people like Ravi Shankar. Instead of playing over chord changes and the usual standard music stuff, we started trying to imitate sitars and ouds and do all this stuff. Everything was opening up in all of culture, not just music, and the music reflected what was going on in the arts. So yeah, I’m probably playing the same shit that I was playing back in those days (laughs).
But you know, Ken Burns did a program about Jazz and he stopped it in 1970. Hang on, mate, it went on after that. What about all the incredible music that came after that? I was playing in that period when it had all opened up and you had Avant-Garde Jazz, Avant-Garde music, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, all these kinds of people. Then after that was the ECM school which was very influential, people like Jan Garbarek, Manfred Eicher. So there were all these schools of music. As a musician, I think over the years when you’re learning, usually in your teens, you take all this stuff and try and achieve it on your own and practice and try and develop your hearing, your listening, your ability to hear harmony, melody; you try to become a real musician. It’s a lot of effort and time and practice. I don’t know if kids today do that kind of thing. I mean, I came from a different era, or an earlier era, where you were supposed to strive for all of this stuff.
As a guitar player, which Police album do you think, top to bottom, you were at your most creative as a guitar player?
That’s an interesting question. I’ve never been asked that before. It’s a good question but I think I did my best on all of them. Still, for me, I think the first two albums were the best ones. I think the pressure came with the third album and then the fourth and by the time we got to the fifth album, Synchronicity, the pressure was so intense to make every song a hit, it was difficult. You could feel it. We became what they often call a brand, an entity. We were so mega and when you’re that mega it doesn’t really have anything to do with genuine creativity. I think it’s true again with all media. If you’re a Jasper Johns knocking out his first paintings and it becomes so popular, you feel like you’ve got to keep doing that. That’s what people like. I think every artist feels this pressure. If you make something that really works and people really love it, very few artists really turn away from that and start making a completely different style.
The only one I can think of in painting is Philip Guston who changed his style to what we know him for now. Before that, he was a completely different painter, which was pretty courageous to do that. I don’t know if you know his work but he’s a prime example of that. Or let’s say, for example, Bob Dylan goes electric. That freaked everybody out. There are examples of this all over the place.
It’s not cynical but by the fifth album of The Police, we were sort of locked into our popular style and everything kind of had to sound like that. We couldn’t really get away from that, which really in a way, sadly, is that it was a good point to stop, cause we would have gone on imitating what we’d already done, artistically, although commercially, of course, everybody would have loved it, and they certainly put that argument out that you can’t stop. But we did stop.
When you first started learning to play guitar, what was the hardest thing for you to get the hang of?
Nothing really. I’m a born musician, I do have the gift, as I humbly suggest or we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now; you wouldn’t be interested (laughs). But it’s a physical instrument and you have to get your hands onto the physical instrument to be able to play chords, more complicated chords, bigger stretches, speed. It’s a musical instrument and it’s like playing any musical instrument. I’m a completely musical person. It wasn’t the music that was hard for me, it was physically getting your hands to move in the right way to be able to play the guitar. That’s it. I mean, I started to hear all the chords and wanted to be able to play them, wondering what they were, and that was a bit more difficult. After the really early stages, when you get into the basic chords, it gets much more sophisticated; the more you go on, the harder it gets basically.
Has there been a guitar that you totally wished was yours, because it sounded great or was beautiful to look at?
You know, when I was a kid, fourteen or fifteen, I was actually into American Jazz guitarists so probably what I wanted at that point was the Gibson ES-175. That’s a sort of deep body Jazz guitar with a sharp cutaway. A Gibson model, beautiful, probably from the late 1950’s. That’s what I wanted. And I got it and it was stolen. It was terrible. It was pretty soon after I got it and I left it on a seat in a car. I was chasing some girl and it got ripped off and I never got it back. I got the insurance money and then I went back to London and got a Gibson ES-335, which is a great guitar and it was a breakthrough for Gibson and I’ve played them ever since. Many years later, of course, I did get another ES-175 and I have a couple of them now.
Is there a song that you haven’t been able to bring to the live stage like you wanted?
I’ve made fifteen albums and many collaborations and I’m working up to a new album but I can’t like say, Oh, there’s one I wrote that, well, I did have a couple in The Police but I can’t remember what they were called. We recorded one song I wrote called “Omegaman” and A&M absolutely loved it and wanted it to be the first single on whatever album that was on [Ghost In The Machine] but it wasn’t written by Sting so Sting got really huffy about it and we put something else out. It’s just par for the course. You go through enough years of doing this stuff and there are bumps on the road. That’s the way it is.
So your live show now is a little bit of Police, a little bit of solo stuff and some stories?
Yeah, I started with one program and I haven’t changed it. I mean, when I started doing it, I had the screen up and the big sort of novelty was, “There’s Andy and he’s playing all his music on tour!” I’ve been doing photography and music for years and it was late in the day I decided to try and put it together. I’m surprised I didn’t do it much earlier. But yeah, I would just play the show and not really say a lot because I was there playing the screen and that was the sort of artistic message project. Now, I’ve got a really strapping manager who said, “You should talk more!” (laughs) So I actually do quite a lot of talking now so I have all these stories from my life as a musician on the road that I tell. I have about four or five of them but I’m very relaxed with it and it’s a very good way as a person onstage to bring the audience into your sphere, if you like. So I’ve been doing that all year so it’s now almost become, and it sounds corny, but An Evening With. I tell stories, I talk to the audience, I play all this shit on the guitar and everybody’s happy (laughs). That’s the way it is and I get a standing ovation every night (laughs).
Will this continue into next year?
I’m sure we’ll do something next year. It’s wonderful to be on the stage. I love that moment, standing there and showing off and all that and playing flashy guitar. Then you’ve got your driving to the next gig and all the rest of it (laughs). Life on the road is difficult (laughs).
What about more photo exhibitions?
Yeah, they continue on. I’ve got two next year in Japan, one in Tokyo and one in Kyoto. And I’ve got the new book, the latest book is A Series Of Glances, so we’ll try to get those to the galleries there so they can be sold in Japan; that would be the obvious thing to do. So I’m not particularly slowing down. I want to make a new record so we’ll see how it goes. I get offered a lot of things and I can’t do everything. I get offers of TV shows, series and shit like that, so we’ll see. It’s all sort of coming to a boiling point now (laughs).
How do the hands feel?
My hands are great. I play all the time. I’m surrounded by guitars, but I’m a guitarist, you know. I’ve got a guitar in every room and a very nice thing these days, the result of the pandemic, is that one of my kids, Anton, he played drums for ten years as a kid, then he became a martial artist and in the middle of all this pandemic bullshit – I have drums cause I play the drums too – he wanted to play drums with me one day out of the blue, cause he hadn’t for years. So we started playing. Of course, it had been instilled in him since he was a child practically but it all started coming back. So we play four or five times a week, drums and guitar. We play all these songs and for me it’s lovely, cause obviously father/son bonding and we just enjoy playing together and it’s great for my hands. I’m playing very well cause I play all the time (laughs). It’s like I’m doing five shows a week and then we go out on the road and I’m all warmed up (laughs).
It’s very nice. We love each other, we’re father and son and we have a great time doing it. He’s keen, you know. And actually he got better and better and better as we went along. I could see his technique, his chops came up; it’s very good. So we have a book of all these different kinds of songs we play, varying from bossa nova to blues to rock, Jazz; we do all kinds of stuff. Over the course of two years now it’s been really a lovely thing. I didn’t see that coming (laughs).
Photograph by Dennis Mukai
