“Stewart was quite the gentleman, completely different style but wow what a hell of a drummer he is. I would sit and watch him every night when we were playing with them.” That’s The Go-Go’s Gina Schock’s take on Stewart Copeland, The Police drummer who founded the band and helped bring them to mega-million success. Tall and lanky, he held down such an incomparable beat that songs like “Roxanne,” “Message In A Bottle” and “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” were destined to be nothing less than hits, staying with fans for over forty years now, beloved and karaoked to high heaven.
But Copeland has been doing something over the past few years to give those instantly recognizable tunes a new spiritual awakening. He has, in his words, “deranged them.” First for shows and now with full symphony orchestra, which he has put down on tape and is releasing to fans worldwide via Police Deranged For Orchestra. Yes, Sting has given the songs an orchestral go-round in the past but what Copeland has done is given them oomph and pizzazz and taken them to new territory while leaving the core bones intact. “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” has become bolder, “Murder By Numbers” even more darkly Jazzy, and “Tea In The Sahara,” already a composition of succulent elements, turns almost surreal. Add to this the vocals of Amy Keys, Carmel Helene, and Ashley Támar, not to mention the basslines of Armand Sabal Lecco, and it’s a Holy Batman 10-song moment.
All three members of the trio known as The Police have become stars outside of the entity that made them household names. Sting became an even bigger solo artist while dabbling in acting and musical theater; Andy Summers made albums with Robert Fripp and Circa Zero while publishing his photography; and Copeland dived headfirst into scoring movies and TV shows, put out a few records with Animal Logicm formed Oysterhead with Trey Anastasio & Les Claypool, and continued to influence drummers into the new millennium. Not bad for a couple of musicians getting their feet wet in punk before embodying a musical style all their own and being honored by record sales, sellout tours, an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame and numerous #1 hit songs.
For Copeland, an American amongst the two Brits, was a world traveler before ever becoming a rock star. His family moved around due to his father’s job and he was exposed to different musical styles and rhythms. His father raised him to be Jazz while his mother opened up the world of classical music – Stravinsky, Ravel, DeBussy – to him at a very early age. And once he started composing, those maternal influences just burst out of him and gave him a whole new world of composition and arrangement. You can almost say, between Mom and Francis Ford Coppola, it changed his life.
It was Coppola, renowned director of The Godfather, who pulled Copeland into film scoring with Rumblefish in 1983. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street came in 1987; the list just goes on and on from there. But Copeland’s knack for creating did not stay within scores and instrumentals. His chemistry with Jazz bass player Stanley Clarke is goosebump-enticing, especially in a live setting. And recently his album with Ricky Kej, Divine Tides, earned him a Grammy for Best New Age Album.
I had a quick chat with Copeland last week about deranging his old music, his love of the orchestra, playing with Stanley Clarke, his drum kit, and his forthcoming new book. You will no doubt recognize his brilliantly wry humor throughout our interview.
How did this “deranging” journey begin for you?
Well, back in the day I had a Super 8 camera and I shot everything that moved. And those Super 8 films went into a shoebox and stayed there because, since there is no negative, you can’t really cut them or do anything with them but string them together and bore your friends. Then one day someone invented COMPUTERS! And it was possible then to digitize all that footage and then I could edit till the cows came home to make the home movie from hell, which on a whim I sent off to Sundance and they said, “Hey, bring it over.” So suddenly my little home movie became an actual movie at Sundance. So it needed a score and the score obviously was about Police so it had to be Police music but I didn’t just want to use the records. So I found all of these obscure Police moments from stage improvisations, studio excursions, just kind of other versions of everything and I created a score for that film out of these other pieces.
Okay, so you know for decades I’ve been playing concerts with orchestras. I get commissions from the Dallas Symphony or the Pittsburgh Symphony or Liverpool or the Royal Opera or whatever and I compose this stuff occasionally and I go out and play them with orchestras. But then I started to drop in obscure Police songs like “Miss Gradenko” and “Darkness” and such and they went over so well that my bosses – I call them the bosses, my management – said, “Stewart, how bout if you play some hits.” And I’m going, “No, no, no … well, maybe.” And I remembered I had that derangement stuff that I’d done for the movie and I said, “How bout if I turn those into orchestral scores.” And I orchestrated all of those weird versions that I had done for the movie, which brings us to Police Deranged.
Do you hear any of the old pieces of symphonic music that your mother had been listening to in your compositions?
Well, like every orchestral composer, I have under my desk a stack of scores and I can hear something in my head and it goes, “shreeeeadaooong.” And I’ve heard somebody else use it. It was Stravinsky and he did it with a harp, the tuba, oh wow, he’s got a tuba in there, cool! And you see how it’s been done before and the reason why that’s the way Stravinsky learned how to orchestrate is because you don’t hear it until you are there in the room with fifty musicians. And experimenting under that condition can be very expensive so you have to study everything that went before. So I deeply study how the Masters orchestrated and that sort of has guided me along.
Also, at a certain point, after scoring all these movies and hiring people to do my orchestrations for me and not really being satisfied with them, I finally hired a guy from USC to come over here and kick my ass every Friday morning, not to teach me music or composition, but to teach me the grammar on the page – the punctuation, the spelling, the where do you put those hairpins, above the staff or below the staff; where does the player like to see that information so that he can just read it and play it. Because that’s what they do. I show up at the Atlanta Symphony. I meet them at 2:00 in the afternoon, “How ya’ll doing guys,” and doors open at 7:30 and we play the show that night after two and a half hours of rehearsal. And that’s because I put everything on the page, every nuance, not just what notes to play but how to play them.
What instrument were you most excited to hear added to these songs?
THE orchestra is THE instrument. I love the oboe, I love the cello, I love the unrespected viola. Poor old viola. The viola is the drummer joke member of the orchestra. They have a million viola jokes. But for the composer, the viola is the hardest working instrument in the orchestra, because they are the bottom of the top violins, and they are the top of the bottom, the cello and basses, so they are always working. Those are some hard-working orcs.
“Don’t Stand So Close To Me,” I actually think the version that you’ve done is a lot bolder than the original.
Oh thank you. Well, it’s actually made from two different versions that The Police did. We for some reason that I still haven’t figured out and no one can remember, we went back to rerecord many of our songs. We only did one because I was playing a game of polo and my horse did a somersault and I was obliged to dismount and broke a collarbone and we didn’t record an album. But we did do that one song. So we have two versions of that song in different keys and with different vocal lines so I kind of made a version comprised of both of those. Handling the two different keys was a challenge but thank you for your compliment. I agree, I love how that turned out. I’m very happy with that one.
What was your first impression of that original song?
I’m trying to remember how he brought it in. I do know that we recorded it very simply and Zenyatta was, you know, an album that I heard the song for the first time about twenty minutes before recording the drums on it. At that point, we weren’t hearing the songs until we got into the studio and we’d show each other the songs right then and there and then record them right away. We didn’t go to a rehearsal room, learn the songs, then go to the studio. So Sting would whip out a song, such as “Don’t Stand So Close To Me,” I’d hear him mumbling the chords and I’m sort of tapping on my knees figuring out, thinking about, where the rhythm might be, and okay, let’s do a take. We would do normally two or three takes, usually take two was the one because it was a little more under control than the first and not quite as slick as the third. So those drums, those parts that I came up with twenty minutes after hearing the song for the first time are on the record for LIFE! Whereas the guitars, the vocals, they get to redo all of that and they spend the next two months redoing and layering the guitars and the vocals and everything. But those drums are what I came up with at that moment.
Of all The Police albums, which one top to bottom do you feel you were on point and locked in at your highest potential as a drummer?
Me personally as a drummer, I would say the second album, Reggatta de Blanc. I enjoyed that album most because we had the least material, which is all wrong, it’s backwards, and we had to come up with it in the studio and we were very much feeling the mojo of that early bite of success. We weren’t playing stadiums yet but we were feeling the rise and we were full of mojo. And we went in there with not enough material and just came out with an album. We had a couple of songs that were going to be hits – “Message In A Bottle” I think was one of them – but that was when the mojo was high. As we went on, we actually got more accomplished as producers and Sting got better and better at songwriting. The other albums might have better qualities but you asked me about my part and my choice would be Reggatta.
In regards to your drum kit, are you an experimenter or do you tend to stick with what you like instrument/gear-wise?
Oh, I am always playing with new toys. People shout out, “Where are the octobans?” And I say, “Well, that was so eighties.” I enjoyed playing with them but they take up so much space. I’ve still got some in the studio here but I sort of DID that and I’ve got another toy now, which is this little tiny, tiny, little piccolo snare, which I use in the same way as the Reggae rim-click. That’s what I’m playing with now. I’ll go through different fads. Right now my fad is quiet cymbals. In fact, Paiste makes cymbals with holes in them so that they’re not as loud. And the reason for that is because a drum set was designed to compete with GIANT AMPLIFICATION! Whereas the orchestra, acoustic orchestra, is much quieter. You don’t realize that when you’re in a concert hall because it’s so rich and powerful; you don’t feel the absence of raw volume. But when you put it up next to a drum set, oh my gosh, how much louder is the drum set than the orchestra!
So I’ve had to completely redesign my playing of the drum set and the equipment that I use as well. So the cymbals with the holes in them are very quiet and they go away very quickly. If I hit a rock crash cymbal, CRASH! I lose the next four bars of the music that I am so proud of. If I hadn’t written the music, I think I wouldn’t care but I DID! (laughs) I can now play my drums to accompany the violin solo and the violin soloist, she’s twenty feet away with a little instrument that’s like twelve inches long, and I can still accompany that on the drums. It takes a whole different technique. And some surprises are I’m actually playing with more dynamism. It’s more exciting because I have a wider dynamic range – from very, very, very quiet to really, really loud, which I can still do when I want to. And there are all kinds of techniques that can’t exist in the rock world because you just never hear those filigrees, the finesse, but now all that stuff that I studied and practiced as a kid has relevance. The drums have a wider vocabulary and they sound so great when I’m not trying to KILL them. When I caress them with love (laughs), they sing rather than cry out in pain. And best of all, no one gets a headache.
What is it like playing with the great Stanley Clarke? How does he make you a better drummer because the chemistry between you two guys is amazing.
Well, he makes me a better drummer by being so sophisticated in what he does. He pushes the parameters and drags me along with him! I like to sneer about Jazz just because it enlivens the conversation. I have to emphasize that I love Jazz fans, Jazz musicians not so much – and some of my best friends are Jazz musicians (laughs). But I did a Jazz tour with Stanley one summer and Jazz fans are THE BEST; it’s the most fun audience to play for, because they’re not expecting you to keep to your place behind the song, the vocal. No, everybody play everything now! And that’s a lot of fun to do. So onstage with Stanley Clarke, with him with that double bass, I really feel humbled that I’m in the presence of one of the legend greats of all time and I’m humbled to be sharing a stage with him.
You have a book coming out in the fall, Stewart Copeland’s Police Diaries. What can we expect?
Well, it’s my diaries. And it’s not just printed, you can actually see them. It’s kind of a coffee table book with my bad spelling. And it’s not just the diaries which have how much we got paid, where we played, how many people came, how well we did, how much the truck cost, how much the PA, cause I was managing the band as well. So I’ve got all the receipts for the trucks, the PA, I’ve got my phone list, my call list, all my notes of just getting the band to and from the gigs, booking the gigs, selling the records, designing the sleeve covers, which I did all myself for my record label, which is sort of a pretend record label called Illegal Records. I was on the phone calling record stores and the conversation would go, “Is it punk?” “Yes.” “Does it have a picture sleeve?” “Yes.” “Is it hostile?” “Yes.” “Send me a box of twenty-five.” I used to deliver to Sheffield or wherever and they’d go, “Where’s the punk?” They’d go to the punk rack and they’d flip through, cause they hadn’t heard any of these records on the radio cause they’re not getting played on the radio; they’re just buying it from the cover. So I made the cover of our first single, which I sold myself, with Xerox pictures, glue them onto a piece of paper and then Xerox that and create the art that way.
So it’s got all these building blocks of The Police and it’s an interesting part of the story because that’s when we were starving for like a year and a half, until Sting started writing great songs. In the beginning it was all my songs, which were crap. I wasn’t a songwriter. I only knew three or four chords at that time. But these were songs of convenience so that we could play the punk clubs, which were the only places to play in those days.
Of the songs on this album, which one do you think will surprise listeners the most?
Perhaps “Roxanne,” because that’s the one I deranged the most; maybe “Tea In The Sahara,” because that’s such a cool song. By the way, there is another album hatching, which is Police Beyond Borders, which is this same record with the Soweto Gospel Choir with a Chinese star singing “Tea In The Sahara” in Chinese. It’s a global album and we’ve got songs in Zulu, in Tamil, Chinese, Armenian. That’s hatching now.
You’re touring, playing some more shows, how long is that going to last in the year?
I’m going off to Europe but I’ll be back in America in September and October. Tour dates on my website https://www.stewartcopeland.net/
By the way, you have a fantastic bass player with you
I do, Armand Sabal-Lecco from Cameroon. He’s been with me about thirty years. Anything I’m doing, I do it pretty much with Armand. We have the synergy, we’ve got a pocket. Same thing I had with Sting back in the early days. When you establish a pocket, you stick with them. Actually, my top ten chuckle buddy friends, most of them are bass players – Stanley, Armand, Trevor Horn, Sting, Les Claypool. I don’t know, drummers and bass players get along. WE ARE THE FOUNDATION! (laughs).
Portrait by Jessica Lehrman
