Stewart Copeland

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Drummer and composer Stuart Copeland has one of the more fascinating bios in modern music. His father was a founding member of the CIA, and his mom worked in British intelligence. He grew up the youngest of four kids, living for a time in the hills outside of Beirut before attending boarding schools in England. After playing in the successful UK prog rock band Curved Air in the mid seventies, Stuart started a new band called The Police with bassist and lead singer Sting and eventually guitarist Andy Summers. Over the next decade, the Police would go on to become one of the top selling rock bands of all time, selling over seventy five million records. Last year, Stuart released the book Stuart Copeland's Police Diaries, which includes his personal notes dating back to the band's formation in nineteen seventy six through seventy eight, when they started to take off. On today's episode, Bruce Heln talks to Stuart Copeland about the first time he saw Sting play and how he was able to successfully lure him into his then non existent band. Stuart also explains why he and Sting eventually had a musical falling out, and how the Arabic rhythms he heard growing up in Lebanon influenced his highly lauded drumming style. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Mitchman. Here's Bruce Heln's conversation with Stuart Copeland.

00:01:42
Speaker 3: Well, thank you so much for doing this. You're always doing something. One of the latest things you've done is Stuart Copeland's Police Diaries, and I'd like to start by talking about that. It's this incredible chronicle of three years in the seventies.

00:01:58
Speaker 1: Yes, the years of the CUSP.

00:02:01
Speaker 3: How did the book come about? What was it like doing it?

00:02:04
Speaker 1: Well, I had the diaries already, sort of like when I made my film. I had the film already that was sitting in shoe boxes until they invented computers where I could digitize them all. The books was not the same problem. But I've got these diaries sitting in a drawer over there, and they're tiny little books, so they don't take up too much space. I still got them, and I'm not quite sure where the idea came from to turn them into kind of more like a scrapbook than a book book. But looking at these notes, how much we got paid, what clubs we played, just the statistics of the day got me thinking and philosophizing. So I ended up writing a lot of modern commentary to go with those historical notes.

00:02:46
Speaker 3: But they're precisely the right kind of diaries that most people don't keep. People often write about their feelings, which you don't care about twenty years later, but you want to know how much you got paid.

00:02:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got both of those diaries. I've got my secret innermost thoughts, which are not pretty. I could only stand to look at them forty years later, and they take on a and comedic element forty years later. But it's all my secret, grandiose schemes, gloating over this grievance, nurturing you know, I don't need these guys. I had a hit with Clark Kent, but while the police was still starving and going nowhere, out of the blue, I recorded some songs my gosh darn self, and by some miracle, BBC Radio One picked it up, put it on the playlist, and there I am, under the name of Clark Kent, having a hit. And I can say, looking at what my thinking was at the time, I don't need these guys that Clark Kent disappeared in the nick of time.

00:03:49
Speaker 3: But they were very game. They appeared with you on top of the pops Sting and Andy Summers.

00:03:55
Speaker 1: Sting was very supportive. Of course, we know why because he was in the process of taking over the Police, and that just made his job a lot easier to keep me busy and distracted with Clark Kent and my dumb song. Okay, there's where you could take your dumb songs. Meanwhile, the Police's mine. And by the way, that was good news for me. Weirdly, actually not weirdly at all. I mean, there's a logic to it that at a certain point I can see the setlists at a certain point, they're in his handwriting, and you could see his maneuvering to take over the band. And nothing could have made me happier because my thought at the time was keeping him in the band, and to the extent that he took an interest in the band was the extent that I could feel secure in keeping him in the band. So I was real happy when he took on leadership position, when he took the initiative, when he stepped forward, even when it was my band, and he was doing it kind of because I pushed him into it. As soon as we walked on stage. He was in charge, he was on the mic. He would take no prisoners. If he's walking on stage, it is his sacred duty to burn the house down. And so that was always fine on stage, but off stage, everybody London was whispering in his ear. And so as he asserted himself more and more, I felt more and more secure that the band would survive.

00:05:18
Speaker 3: And you didn't have insecurity about the writing because you'd written so many songs.

00:05:22
Speaker 1: No, not at all, because his songs every time he brought one in was an upgrade. Wow, let's play that. And my songs were pretty much not because I had an achy breaky heart and needed to unload my feelings upon the world. No, they were just songs of utility, something we could play in those punk clubs, you know, basslines with the yelling to fill the punk brief. And so I didn't have any thoughts of myself as a songwriter. So when he brought songs in, I was always very happy. They were always an upgrade.

00:05:56
Speaker 3: Looking back now, though you didn't think of yourself as a songwriter then you've written just a staggering amount of music.

00:06:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, but not so much songs. I've had success in almost every known form of music up for songs. You know. My first success, I suppose on my own, was with a song Don't Care, under the name of Clark Kent, and that was pretty much it for my songwriting. Then with film, composing, with opera, with symphonic works, in every other known form of music, ethnic stuff, global stuff, and so on. I've had a heck of a party. That song thing not my strongest suit.

00:06:32
Speaker 3: I guess that's an interesting question. What makes either a good song or a good song writer?

00:06:38
Speaker 1: Then, well, giving a darn about the lyrics? For one, me in the car, driving along, slapping the steering wheel. It's the baseline, it's the riff, it's the drums. Somebody's singing something somewhere, but I never paid attention. I never sang in the shower, I never sing in the car. I'm not so much of a song I don't. I listened to the musical textures. That's what catches my ear, and by the way, that goes for police songs too. I had no idea what the hell he was singing about, you know, all I ever saw was the back of his head, preferably, and I don't know what he was thinking about. And it wasn't until I did my Police Deranged for Orchestra that I took those songs and I had to analyze them and orchestrate them and figure out the vocal harmonies for my three singers and so on, that I realized, Damn, those lyrics are pretty smart. Damn should have paid attention. At the time, I was just banging shit. I didn't need to pay attention. That was his gig. It wasn't until years later that I discovered and don't tell him I said this, that guy's kind of a genius with the words.

00:07:35
Speaker 3: Yeah. One thing I loved about the book is it does go from the sort of slow death of your band Curved Air, through the birth of the Police. But it's really also this document about what happened when punk rock hit. Yes, because you were a little older, you weren't punk rock wasn't your first go at the music business? What did it feel like in London? Then?

00:07:59
Speaker 1: Very exciting because for the likes of Stingo and I, who were born in the fifties early fifties, we were too young to be hit. The hippie thing had come and gone. If we could feel the entropy of that world, the prog world, and this new thing. We were older than the Damned and the Clash and the pistols, you know, and we'd been professionals. We actually knew how to play our instruments and were professional musicians. Where a lot of the charm of punk was the naivete and the Clash were the These knives who knew three chords but had great attitude, great look and just instinctively were great musicians without a lot of musical vocabulary, and that kind of distilled the excitement of that punk sound. But we knew better, we knew more. We had a larger musical vocabulary in which we had to hide at first, and it wasn't until we started unhiding that musicality. Like when Andy joined, we couldn't hide it anymore. And that's when Stings started writing the big songs, and we just had to live up to the fact that we actually knew one or two things about music. But that cusp to which you were was an interesting time. Think. In nineteen seventy six there was an oil crisis which raised the price of vinyl drastically that was the talk at the time. Suddenly records became Suddenly the music industry had the stuffing knocked out of it by supply chain issues kind of thing, and also just the feeling that everyone had seen it done. It had all been seen and done where it needs something new, folks. And then one of the sex pistols I think is either Paul Cook or Jonesy said fuck on National TV and a whole new world opened up.

00:09:43
Speaker 3: Was it at all threatening to you as someone who loved music and valued music. Your two bandmates are both excellent musicians, and suddenly the airwaves are dominated by people who can't really play well.

00:09:59
Speaker 1: Actually know, the airwaves were not dominated because the BBC didn't play them. They were still playing old wave, they were still playing progue, well not even prog, they were playing pop music. And what was so appealing about the punk scene was that it didn't rely on you know, radio play. It was word of mouth, it was the fanzines, it was just the scene being on the scene. You could do it your damn self. And he didn't need a record company. And one of the things I noticed reading my diaries when I went from a prog band, which was you know, it had been successful long before my time. I was the last rat to jump aboard the sinking ship. But it was playing big places for good money. We had a road crew, we had a special car for you know, we were living high on the hog, on the dregs of the prog rock industry. I never see any complaint going from three roadies in a fancy car to no roadies and we're riding down in a truck and literally we played Torquy. We slept in a farm shed like Jesus in a manger, But not any complaint. It was because this is my band and it was doing We're doing it for ourselves. You know, we get paid thirty quid. It would go into our pockets right away rather than getting sucked up by the machine. And so even though we were on much reduced circumstances, just the feeling that we were in charge of our destiny made up for that. But you know, the old scene was going out and the new scene was the new wave was coming in, and we would be on the front of that way rather than swirling in the SuDS on the back side. But then down in those punk clubs, it was all going on. It was exciting and we could be boss of it. And when Sting and I went down to the Roxy Club first open, we looked around at all the minnows, which as sharks we could consume.

00:11:48
Speaker 3: Did you always feel the band had a destiny?

00:11:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh absolutely. I think I'm pretty sure that every band thinks that world domination is their rightful destiny.

00:11:58
Speaker 3: Did anything surprise you going through the diaries, Well.

00:12:02
Speaker 1: A few things. One was how much of a slog it was, I mean, looking through these pages, here, wake up, you know, go down to Ealing, pick up the truck, drive the truck over to the other end of London, pick up the gear, drive over to pick up Andy, drive to the rehearsal. Rehearsal all day, try and book some dates, drop the gear off that you know, just endless, endless hustle. Then hoover the apartment. Then have an Indian meal. Every Indian meal is carefully documented, which is kind of interesting. But the largest thing that surprised me looking back with all that struggle and toil was that we didn't have songs. Remembering, we didn't have rock sand, we didn't have a message in a bottle, we didn't have every breath you take. We didn't have anything but dead end job, these dumb songs that I had written, so we knew that we were in the right musical company. We're playing with the right players. This is the band. Even though we didn't have those brilliant songs. We had crap songs, but just the musicianship of our partners in crime, that's what kept us together. And then one day we ran into Andy Summers and Sting's ears pricked up and he started writing those songs, which I'll have to ask him about this, but you know, you'll have to ask him about this, But I don't think he had much of an inkling himself that he could write those hits, because he saw himself as a jazz musician, which is kind of the antithesis of pop songs. So I think he was just as surprised as us that he just had this knack. He just, you know, he what he learned from punk, which was the distillation of the musical material into verse chorus, verse chorus, bridge, verse chorus out done very simple formula from the Beatles, you know, through all pop music. And I think that distillation, combined with Andy's expanded harmonic musical vocabulary. That's when nuclear fusion happened.

00:13:52
Speaker 3: Was there a moment where you saw that. Was there one song that you thought, wait a second, this could be it?

00:13:58
Speaker 1: There were moments and songs. Born in the fifties was the first song he brought in, well, not even one of his big ones, but it was such a cool song, thinking yeah, let's play. But it didn't dawn on me that somebody else was writing songs. I just never crossed my mind. That's a cool song. Let's play. It can't stand Losing You was the first one, or maybe Roxane was the first sort of reggae ish one that we attempted, and it worked out really well that we really were very pleased with ourselves. Well this is darn clever. This will bring world domination within our grasp, and we loved it. But the more inspiring moments were moments rather than songs, and for instance, one of those would be when we went to Germany. There's the whole Andy the Courtship of Andy Summers part of the book. But he joined canned all of his other gigs, but he had one gig left over in Germany. There was this German composer called Eberhart Schener, who had this multi media show involving lasers, ballet dancing, a jazz saxophonist, all these different elements, and Andy Summers and and got me the job. Say any night, go over to Germany. And we convinced that this is a great show. What you need just one last element, you need punk band. And we got this bass player over in London, so we brought the bass player over. So we're all rehearsing for this show. And one night I think it was actually live on stage because we were unrehearsed and we you know a lot of it. We didn't know what was supposed to happen next. And one of the elements was jazz singer Lady and she was sort of the Shah day of her day and sang flat and liked it that way. You know, she had the one shoulder down the jazz attitude and sneered at us punk rockers. And one day she made the mistake of walking away from the microphone, and young Stingo walks up to the microphone and starts this keening wailing. I don't know how to describe it, just yodeling. Anybody whoever came to a police show knows exactly what I'm talking about. You know, when Sting goes off, he just starts some repetitive vocalization combined with the bassline that we'd never heard before. Then he just goes off and it comes to him and every heart is broken. The birds stop their song just like Andy and Iron. The shadows next him, going holy gopher fuck, where did that come from? And he just like he takes flight right there in front of us, and we're going, Jesus Christ. We'd only ever heard him yelling, you know, because that was his brief in the punk band. But to just hear him soaring with that kind of melodic invention, None of that would have been allowed in London. We would have been torn apart by the New Musical Express and by Melody Maker and so on for such musicality. And our next time was when we went over to America, where people didn't know any better. They didn't know that it was supposed to be crap music only is allowed, and so we would stretch our scant material into three sets, which involved a lot of jamming and improvisation, and that again is where we discovered each other. Damn that Andy's got some chops on him. You know, I'd only ever heard him god, you know, but now he's playing with all that virtuositic you know, that stuff he can do with his fingers, arpeggiated things, these sound clouds and so on, and so we kind of discovered ourselves at these crucial moments.

00:17:20
Speaker 3: Is that when you really heard that kind of police sound for the first time.

00:17:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was when Stings got licensed to actually sing, and when Andy he had another factor, which is that his gear was I think he had a music Man amp, which is a very clean amplifier, perfect for air conditioned studio session recording, but not to move air at a punk club. But he developed his pedals, his effects into a manageable, portable foot board. We called it the fred Astaire with all of his effects and gismatronics, his delay lines and echo n and he developed this style of guitar playing which was not about wiggling his fingers but about creating a soundscape song as like walking on the Moon. There's no Fiddley Eric Clapton on there. It's just an entire orchestral world of sound that Andy started creating. So the discovery of Stings singing and his songwriting and Andy's huge sound vocabulary as well as harmonic vocabulary. That's when the police sound began to emerge.

00:18:31
Speaker 3: Now you're this guy that doesn't like jazz or didn't like.

00:18:34
Speaker 1: That I'm I'm just at the back of the stage banging shit.

00:18:37
Speaker 3: But suddenly you've got a jazz bass player, and you've got Andy who loves using chord extensions and you know, sharp thirteenths and he'll take the third out of the chord to create all this. Were you thinking, this isn't why I got in this or did you just love the effect?

00:18:56
Speaker 1: No, it was why I got into it, because somewhere beneath the machiavellian game plan of a punk band to play in the punk scene, there was still this inner, deeper, lurking musicality that could not be suppressed, which just woke up to that cool shit that Andy and Sting were coming up with. And in fact, I saw that moment with Sting driving home from our first session with Andy, where we were the hired rhythm section on someone else's album and Andy was the hired guitar player. That's where we met Andy. Andy walks in the room. We'd all heard about him by reputation. Wow, you know we got this is some big brass we got going here. And we just spent a day playing actual music. It wasn't hit music, but it was real music, and we just felt so fulfilled. And driving home that night, Stingo is seething and he's just saying, Man, I love Henry, our guitarist, who only knew three chords. We could play them really well. I had the vibe, he had the right shades and the upturned leather jacket collar and everything. He was perfect. In fact, he was the nearly genuine punk in the band. But that musicality thing is things is just going gosh, you know, music got it forgotten? What is like to be playing music? We got to get you know, that guy in the band. I'm saying, dude, we can't afford him. There's no way. Why would he he joined. You know, even if he says he's going to join, they'll quit a week later when he sees the shit we have to put up with. And this thing is going. God, you know, you're a better guitar player than Henry Pottervani and your crap. And I think, really, God, out of the blue, this unexpected Accolade, and then over the next few weeks this dance began where you know, we're sort of in touch. You know that Mike Hollett, a guy played in a band called Gong, which I'm sure no one in America has heard of, big in Europe, and it was his solo album. He was a bass player. Why did he want a bass player? God only knows. Anyhow, he woke up twenty years later saying, my gosh, my solo album that I made twenty years ago. The band is the Police. So he called this all up and said, hey, do you mind if I release I'm sure, man, you paid us fifty quit it's your record, And so he released it under the name Police Academy. It's an interesting record. You hear the same three guys what they sounded like an album or two later. You know, the material is not that great, but the playing sure is.

00:21:07
Speaker 3: So did Andy ever say why he joined the band?

00:21:11
Speaker 1: I asked him. He said, like I said, I don't know, what were you thinking? And I asked myself as well, how was I able to hold on to Sting in that world? I just we knew, you know, from the first time we played together. You know, he came down to London. He called me from a phone booth on the street outside my apartment and he came on up. We just plugged in and started playing and that was the rest is history. We just knew that this is the right musical company.

00:21:40
Speaker 3: What's that first session?

00:21:41
Speaker 1: Like?

00:21:41
Speaker 3: What happened?

00:21:43
Speaker 1: Well? I saw him up in Newcastle. I was playing with the old with curved air and my prog rock band with long hair and flouncy clothes. On a night off in Newcastle, the local journalist Bill Suckcliffe took us to see the local hero band, kind of a jazz band, sort of not that too distant from Return to Forever or something like that, these kind of progressive jazz crossover kind of thing. And I wasn't didn't that much care for the music. But the bass player could play bass and sing. And I was looking for either guitarists who could sing or a bass player who could sing one of it because I can't I'm breathing too hard banging on drums. And I could see, Yeah, he can sing and play bass. That's cool. And look behind him, Yep, that's a nice big old Fender basement amp he's got there, So he's got an amp, too cool, But that wasn't what really did it. What really did it for me was that golden ray of celestial light coming down from the heavens, alighting upon his magnificent brow. And I looked up there at that guy on stage with his pretty serviceable amp can sing and play bass, and saw that is a meal ticket.

00:22:48
Speaker 3: But you still you had to have that moment where you played together for the first time.

00:22:53
Speaker 1: Oh yes, So I call up the journalist Phil Suckliffe and I say that bass player Sting, we were introduced, but he was staring off into space. I don't know if he even saw me. I mean, you know, we can say about Stingo that success never changed him. You know, he was the lion king from birth. But I sure saw him. Anyways, I call up the journalists and say, you know, I'm telling him, I got the scene going on in London. It's all going great and with this whole punk thing, London is explaining and right there the temperature drops thirty degrees Punk because you see, in those days, Punk was the barbarians at the gates. They were the enemy of all that is decent. They were, as you say, tearing down all known values of art, creativity and musicality. They were the enemy. And here as I talking about yanking the star from their local hero band down to London to play punk and he refused to give me his number. Oh man, So I hung up, and I'm a little disappointed. I'm walking around and then I came up with a much better idea much more persuasive argument to tell Phil, and I called him back and the argument went along the lines of give me his fucking number, asshole. And I called him back with this winning argument, but he didn't pick up. His girlfriend did, and she says, oh, hello, is there anything I can do? And I said, well, you know that bass player sting guy I was looking trying to get his number. Yeah, hang on a tick and she goes off to get his phone book and okay, here it is seven three to two four nine one eight five three four, And one minute later, I'm on the phone and that gravelly voice with which we are so familiar these days is saying these fateful words. Keep talking, And that was an answer to my question to him. Look, I'm calling from London. Phil Suckcliffe gave me your number, and I've got this thing going on, and it only involves you, not your band, to which he responded, keep talking. And right there I knew that he was a free agent. Yes, yes, okay, and I subjected him to my torrent of grandiose schemes and convincing certitude that we're going to be I got it all going on. I got a scene down here, I got connections, and he wanted to move down to the big city. He'd outgrown Newcastle and this is the only person he knew in London who was offering him something. So he said, okay, I got your number. I'll give you a call. Not long after, maybe two three weeks later, I get a call and he's down on the street outside my place, in a phone booth, and I said, come on up, and he comes up, and I put a bass into his hands and we let rip, and we surge high to the stars. We dig deep to the bowels of the earth. We pushed forward like an invading army, We withdraw into poignant sensitivities, and it just goes every which way, just like it was just the most amazing afternoon of playing the most amazing music that either of us had ever participated in. And okay, we got a band. Here and I told him I do have a guitarist. I had to find a guitarist to make good on that promise, and so I introduced him to Henry Pottervanni. Now Henry Pottervanni was a chum of mine, recent chum of mine. He would recently become a bonafid he punk by dropping acid and cutting his hair. And I had to show him EA and D chords and also G so that when we're in the bandroom and I said okay, Henry, I said A, and then it goes to D, he would know what the hell I was talking about. Stings saw through that in a heartbeat, and once again I'm amazed that he didn't fall for it, but he put up with it, and that amazes me. Almost half a century later.

00:26:34
Speaker 2: After this quick break, we'll be back with more from Bruce Headlam and Stuart Copeland. We're back with Bruce Headlam and Stuart Copeland.

00:26:45
Speaker 3: I think, like a lot of fans, I knew your father was somehow involved in the CIA, not realizing that your father was one of the founders of the CIA. He was a legitimately big deal.

00:26:56
Speaker 1: But a great jazz trumpeter too.

00:26:58
Speaker 3: Also a great Jazz Trumpeter. Now you didn't know he was in the CIA at that point, well, growing up, not when I was growing.

00:27:06
Speaker 1: Up, but when I was in college he wrote his first book and there it was on the liner notes, Dad Gosh, And the book came out during the time of the Chilean crisis, when the CIA was involved in very dirty stuff, and so the CIA was a bad word at the time. But I understood what my father's work in the Middle East was all about, which was keeping the oil flowing to the West rather than north to the Soviet Union, because there was a war going on. There was a Cold War going on, and it was critical for American interests, and my father was doing his patriotic duty to manipulate local politics for the betterment of the American economy, to feed our factories. And the Ruskies. Their job was to tear down our systems, our relationships with the Saudi Arabian oil fields and the Gulf States. Their job was to shake it up and make it unstable so as to foil our global dominance. So my daddy played his part in those local politics. And as an apologist for my father's work, I can say that that world was run by monarchs or other forms of dictator That was their political system, and for them democracy was a very strange idea because of their tribal rivalries. For them, democracy was exactly like two wolves in a sheep voting on the dinner menu.

00:28:34
Speaker 3: Now, your mother was in Was she in British intelligence?

00:28:39
Speaker 1: Yes? During the war, not quite as sexy as the CIA. She was at a desk in London analyzing train schedules, radio and just basically figuring out where the British raf should bomb, where the German resources were being transported to and from, and so it's kind of desk work. But technically, yeah, my mommy and daddy were both spies.

00:29:04
Speaker 3: They sound like difficult parents to fool in case you were trying to get away with anything.

00:29:09
Speaker 1: Well, no, when I came along, I'm the fourth child, and I now recognize the father of seven that by the time you get to the fourth child, willful blindness is an asset. I don't know if you have children, any of your listeners who have children out there, there's sometimes when you're just having a nice time and the child does something bad and you've got to pull out the daddy voice, and it's just gonna pop the bubble. We were all having such a nice, cozy time. So I think I will just somehow fail to observe that transgression so that we can continue this evening in a nice way. And I think I got away with stuff because they were lazy, And also they fought. My older brother, Ian was the black sheep of the family. He was the motorcycle thief of the family, so they were worn out by battling with him. And all I wanted was just to be a good kid.

00:30:00
Speaker 3: And I totally forgot. Your dad was good friends with Kim Philby, one of the most famous of the Cambridge Five, one of the most famous double agents of all time.

00:30:10
Speaker 1: Yes, they were suspecting it, but they couldn't believe it. His best friend. We were parallel families. They had kids the same age as our family. Young Harry was my age. We were chums and we would go on to archaeological sites. We would go off into the desert to visit the cract Chevalier Castle in Syria, or up to Tabarja Castle on the coast, you know, up the Biblos. So it blew his mind and broke his heart. When Kim Philby was exposed.

00:30:39
Speaker 3: Did he talk about it a lot.

00:30:41
Speaker 1: No I read about it in his book. At the time, it was very mysterious that Harry's dad just disappeared one night, and for some reason, the grups were all in a state of agitation. We didn't really understand what was going on because we lived just outside of Beirut, in the hills above Beyrout, and they were escaping attention just by holding up in our place. And then it came out that he had jumped on a Greek ship and defected to Russia. And then I never saw him again. To this day, I have not been able to find my old friend. Harry Philby just vanished off the face of the earth. I can't find him. If i'd google him, I get the dad who was also h Philby, and I'm sure we regarded as kind of a joke in our family cia Daddy, but for them it was utterly devastating. He was in a boarding school in England, kicked out. Just the family was just trashed. I can hardly imagine how devastating it was for his family.

00:31:39
Speaker 3: And his family didn't join him. I think Eleanor went over to Russia for a while, but they didn't actually join him.

00:31:44
Speaker 1: There. No, they didn't. One of the sons visited him there eldest, who I didn't know that well, and he was remarried. I don't know whether he had an affair going on the side all the while, but he was never reconciled with his wife, Eleanor, who was an American. Actually she was quite fierce. It was Dad Philby, who was the jovial boozer, who was the fun one. He was the easier of the two parents. But as my mother used to say, you can always tell the spy. They're the one talking the most bullshit. They're just talking about trivial bullshit stuff life of the party. Apparently drunk all the time. Couldn't possibly be a spy. He has nothing with gravitas going on in his head.

00:32:31
Speaker 3: You mentioned the mother was the fierce one in your family. You are a fierce character. We talked about how much No.

00:32:40
Speaker 1: I was the good kid at the bottom. I was the fourth of four, and like any youngest in any family, I'm the cheerful one.

00:32:47
Speaker 3: But you also have thrown yourselves at so many new projects. You make a film, you wrote an opera, which.

00:32:56
Speaker 1: Excuse me, I've written seven operas. Thank you.

00:32:59
Speaker 3: Seven operas, ballets, you write an extraordinary amount of film music. All these things you didn't know how to do when you started.

00:33:08
Speaker 1: Well, except that I had the wherewithal I had the material to work with. I had the clay, which seventy years of life gave me the experience to work up the skills to go with that clay, to go with that gift. And when I was in college, I studied music theory and so on until I went to UC Berkeley and couldn't get into the music department there, and so I didn't learn that technique, you know, the advanced technique of music theory, until years later. But that didn't matter. I didn't need that music school education. I had the music. I just had the instinct. That was a gift. God knows from where, but I had that gift. And just as a punchline to that story, I'm going back to Juilliard to teach after years of learning on the job. I suppose I was paid for most of my music education.

00:33:54
Speaker 3: But you even say in your book you have to be willing to throw yourself off the cliff.

00:33:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, it's much easier for me than it is for that skiing hot dogger. When I throw myself off the cliff. There are no hard rocks beneath me. If I screw it up, it's only music. Nobody's gonna die, nobody's even gonna experience pain except for the bandmates momentarily.

00:34:16
Speaker 3: There are a lot of creative people who don't have that attitude, though, for whom like taking on adventures like that would be terrifying.

00:34:24
Speaker 1: And I don't know that that's a matter of fear as a failure of imagination. I do look askance at my peers who just play guitar, or just play drums, or just play bass, and that's their entire musical career on one instrument. My God, got four strings on that bass, you know. I can't even conceive of just sticking with one instrument the way most of my peers do.

00:34:51
Speaker 3: I do want to talk about your drum playing a little because your dad encourage you to, or you started on the trombone, right.

00:34:59
Speaker 1: My first music, I guess, was on the piano. My sister teaching me how to play piano and actually how to read the dots and then try bone lessons. Because trombone is a very easy brass instrument to play. Trumpet takes an actual ombusure, whereas trombone with that huge mouthpiece. Any damn fool can get a sound out of it, but I couldn't. When I was seven, I couldn't reach the extended positions. But it didn't last. As soon as I discovered banging stuff, that just took over my life.

00:35:29
Speaker 3: Could you bang stuff in a very distinctive way? Certainly your stuff with the police was very distinctive. I recently, when I was preparing for this, I just saw a clip of you conducting and I thought it looked strange, and then I realized something, you're left handed, which I didn't know.

00:35:46
Speaker 1: That's wrong.

00:35:47
Speaker 3: You're not left handed.

00:35:49
Speaker 1: It's right that I am left handed, but it's wrong to be conducting with the left hand. And by the way, using a drumstick as the baton, Well, that's so they can see the damn thing.

00:35:57
Speaker 3: Well, they seem to be able to follow you. That's the important part.

00:36:00
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, ye, Well, the rhythm's good. My conducting is show business. I did not go to conducting school, but I have a life time in show business and I learned a lot there and I am actually in the conducting school of Mickey Mouse. It's all about the show, and I do the cues as well. I did take a course in conducting, so I know the conductor's actual job, which is pretty simple really in concept, but very difficult in practice with really complicated music, which is that you know there's something in you don't see much in rock and roll, which is the word tacit, which is where the flute player he's tacit, which means he doesn't play, don't play for sixteen bars, thirty two bars, because in orchestral you don't use all the instruments all the time. In a rock band, guitarist, bassed, drums, you don't stop if the bass player stops. It's a special effect. No, you play from the beginning of the song through to the end of the song. There's no such thing as tacit. But in an orchestra, the bassoon is sitting down, he's staring off into space for thirty two bars. He's not counting thirty two bars as they go by. That's what the conductor is for the conductors. All the parts. Okay, mister bassoon, your part's coming up. It's coming okay now, And so the bassoon can launch into his bar three hundred and forty seven with confidence because he hasn't been counting for thirty two bars. And so the conductor gives the cues. He also gives the emotional attitude. And there's all kinds of things that are not so discernible to the audience which the conductor provides, and I provide all those while putting on a show.

00:37:36
Speaker 3: How did being left handed affect your drumming? Do you think?

00:37:40
Speaker 1: Possibly? It gave me a slightly different vocabulary. I maintain that on most instruments, both hands are working. Whether it's the violin, you know, the right hand is doing the boeing, but the left hand is doing some complicated stuff. Same with the guitar or any any instrument, now maybe brass instruments, the left hand is at your side while the three fingers are doing all the work. As far as dexterity. With drums, both hands and both feet are working. Doesn't matter what you're left handed or right hand, it's you know, it's all working. But perhaps left handedness, like with Ringo Starr, for instance, just gave me a different approach to using the instrument, navigating around the instrument, using the toms, the high hat, my kit. Like Ringo is set up normal, I right handed, the same way a right handed person would play it, because it's very, very impractical to rearrange the drums so the high hat is on the other side, and it just means that you never get to jam with the band because moving the drums around in that way is utterly disruptive. So I tell all your listeners, any left handed want to be drummers out there, play a right handed kit. Don't be messing around with trying to change the kit. Change yourself. And the same goes with guitar. I think Jimmy Hendrix just turned the guitar upside down, but it was a regular guitar. Make it easy to play other people's instruments basically, So left handing might have changed my vocabulary slightly, but I think actually there were there were other factors. It was that Arabic influence. I think it was a big part of it.

00:39:08
Speaker 3: The Arabic influence being the beat you were using.

00:39:13
Speaker 1: Yes, the rhythm, the fundamental rhythmic structure of Arabic music balladi or country. Arabic music shares some features with reggae, believe it or not. On the other side of the planet, no cultural cross pollination. They're just coincidence that both forms of music emphasized the third beat of the bar, and they hide one of the bar one two three four, one two three four. Rock megas ooh dah, ooh dah one two three four, backbeat on two and you know the downbeat one two three four, whereas reggae and Arabic music is on three one two three four, two three four nothing two three four two three four. And then those up chicks that hold it together check check check, oh check, which turned into my secret sauce when it came to introducing reggae rhythms or reggae ish rhythms to rock music. And I think it was the class who did it first, attempting skinny white guys trying to play reggae. And the reason they did that another sidebar story about how Don Letz brought dub music into the punk clubs. It was the only acceptably hostile form of chill music, but Clash for the first to attempt playing reggae with their white sensibilities, and they did it pretty effectively. But it was just a whole lot easier for me because it was already that formula was already there in my DNA, so I didn't need to listen closely to what the reggae cats were doing in Kingston, Jamaica. I just got, oh, yeah, you can do that, and I just came up with my Arabic vocabulary, which most of the world saw as being reggae.

00:40:58
Speaker 3: Interesting and in Arabic music, is there any stress on the one or is it just on the three?

00:41:08
Speaker 1: It's just they hide it. It's a gap, it's a void, it's a pit that you fall into, and then they land hard on beat three.

00:41:16
Speaker 3: Well that's interesting because another thing I've noticed and you're playing is if you're playing a crash, you often do it on the fourth beat or even four and a half in the wrong place, not the wrong place if it works. But yeah, I think Invisible Sun would be a good example of that.

00:41:35
Speaker 1: You know, I guess, to the annoyance of my bandmates, I would resist the straight backbeat. And I'm sure Stingo writing his song you can care whether it's a downbeat or a backbeat or whatever it is, as long as you can hear as darn lyric And so it was probably a distraction. Why can't they just play a backbeat? Well, because I don't want to. I want to look for something else somewhere, making it interesting or difficult. That was a Freudian slip, interesting or different.

00:42:00
Speaker 3: I meant to say, let you take that up with your therapist.

00:42:06
Speaker 1: Yeah. Really, it's just an avoid and so of standard. And that's as far as you know. There's no more detail to the brief than that. Just okay, what else is there?

00:42:18
Speaker 2: After this last break, we'll be back with more from Stuart Copeland. We're back with the rest of Bruce Heellim's conversation with Stuart Copeland.

00:42:30
Speaker 3: So how did you arrange the songs? He brought them in? They could have been done very conventionally. You come in, you're often turning the beat around on these things. A lot of high hat like I bring on the night.

00:42:43
Speaker 1: Well, I would say, I'm guessing you'll have to ask them. But I think as we were excited when Sting brought in a song. He was excited when I'd fuck up the rhythm because you know, we were co dependent at the time, and he was real pleased that we'd take an interest in his song. Of course, later after he'd written twenty hits, you know, he was less concerned whether we liked the song or not it's a hit because he wrote it. And as he got more and more in control of his medium and became a better and better songwriter, he had less and less patience for collaboration. And we understand that now, and I'm very grateful that we got five albums out of that son of a bitch, because it became more and more difficult for him to compromise and collaborate because his musical ideas and I understand this as an orchestral composer, the musical ideas are fully formed in his mind. And by the way, he knows a thing or two about where to put the drums and how to use the drums. And you know, the times when it was most urgent that I throttle and kill him was when he was right. But in the early days he was very pleased that we took an interest. And if I came up with some wild offbeat rhythm, all he had with the chords. He didn't have that fully developed concept of what the music should be. So I think in the same way that we left on every one of his songs as he pulled them out, they left on every one of my strange rhythms as I pulled those out. And also Andy got much love from his bandmates when he came up with a guitar part that was unique.

00:44:18
Speaker 3: You just mentioned that he was usually right, staying that he knew a thing or two about drums.

00:44:23
Speaker 1: No, no, well, he was often right, let's call it often right. What he was wrong about was the effect that had on his two bandmates for him to be implacable, and he you know, I would describe it as a form of aspergers, and I mean that as a compliment that he's just music is so important to him, it just makes him feel sick to get it wrong. And I'm grateful that he was able to put up with these intrusions on his pure concept. But he did put up with it, and it got more and more difficult, which is why there was friction in the band. And finally, you know, if you love somebody, set them free, and off he went.

00:45:02
Speaker 3: And immediately played with jazz players who you can't really control, which I thought was a very odd choice.

00:45:08
Speaker 1: Good point, and never thought like that. He left the frying pan and into the fire of jazz musicians who didn't hold him in such reverence, which annoyed me. Once again, he was back in the supplicant position of gosh, you like my songs, you'll play with me the skinny white Kid. My goodness, I am so honored play what you like. And they did to his benefit. I mean, his first album, I Dream of Blue Turtles was a brilliant record because he had faith in his players.

00:45:37
Speaker 3: They were great flairs, Kenny Kirkland, all those guys were sensational.

00:45:42
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:45:42
Speaker 3: It reminds me of the part in your book where You're incredibly happy where you got your first tape recorder when you could put multiple tracks on.

00:45:52
Speaker 1: Ah, yes, the tact.

00:45:54
Speaker 3: And that's when you recorded all your or did the demos for Clark Kent, Yes.

00:46:00
Speaker 1: And for Police too. I've always been a home recording enthusiast, and before that I had a Revox a seventy seven, and you record on the left channel, usually a drum box, which I you know, a nightclub allounge. You act to accompany the pianist in the in the bar, the piano bar let that do you know, or pop one or pop two or whatever, and then lay that down on one track. Then I feed that track onto the other track while adding a guitar, and so the drum box and my live guitar goes onto track two. Married together. Now I've got drums and guitar, I take that track, bounce it back onto track one while adding a bass guitar, and so I'd go bouncing tracks back and forth, but they would get mushier and mushier. Kids these days probably don't have a concept of signal to noise ratio, which as a byproduct of magnetic tape as opposed to digital data, and so every time you back you got tape hiss as a layman's term for signal to noise, which increases, and so the earlier tracks get mushier and mushier, which, by the way, is why on old Rolling Stones records and Beatles records the tambourine is so prominent because by the time they did that, they only had four tracks recording in the early days, and they did a lot of this bouncing of tracks. They call it when you merge tracks onto another track, then go back and forth the initial tracks that say, the drums get mushier and mushier. So to add some sparkle back into the rhythm, the last thing they add is a tambourine, which is in your face, bright fresh recording, whereas the actual live drum set has gotten a bit mushy. We digress. I got the four track machine, which meant that I now have four tracks that I could record on, which was a huge breakthrough. And I can now play guitar bassin you know, two guitars bass in drum box.

00:48:00
Speaker 3: And this really surprised me. In the book, maybe you were overstating the case. When you went into the studio to record your Clark Kent album, you said it was the happiest day of your creative life.

00:48:12
Speaker 1: Oh. Absolutely, without doubt. I've had a few happy days since then. But at the time, I was a recording enthusiast, frustrated guitarist, and I had these songs which the band were not. They did not leap on my songs, you know, because Sting had to sing them, and my puerile college kid American college kid lyrics just did not match his persona. But I do have recordings of him singing those dumb songs of mine, including the one I had a hit with called Don't Care. The lyric is something like, I am the neatest thing that ever hit down. There isn't anything that could bring me down. Don't care, did di di di di? Did? Did? Don't care? You know, Sting is a man of great genius and you know grave posture. You know, he's a great poet and to sing those I've got a recording of him singing that dumb song, which I like to remind him of occasionally.

00:49:03
Speaker 3: I was going to say, do you ever just leave a message on his answering machine saying I've decided to really and.

00:49:10
Speaker 1: You've got me busted. Well, these days we get along great. We don't have to play music together, so which means that we get along really great. And we do like to rattle each other's cage.

00:49:20
Speaker 3: There's some very touching things in the book. People know about you guys battling it out, but at one point you babysit for him, so he and his wife couldn't have a night.

00:49:30
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Well, we had to keep secret from our punk scene, the fact that he was a father, he had a baby, he's married. For one thing, that's bad enough, but he actually had a wife and kid. God, I mean, Joe Strummer wouldn't have talked to us if he'd known that. But one day his wife was an actress. And here's something else that I will expose to his discomfort is that he was a model and if he went for a gig, he would get the job because he just had charisma out to hear. And so one day he was out doing a modeling job and she was out doing an acting job. And what are they going to do with her child? They must have been desperate to call me, and they dropped off young Joseph, who was old enough to crawl. He was out of his crib. But a little destruct a thought, and he was you know, for the next two hundred hours. He made my life a misery while I tried to keep him out of trouble and stop him from destroying my world. But a lifelong bond was established. That little kid left a dent in my heart which survives to this day. And now Joseph Sumner is himself a father of many, just a really one of the world's great human beings.

00:50:39
Speaker 3: He also called Sting at one point, one of the world's most loyal.

00:50:42
Speaker 1: People, true to this day. In fact, he has around him the only people he wasn't loyal to or Andy and me. Everyone else in his world is old police crew. He forms relationships and they last, and our relationship lasts. The only thing that doesn't last is our musical relationship, which is secondary. And there's a good reason for that. We are not musically birds of a feather. We make music for for reasons. Music has a different function in our lives. We go about it in different ways. And when we were young and codependent, that worked. We now understand that that clash provided the police. It gave the police its thing. But he's very loyal to me to this day in every matter except for music, and that's fine. You know, we enjoy each other's company, and I don't enjoy getting dictated to any more than he enjoys struggling with collaboration.

00:51:41
Speaker 3: Just raised a really interesting point. You have traveled around the world. You did a film going to Africa, kind of like one of your heroes, Ginger Baker did, and you were looking for Western music. You just said, music has a different function in your life other than it's your job, and I think you love doing it. What is music in your life? How does it function?

00:52:05
Speaker 1: It is a river that flows a wake up in the morning, I rush through breakfast so I can get into this room right here and make some more music. It just flows out of me like a river. And this isn't true of all musicians. Many musicians are players, and they achieve their musical nirvana just by playing their instrument, you know, and the music doesn't happen for them until they pick up their instrument and start playing it. For me, it's a river that flows. That doesn't mean that this gushing torrent of music that comes out of my brain is any good or that anyone else will like it apart from me. Fortunately enough people do so that I can earn my crust from producing this stuff. But it's a gift that comes to me. And you know, like I have musicians who are an incredible pianist, for instance, concert pianist. You know, he'll come fly into the Chicago Symphony and play rock Monona's fourth Piano Concerto and just incredible musicality in every which way except the composing part. And he will say, you know, this summer, I think I'm going to compose a pano concerto. No, you're not. If you were going to compose a piano concerto, you would need that gene, that gushing torrent of musicality, and you would have written ten piano concerties by now. If you're going to wait till this summer. That means where are you going to get it? You know, his fingers do it. His heart plays the music with great musicality, but that composing gene is another and separate and distinct factor. So the relationship with music is that I just have this music that I want to make, and when I sit down behind the drums, I just play. It's just something I don't think about. I just do it. And to be working with a musician that has an agenda, actually, I kind of want the drums to do like this. I go ya what say what? Okay, I'll try that, And as soon as I start playing, it goes right out of my head. And the function of music for me is kind of the other way around. I am a vessel for this music that comes from my heart.

00:54:05
Speaker 3: But you have an incredible gift for melo. I've been listening to a lot of your music. I've been listening to the orchestral album you did. Seems almost limitless.

00:54:15
Speaker 1: Well the music. I've been doing this for seventy years and it hasn't quit. In fact, as I developed more skills, I've still got the same musical identity I had that I was born with the same inclination to use these intervals or those intervals melodic signature, if you like. But as the years and decades go by, I developed more skills. So where I was, you know, in the seventies, I was just limited to the chords I could play on a guitar recorded into my rebox A seventy seven. Now I have full orchestration skills and can now work with the seventy piece orchestra to take my music Internet. But it's the same music. It's the same melodic sensibility, it's the same harmon. I just gravitate towards this chord in that chord. It's the same identity. The only thing that's changed is the skill set.

00:55:04
Speaker 3: The technology has changed, though, it's allowed you to do that absolutely.

00:55:09
Speaker 1: One day they invented a computer that would do as it was told. Before that they had a drum machine which you could just set a rhythm and play along with it. Then Roland developed drum machines that you could program. Kind of complicated, but you could program into it the rhythm for the verse and then say it bar twenty five switched to this other rhythm, and you could program that other rhythm. It was kind of fiddlely, but you could do it. And then they invented the fairlight computer, where you had a visual display and you could enter the notes on a keyboard and tell it to play back exactly what I tell you in a much more comprehensive way. And that created me as a composer. It enabled me to really think of music in a broader way and have total control. And that's where my orchestral journey began.

00:55:54
Speaker 3: Well, there's a technological change going on right now, and I'd love to know what you think about it, which is artificial intelligence. That is a tool that a lot of musicians, perhaps a lot of music labels are going to be using. What's your view of that.

00:56:11
Speaker 1: I've had my career and therefore I can wish well all of those non musicians who can now make music using AI. And I say that as a drummer, which is the first instrument to get brushed aside by technology. You know how many guys does it take to screw in a light bulb? None get your drum box to do it. And it's weird that my instrument should be supplanted. Thus, because rhythm the most elemental instinctive, mammalian part of music that gets your puredenda thrusting in public. You would think that would be visceral and that a machine would be the furthest thing to be able to recreate that visceral rhythm thrusting. But no, on the disco floor, it's a machine that gets humans dancing. And another thing to think about is an artist like Moby, who's very creative and musical, but to my knowledge, he doesn't play a musical instrument. He is musical elements and creates beautiful music as a result. And Kanye and Kendrick and all these other modern musicians who don't need some band guitar, bass and drums. They create music with found sounds and so on. With musicality. They're not limited by what their fingers can do. And so the technology has set Moby and Kendrick then the rest of them, you know, set them free to create stuff with their imagination. But they don't necessarily need to have that finger twiddling piece. It's just music from whatever source. And of course people musicians of my generation despise it and are threatened by the fact that you can make music without an actual living musicians. I say who cares. It works. It moves people, you know, in the case of the drum box, gets them dancing on the dance floor. That's what we're here for.

00:57:59
Speaker 3: And yet you know, what those artists are doing is a kind of form of collage, putting together different elements.

00:58:06
Speaker 1: Okay, well, I can see what your next question is. What about when a machine does the collaging, When a machine assembles these things, a machine called AI and I have the same feeling about it now. I was at the Mediam Festival in can a couple of weeks ago where I was on two different panels, one of artists talking about it and the other with lawyers talking about it. And on the second panel it was the lady who runs SASSEM, the BMI of Europe and all these people who are the legal aspects of copyright and who's protected. If you merge Mick Jagger with David Bowie and you've got this sounds like both of them, But isn't either of them who owns that? You know? And so you know the legal issues and they're not my problem. And the artists were more sanguine about it because they can use it, because it gives them more tools than it takes away. And there's another aspect, which is the sense that music is evolved in Homo sapiens for the benefit of all of us. We are all You and I are both and everyone are incredibly musical. All of us are not Eric Clapton, but our species is a very musical species. We are all gifted musically. We can all sing a tune, well, most of us. We can all coordinate our body motions to fit into a rhythm. We are more musical than we think. And so a tool such as AI gives the gift of music to every man, woman, and child on the planet. That's a really good thing for non professionals. It goes back to campfire music, where before the age where of specialization, where I get to spend all my time banging stuff and getting really really good at it, and you get to just pay me money to listen to me bang and shit. AI gives you the tool to make your own music and create your own community, and you get to do it, And so for humanity, it's a blessing. For individual musicians trying to make a living at it, the same thing happened, you know, back in the days of Moby with samples and so now any damn fool can make music, which means every damn fool is making music, which means the competition is real fierce, And so I feel some sympathy for my young musicians try to create a career, and this creates an obstacle for them, but for humanity at large, it's a blessing.

01:00:29
Speaker 3: Well, I'm gonna keep listening to you banging shit, I think in the meantime.

01:00:33
Speaker 1: Cool.

01:00:33
Speaker 3: All right, Thank you so much, and I love the book.

01:00:36
Speaker 1: Cool. Glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for listening.

01:00:41
Speaker 2: Thanks to Stewart Copeland for talking about the police's formative years and his new book, Police Diaries. You can hear all of our favorite police songs on a playlist at broken Record podcast dot com. Subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Tollin. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.