Arresting development

In the great tradition of the rock reunion, one errant member, usually the frontman, holds out until the lure of past glory becomes too strong or the wad of cash dangled in front of them becomes too voluminous, or in Sting’s case “because it’s very healing”.

Just as Baker and Bruce had to wait for Clapton, Copeland and Summers had to do their time before the call came from Mr. Sumner. “We are The Police and we are back,” are the words many thought he would never utter, and the man himself has expressed surprise at his decision, but utter he did as the reformed trio blasted into ‘Roxanne’ at the opening ceremony of the Grammys.
Twenty years since the Amnesty 1986 tour brought The Police’s career to a halt, the band are once again making headlines and preparing for a slew of sell-out stadium shows.
Speaking recently in the Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles Sting commented, “If you’d asked me the day before I made this decision, I would have said, ‘You’re out of your mind. My head is somewhere else.’”
Confirming that the famous ego is still intact, he continued, “I woke up one morning about three months ago and this light bulb went off in my head: I’m going to call Andy and Stewart and tell them we should tour.”
Luckily his fellow band members have retained their ability to deal with their immodest vocalist. “We refer to Sting as our dear leader,” Copeland jibed, to which Summers added with comedic precision, “On a good day.” So far only Canadian and American dates have been announced but European dates are expected in late autumn.
Rumours of a reunion have been brewing for months now. In conversation with hotpress recently Andy Summers was in nostalgic mood and spoke fondly of his former bandmates, perhaps knowing more than he revealed.
His comments on the break-up of The Police are certainly telling. “The idea of closure is like something finishes, why finish it? In a sense it’s never going to end because we made those songs. You make a song and hopefully it lasts for years. Think about songs that were written in the ‘30s and ‘40s, people are still singing them today. Maybe we achieved that and these songs are going to be known forever. So I don’t think it is unfinished business, I don’t particularly want to have closure and finish up – why? As long as the relationship continues between the three of us, which inevitably it has to when the songs are out there, I think it just continues.”
At the time of their break up they had released five chart-topping albums, numerous hit singles and were selling out stadiums worldwide. If fate had played a different hand and the bleached combo had ventured further down the road of superstardom might they have been the next U2? “It’s interesting, isn’t it?” he muses. “I’ve always thought in my own mind that we got off the centre stage and handed the crown over to them and they took it and they went with it and they’re still here.”
Indeed the blossoming Irish supergroup played support to the band on two occasions, at Leixlip Castle in 1980 and at Gateshead in 1982.
“The Gateshead concert is where I really stood and watched them. We had heard about them and I hadn’t seen them at Leixlip, it just hadn’t worked out that way, but at Gateshead we were all close to the stage and we were able to see the whole concert. We were very struck by them. They came on and opened with ‘Gloria’ and I remember Bono’s voice and going ‘Oh my God, these guys are fantastic’ and of course they proved it.”
Summers remains good friends with The Edge who has written an elegant foreword for his recent biography One Train Later. “I saw The Edge not so long ago. I see him quite often because he spends a lot of time in Los Angeles with his wife Morleigh who I’ve known for many years.”
In Leixlip The Police did get to hang out with those other Irish heavyweights The Chieftains and shared a few swift halves with Paddy Moloney. “I actually met up with him a few years after that, in Cuba of all places. I reminded him that we spent a drunken night together in Leixlip Castle,” he laughs.
Ireland plays an important role in the history of The Police, for Summers and Sting in particular who spent years living here in tax exile. Sting located north-west and Summers headed south. Given the famously fractious nature of intraband relations one might suspect this was strategic but he simply states, “A friend said you should go down to Kinsale south of Cork and you’ll really love it, it’s beautiful. We were lucky we went down and found this beautiful old Georgian house overlooking the harbour and we stayed there for three and a half years or so.”
The years in Ireland were difficult for Summers who struggled balancing his personal life with the demands of constant touring.
During the hey day of punk the band shared bills with many fine purveyors of the genre. One would expect there are numerous debauched tales from the road but he explains, “We were so engrossed in our own thing and in such a whirlwind of our own touring that it was difficult to pay a huge amount of attention to all these other bands. Of course we were aware of the punk scene and The Clash were a very strong band.”
He pauses, “Oddly enough Paul Weller has just really come to my attention in the last two days. I watched a programme about him the other night and I was actually very impressed. He’s very talented.”
Of course, the trio were also not your average “punk” band. Writing about the Mont-de-marsan punk festival in 1975 when the band played with The Clash, The Damned and The Jam, Summers notes, “On the way back to Paris in the bus the ‘punk’ bands are generally trying to outdo one another by lighting farts and spitting in one another’s mouths while Stewart and I trade sardonic remarks aimed in their direction. Sting reads a book, and Stewart is mortified by this defiant act; no one is supposed to read in the punk world.”
Then fame came knocking, in the form of a fictitious French prostitute ‘Roxanne’ and the rest as they say is history, or not as the case may be.
When I ask about the current relationship between the three Summers says, “Sting and I went out and had dinner two nights ago actually, so we caught up. I’ve seen him a few times this year and Stuart lives close to me in Los Angeles, in fact we had a jam about three weeks ago. Everything is really matey between us and there’s been quite a lot of dialogue between all three of us this year. Things are good in that respect.”
Now we know just how good.