After a 24-year gap, the Police return to Western Springs this month on their cash-raking, headline-making global reunion tour. Russelll Baillie takes drummer Stewart Copeland in for further questioning
KEY POINTS:
Not for the first time in the past few minutes, Stewart Copeland is on a roll.
Down the line from his Los Angeles home, the gregarious drummer with the Police is breathlessly explaining how the reunited trio of him, Sting and guitarist Andy Summers is playing so much
better six months into their world tour.
After all, he famously slagged the band's opening night performance, describing bandmate Sting as a "petulant pansy". Anyway, here's Copeland's current assessment:
"What makes the machine work are the two ends of the magnet - the positive and the negative end and they have to be in opposition and they have to be in a state of instability for the electricity to run, for the engine to actually turn over and make forward momentum. So keeping it within bounds where nobody gets throttled, mutilated, bludgeoned or otherwise harmed, the engine is still creating the energy that it needs to create. It's a very fine-tuned machine at this point ... "
All of which has a slightly familiar ring. One has to interrupt and ask - with a nod to Spinal Tap's Derek Smalls* - who in the Police is the lukewarm battery water between those two terminals?
"Very good. Touche monsieur! It's too easy isn't it - our manager. Just kidding. Actually that is a perfect way to describe Mr Summers.
"He has the most complicated job of all in the band. He has so much work to do. The entire harmonic range is his world, as well as all those sound textures that take multiple patches, twiddles, all the gadgets that make him go from a hard chugging sound straight into the wobbling chords of Walking on the Moon.
"He's got a really complicated day at work. He hasn't got time for the psychobabble of the other two, he has other fish to fry."
Well, the guitarist is the only one of the trio who hasn't made headlines since the reunion jaunt - the biggest grossing tour of the past year - started in May.
There was Sting with what Copeland chucklingly refers to as "the Hamburg incident" - the singer was photographed leaving an upmarket brothel in the wee small hours after a show, forcing a defence of his marriage and sex life.
Meanwhile the drummer's talent for comedy came back and bit him in South America. In an interview with a Chilean newspaper, Copeland compared the attractiveness levels of Chilean president Michelle Bachelet and her Argentinian counterpart Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner: "Look, the future President of Argentina would be good for one beer, yours [would be good] for four."
When his comments were picked up, Copeland sent a letter of apology to Bachelet and invited her to a show.
He's laughing about it now and his blog review of that opening show.
"You get these things that arise out of nowhere. If you step out of your hotel room you are going to step on one somewhere and, for the most part, the game we play with the media is we have a nice symbiotic relationship where they make us famous and we sell lots of tickets or records or whatever the hell we are selling. And if we goof up, you guys get to come in for the kill and string us out on it and fair's fair.
"My only regret about my review in that blog - which if you read it you will see it's absolutely a cheerful piece, that it's a statement of adoration for my two brothers in the band that we end up laughing and so on - was I spoke harshly about one of the people in whom I hold in the highest esteem. I can take the mud that gets thrown at me, the drummer in a rock band, when I make sexist comments about heads of state.
"But when the mud actually gets on my buddy that's harder to shrug off. I am sitting here wrapping up the year regretting that one. There are plenty of other reasons to be cheerful."
Well for one thing, there's all that money he's made from his cut of the tour which so far has grossed US$212 million ($275 million) and sold more than 1.8 million tickets and still has another six months to run.
"Well it's been a very good Christmas for everyone around me. I just watched someone on Survivor last week win the $1 million - okay, I've got a bit of that going on in my life right now. After 20 years as a suburban dad film composer, suddenly the ship comes in and so the best part of it has been to spread the cargo among my family and crew and see all the people around me see their lives improved suddenly and dramatically."
It was Copeland who started the band in the late 70s, after the split of his progressive rock outfit Curved Air. The drummer wanted to do something aligned to the burgeoning British punk scene. He convinced schoolteacher Gordon Sumner (who became known as Sting) to leave Newcastle and his jazz-rock outfit to come to London to form a band.
Eventually, they recruited Summers, broke out the peroxide, found a sound where punk, reggae and pop got on famously - especially care of Copeland's distinctive, reggae-infected drumming style - and started having hit after hit from albums which got more complicated and higher-minded with each release.
Sting started acting, the members were increasingly at loggerheads in the studio and in 1984 - after the band had played to 60,000 at Western Springs in February of that year - the Police effectively called it a day as Sting headed off to a successful solo career.
Copeland decided to move into film music, raised a family, and played with super-musicians like Stanley Clarke and Primus' Les Claypool when he wasn't out playing polo.
Then in recent years, the Police started to make a comeback in Copeland's life.
Firstly, he assembled a film from the Super 8 footage of the band on tour in their glory days. Originally intended as a home movie for the band and their extended family, Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out took on a life of its own and screened at the Sundance Film Festival before being released on DVD.
"I found the actual shoeboxes with the celluloid film and an obsession took hold. It had nothing to do with nostalgia - it was to do with the unique perspective of a camera right inside a band. It really seemed to have kind of a zing to it and it was a really fun little mission. It was a hobby. I was going to send it to Sting and Andy and the rest of the Police family but then somebody talked me into sending it to Sundance.
"It ate up a year of my life just doing the movie, doing the festivals, marketing the thing, turning it into a DVD, then just when that whole cycle is dying down I'm calling up my agent saying 'Does anybody remember me out there? The film composer guy?' and I was about to get stuck into that when Sting called ..."
So with that er, synchronicity, the Police resumed duty.
Copeland says at the halfway mark of the reunion, he's really started to enjoy being back on the beat - even more than he did 20-plus years ago.
"When you are all wound up the first time round you don't get it. There is so much you don't get until you have had 20 years to reflect on it. When it all comes around again - although those same pressures, those same personalities, same foibles, those same triggers all still exist - you've got better perspective on how to use it and what it's all worth and so it all adds up to a very different result.
"Friends of mine say 'I came for sex and drugs and rock'n'roll and all I can see is rock'n'roll'. I'm enjoying this a lot more than I did first time round."
And that's not just because of the money or the nightly adulation.
There's something spiritual at work in these shows as fans reconnect to the Police's music, he says.
"It is this huge thing - it's not just Sting, Andy and I any more, it's a monster. For good or ill [the audience] they come to the show with a lot of emotional baggage and [that's] what makes the show an unbelievable experience for the three guys on stage. It turns the tables completely on all of our previous musical endeavours - this is unique for all three of us in that it's not a forging ahead, the creation of a new world, which is what you do your whole career as a musician.
"It's a ceremony, a litany. We perform the ceremony but it doesn't belong to us ... it's pretty overwhelming."
* In the classic 1984 rockumentary, bassist Smalls says: "We're very lucky in the band in that we have two visionaries, David and Nigel, they're like poets, like Shelley and Byron. They're two distinct types of visionaries, it's like fire and ice, basically. I feel my role in the band is to be somewhere in the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water."
LOWDOWN
Who: Stewart Copeland, drummer of the Police - also consisting of singer-bassist Sting and guitarist Andy Summers - soundtrack composer and documentarian.
Born: July 16, 1952 Virginia, US - the youngest of four children of CIA officer Miles Copeland and Lorraine Adie who worked for British Intelligence. Grew up in Lebanon, England and California. Both of Copeland's brothers Miles Jr - who founded American indie label IRS records - and the late Ian were involved in the Police's management.
Albums: With the Police - Outlandos d'Amour (1978), Regatta de Blanc (1979), Zenyatta Mondatta (1980), Ghost in the Machine (1981), Synchronicity (1983). The Rhythmatist (solo album, 1985), Animal Logic (1989, with jazz bassist Stanley Clarke and singer songwriter Deborah Holland).
Soundtracks: Rumble Fish (1983), The Equalizer (TV, 1986), Wall Street (1987), Talk Radio (1988), Riff-Raff (1990), Raining Stones (1993), Rapa Nui (1994), Spyro the Dragon (videogame, 1998), Dead Like Me (TV, 2003), Desperate Housewives (2004).
Playing: With the Police, Westpac Stadium, Wellington, January 17; Western Springs, Saturday January 19.