The Police’s Andy Summers on NZ shows and how the band began

Andy Summers will perform in Auckland on October 3 following shows in Wellington and Christchurch. Photo / Dennis Mukai

Andy Summers of The Police fame is bringing An Evening with Andy Summers to the Auckland Town Hall on October 3, following shows in Wellington and Christchurch. Ahead of his visit to New Zealand, he spoke to Gold Afternoons presenter Tracey Donaldson in August, recalling the band’s first-ever gig in Paris and revealing what Kiwis can expect from his Auckland show.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Donaldson: You’re coming to New Zealand for three shows on The Cracked Lens + a Missing String tour - I assume the “missing string” is reference to your first guitar that your uncle gave you [when] you were 12, and it was missing a string.

Summers: Yes, you’re absolutely right. I started with one string missing. I tried once to find that little guitar. I think a cousin of mine had it, and she was very snotty about it. Said, “Oh, I don’t know. Somebody else took it”, and so I never got it back. I did actually pursue the first guitar I ever had, but now I have about 200 sitting around.

D: Honestly, the stories from your pre-Police days, from that 60s-era London, before you’d gone to LA, the people you were kicking around with - Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Chaz Chandler, the stories are hilarious. I hope we hear some of those on the night.

S: Yeah, I’m happy to talk about anything like that, and I do tell some stories on stage as part of the whole performance. It’s a multimedia show, so we’ve got big screens, and I’ve got various sequences of photography, I match guitar to whichever sequence is running, I play some solo guitar, I do a Brazilian section and of course I play Police songs which takes it over the top at the end. And it’s gone very well. People really love it.

D: Of course they’re loving it, you’re such a good storyteller. I was laughing out loud at the story you tell - Eric Clapton trying to get your Les Paul [guitar] off you after his got stolen, and when you dropped it off to him at the studio. Unknown to Clapton, his private conversation was being broadcast over the studio speakers, and you could hear everything he was saying about you.

S: You’re dead right - we were knocking around together in those days, it was the early days, sort of the beginning of everything when people started writing their own songs. The Les Paul emerged, then we started being able to buy Fender Stratocasters in England, which you could never get before. So I feel very lucky that I was starting at that point, it’s amazing looking back on it. Now, we’re sort of at the other end of it.

D: You lived this incredibly interesting life before you found fame with The Police. Interestingly you met Sting and Stuart [Copeland] completely independently of each other. You had no idea they even knew each other. Months later comes a chance to play with “a couple of guys”, you don’t know who they are but you turn up at the flat, and it’s these two guys that you’d met, separately, previously. That’s serendipity, isn’t it?

S: Complete serendipity. I’d briefly played with an orchestra in Newcastle, where Sting was living, and his band was the support group, and I was the star. After I walked off, they played. I didn’t take a lot of notice. A few weeks after that, I was playing with a guy called Kevin Ayers. We ended up in a hotel in Newcastle, all lying around on the floor in someone’s room smoking what was then illegal substances, but are not anymore. And there was another guy there who had a lot to say. His name was Stuart Copeland.

Andy Summers spoke with Gold Afternoons' Tracey Donaldson. Photo / Mo Summers

So then two months passed, I’m in London and this guy wants to do this gig in Paris, and he wanted to put a band together to do this one show. So he invites me up to his flat in London. So it’s me, my guitar, my little amp, and it was these two guys. So, we start playing away, and the bass player says, “I sort of played with you back in Newcastle, my name’s Sting”, and I say “Oh yeah. I remember you” ... and the other guy was the guy I’d met lying on the floor of the hotel smoking. So the three of us were connected like that. And then we played together for three weeks. And it was like, actually, we’re a band now.

D: So you do this one-off gig in Paris, and nobody in the crowd that night knew they were witnessing The Police’s first show.

S: No, they didn’t, we were completely unknown. So we rehearsed a lot, and as we rehearsed, we really got into The Police style. You know, we started to find it. We felt encouraged. But it wasn’t overnight, we still went absolutely nowhere. It really started for us in the US, because we went nowhere in London, and so we went and did a little three-week tour of America’s East Coast. We started at CBGB, which was the famous punk underground club in New York City. There weren’t many people there, but they loved it. And we did two sets. We left at about four o’clock in the morning, and we did a little three-week tour, and we knew we were on the way. That was a lot of fun.

D: And then you guys got so massive, so quickly. And you all handled the instant fame differently, and it caused issues in the band. But like you say, all good art comes from tension and friction, doesn’t it?

S: Well, it does. That produces “that thing” in the music. It’s got this tight spine that makes it exciting.

D: And what is your relationship with the guys these days?

S: Well we are, of course, bound together forever. You know, there’s no way any of us are getting out of the boat. I mean right now is an interesting moment, because Synchronicity is being rereleased 40 years later, and I think it’s going to be number one. There’s so much interest, so it’s sort of amazing. Stuart lives close to me. Sting, he’s got a house here in LA and he’s got houses everywhere ... mostly we communicate through stuff like this, rereleases et cetera.

D: It’s funny you say it’s history because we still play The Police on the radio all day, every day. Any radio station, rock, pop ... your music has literally never gone away.

S: No, that’s very pleasing. That doesn’t happen to most people, but we are always around. Well, I’ll be bringing a little bit of that spirit to New Zealand. I hope so.

Andy Summers will perform An Evening with Andy Summers at Auckland Town Hall on Thursday, October 3.