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Sean Egan
the police, live in 1983. © 1983 robert alford
For a band who broke America supposedly as part of the late-70s new wave, The Police had quite a musical pedigree. Individual band members Sting, Andy Summers, and Stewart Copeland were not three-chord trick merchants but had practiced their chops in jazz ensembles, Soft Machine, and Curved Air, respectively.
It is almost forgotten now, but at the time, The Police were widely depicted by the music press in their homeland as frauds: Like The Stranglers, they were supposed to be boring old farts hoping to con the musically naive into thinking they were the genuine punk article. Eventually, The Police's talent for creating a galvanizing mixture of musical innovation and solidly traditional pop structures would win over even the severest critics. As nice as that undoubtedly was for The Police, somewhat more important was the fact that eventually they would be the biggest band on the planet.
Born in 1952 in Virginia and brought up in Cairo and Beirut, drummer Copeland had been both a rock tour manager and rock drummer when he first clapped eyes on Gordon Sumner, his future Police colleague. Sumner, born in 1951 in Newcastle, England, was already widely known as Sting due to his penchant for wearing a black-and-yellow-striped jersey that made him resemble a bee. Sting had film-star blond good looks, played fine bass and sang in a falsetto voice halfway between objectionable and hypnotizing.
"I remember seeing Sting and thinking, 'That guy's a motherfucker,' when I saw him up in Newcastle and he was playing with some band," Copeland revealed in a recent Goldmine interview. "I thought, 'Jesus, that guy's really got it all."'
Before long, Copeland had the notion to team up with Sumner, who was then playing in the jazz group Last Exit: "Curved Air was on its last legs [on] its umpteenth tour of Sheffield, Huddersfield, York...," Copeland said. "You could feel the air going out of the balloon."
Copeland hooked up with Sting when the latter brought Last Exit down to London and then saw them promptly split up. Guitarist Henri Padovani became the original third member of The...