Waiting for the tour in Italy, Stewart Copeland tells Panorama the Police years, the quarrels with Sting and the musical differences in the band.
«The first Apparition on Sting to BBC video was not with the Police as everyone believes, but as a bass player in one of my songs. Before the Police, I was a solo artist and singer, he jumped with a gorilla mask on his face and played the bass, on his right there was Andy Summers (the other Police, ed) to the guitar, disguised by Leonid Brežnev “, reveals on the phone by the California Stewart Copeland, between a cough and the other caused by a malpathy sip. Mister Copeland, from Alexandria, in Virginia, is the artist who has reinvented the battery by transforming it from an accompanying tool to magical box of sounds and polrititmias.
It will soon be in Italy: On 23 July in Villafranca di Verona, 25 at the International Jazz Festival of Spezia, on 27 in Rome and 29 in Foggia. «The show is called Police deranged for Orchestra and is a symphonic reinterpretation of the pieces of my former group. I reimized the songs that everyone knows by adding details taken from the Police’s ribbons archive. I found guitar parts, arrangements and improvisations never used before or discarded and inserted them on the show. In La Spezia and in the other Italian dates you will see how, thanks to the collaboration with 27 other musicians, I can upset songs that you have known for a lifetime, “he explains. «We closed with the Police in 1984, when we were the most famous band in the world, because each of us was pulling others crazy. We did the musicians for different reasons, we had very different musical tastes, we wrote music starting from opposite points of view. In essence, we were a group based on the conflict: a game of contrasts that was fundamental to achieve success, but that from a personal point of view, at a certain point, became unsustainable and very painful “confesses.
«We made a triumphal reunion tour in 2007, excited by what our music was able to arouse after 30 years. It was a sort of therapy in which we clarified on many things. We said in the face that when you are young, everyone believes that there is only one musical truth, their own. This was the reason for most quarrels. Having said that, during the Turin show there was a curtain of ours: in the middle of a song I started accelerating the rhythm, and Sting, who does not stand these changes of time in the least, started screaming me and I towards him. Stronger and stronger. A scene from gladiators in the arena, live, in front of 70 thousand people. The final result was one of our best concerts ever, “he says among the laughter. «A few months before the end of the band, in 1983, I found myself in a recording studio with Francis Ford Coppola to write the soundtrack of Rusty Il Selvaggio: it was like being reborn. In those weeks I rediscovered the taste of making music without continuous mediations, without quarrels and dark faces, and I made how much the Police, despite everything they had given me in terms of wealth and fame, had become a prison », underlines, also focusing on the bizarre sense of their presence in the Punk scene of London of the late seventies:” We were a false punk band, we were not angry with the world It is started writing songs appeared clearly to everyone what we had nothing to do with that context. But we wanted to be there, because that was the most exciting musical and cultural movement of the moment, the one on which all the media headlights were turned on. In the punk world, interesting things happened and we, a little cynically, simply wanted to point out, try to shake the tree, “he explains. For a lifetime Stewart Copeland has been experimenting, using the notes and rhythms of every part of the world.
Even the non -human ones, as happens in the Wild concert the strangest and most fascinating album I have ever affected. «It is the sound of an orchestra that interacts with the sound of animal voices. The singing of a bird or the howl of a wolf have no intonation, they do not move along a melodic staircase, yet, if combined respectively with a flute and a trombone, they manage to produce something very pleasant for our ears is an incredible miracle of nature “.
