Rock intro THE POLICE - It is never too late to become punk rebel, neither when you're close to 30es. / in ENGLISH
Rock intro to the topic
THE POLICE - It is
never too late to become punk rebel, neither when you're close to
30es.
It
is quite natural that after Green Day in my monthly blog I present
The Police, another most beloved band of the members of punk rock
group from my contemporary comedy novel Euinc. Just to mention for
easier understanding, the characters from the book are adult people
in their middle 30es, so their music taste got matured with the time
too, but they still dream about success in popular music, in this
field which changes so quickly, maybe quicker than any other industry
in the world.
The story of The band Police begins in 1976 with the encounter of two poorly-known bands who have failed to reach this first stage of success, leaving anonymity and becoming "somebody important".
It is interesting that Copeland's older brothers started not very successful record company and Stewart has been performing more managerial and administrative affairs for other bands, than he personally played with them.
Gordon Matthew Sumner, later known as Sting was born 1951, near Newcastle in a middle class family, as a kid he fell in love with the old guitar given from his uncle and several times abandoned school and changed his mind about what he wanted to do in life. Eventually he decided that he wanted to be, you guessed - a school teacher teaching music education! Of course he also played in the school band there, and there was a big sweater that he wore for concerts, a black and yellow striped sweater, being dressed like this he looked on the stage like wasp or bee, and thus getting his famous nickname. For years he has been a local rocker in Newcastle, and perhaps he may have remained a local attraction for whom we, foreigners would have never hear of – unless there was his woman there. His first wife, Frances Tomelty, was a rising actress, much faster rising than he himself, which, of course, meant necessary migration to the metropolitan city London, and then unsuccessful trying to break into the big national scene with his band Last Exit and the other one, The Police, started together with Copeland and guitarist Henry Padovani. Sting's friend, critic and biographer Phil Sutcliffe describes that Padovani with brilliantly picturesque characteristics that say more than words: Corsican with beard, long hair and 3 chords. It is also interesting to mention that Frances Tomelty, just like Sting's today's wife Trudie Styler, still today can be seen occasionally in some British TV series.
However, unlike the certain achievements of his wives actresses, Sting's musical career then developed much worse. Despite the managerial and DIY skills in pirate recording and publishing of their first singles, designing of the covers and putting up posters across London, as well as the personal sales of the singles to record shops all over the city, the ambitious Sting and Copeland were then reduced to occasional backing performances to some second-class punk rock groups who then meant something, but today it's difficult to find any info about them on google. In fact nobody in the audience was particularly interested in their technically excellent played music. Despite the fierce debut single Fall Out, they were not enough wild and furious, not enough punks, too much musical and perhaps too old. They were already close to the age of 30. Both today both admit to Sutcliffe, then it was supposed to have an attitude and be rebellious. At the time nobody was paying attention on music playing, it was just an unnecessary surplus. So something should happen to spread the news about The Police, and of course it was the arrival of Andy Summers. The first strange thing about the future guitarist of The Police is that he is even 10 years older(!), not younger than the first two. So, if someone is worth a word "NEVER TOO LATE" it's worth more for Summers than for the first two members of the famous band. Summers of course, still before them had a long career in various bands, career full of ups and downs in Europe and America, but none of these bands had achieved international success and ultimately he had to be content with some solid earnings from playing for other well-known performers as rented studio and concert musician. Yet he wanted something more. This happened when he found Sting, the bass player whom his then band's leader, Mike Howlett wanted to engage, (for the band Strontium 90 if this name means something to you) and then what happened is a usual happy end in romantic movies. (Do not think that I allude here to anything else but music playing.)
Andy Summers listened to the sound of their band The Police, and then accidentally, or maybe intentionally, met outside in the street that drummer Stewart Copeland after the play and told him that they had to discuss something important at the nearby cafe. It was that famous acknowledgment: "Guys, you have a great group, the songs are great and you're all good except one detail. Get rid of that bearded guitarist and take another one – me!" Summers later defended himself in the same biography that he never said something so brutal but let's be honest, it is clear that sooner or later, all three of them: Sting, Summers and Copeland concluded the same. In the end, those who play really better than the others united their forces, those players who serve each other as a motivation for progression, and all others in the group who can't reach that quality drop out sooner or later. There is no reason to doubt that this is the truth that is repeated in every story of success. However, the three of them still had a long way to go, to the ultimate success for that we know them today. There were some concerts in France and other European countries, some which were travels in vain because their concert was canceled in the last moment, and on one of those in Paris, Sting first time visited the red lights district, saw prostitutes doing their job and there was some poster of theatrical performance "Cyrano de Bergerac", in which one name especially caught his eye, and became eternalized in his song - Roxanne.
How low they earned at the time admits Stewart Copeland too. He had to ask his brothers again for financial and managerial help to record the debut album "Outlandos D'Amour" in 1978. There is another proof, no matter how unpopular it sounds, that for this band one may rightly say that there wouldn't be The Police today if it wasn't that infamous CIA somewhere around. Then, things started to roll slowly, despite the fact that the single Roxanne, praised by critics, was hardly airplayed on the radio, because of the provocative theme of the song, all these, mostly Sting's songs that are classics today have started to build the cult status for the group that they still have today. The Police is not only a typical example of a band whose tracks generally did not achieve commercial success with the first release, and after a while they became big hits, while The Police became the favorites of all sorts of critics and rock magazines, but the general musical tastes also a little bit changed in their favour. At the turn of the 70s into 80s of the last century, music trends were turning more and more from punk towards new wave, which suited this band very well.
Then came those big commercial hits like “Every Breath You Take” and in this new wave period after punk, when romantic and sweetish music became preferable again, their high jazzy pop quality of playing got full recognition. That same music that was underestimated before or rated as something snobbish, now is logically on the top by pure change of trend and general taste of the audience. As we know, unlike some other bands that live too long, The Police didn't live very long life in its glory. 3 strong music personalities who helped each other to reach the top of the World which they wished so much, after that, in the middle of 80es went their own ways in the solo careers.
So, regardless the fact that all of them, especially Sting as dominant composer among them, later became soft and sweetish new wave musicians what the audience liked from them the most, the band Police is really worth that truth that SOME THINGS YOU CAN ACHIEVE ONLY WHEN YOU ARE YOUNG, BUT MOST OF THE THINGS YOU CAN ACHIEVE ANY TIME IN YOUR LIFE.
And for them that time came when they were nearly 30 years old (except "daddy" Summers) and having very little success at the time of that original punk explosion. It is strange that only much later that part of the Police's opus was recognized and praised. Then when the first heroes of punk era, Sex Pistols, Clash, Exploited and many others were gradually disappearing from the stage.
Cynics would say probably because of too high quality of the music playing. Then, at one small concert
for students in Newcastle, the prog-rock band Curved Air met the jazz-rock band Last Exit. In
translation, drummer Stewart Copeland first time introduced Gordon Sumner, who later became Sting,
and who was then, as in all his career, an unusual combination of frontman and bass player, instead
of the lead guitarist.
The story of that Stewart Copeland who has already decided to leave his band which has not been
advancing for years and already had a ready name for his new band, (which he will definitely call
The Police) is a quite different from what you probably expect. Most of his childhood this born American
has spent in the Middle East for a very special reason that his father is no less than a former US
intelligence officer, moreover one of the founders of the CIA itself(!), who also became, after leaving
active service, a political advisor of several pro-American Arab politicians in Egypt and Lebanon.
It is therefore possible to perceive certain autoirony in that unpopular name that young Stewart
Copeland wanted to call his future band. After reading about it in Sutcliffe's biography of The Police,
I noticed an interesting parallelism / analogy in the biographies of the famous rockers which I should
describe here. I was surprised how many, among the British and American musicians who became
celebrated in rock music, were in fact children of British and American spies and intelligence officers(!)
Recollecting from my memory, even without further research, I could list Copeland, Joe Strummer
from Clash (born in Ankara, because his father was a diplomat) and Marianne Faithful (who mentions
her father as an important spy in the Second World War).
It is interesting to compare it with a number of rock stars from the former Yugoslavia, only to mention Branimir Johnny Štulić, Milan Mladenović and Momčilo Bajagić whose fathers were not spies, but were therefore officers of the JNA. Today, this army of the former state is hated and often ridiculed as a symbol of the former failed system and the state, and at that time of the regime of the communist dictatorship in Yugoslavia, when other people with political ambitions were controlled by police and supervised by secret services, for rebellious children playing western rock and constantly provoking the system with something anti-communistic, in fact, it was quite good to be protected by the powerful father in the Yugoslav army. I suppose that the children of spies in Anglo-Saxon countries, regardless of political democracy and the different structure of society, though, in some way, still they have similar privileges in growing up.
It is interesting that Copeland's older brothers started not very successful record company and Stewart has been performing more managerial and administrative affairs for other bands, than he personally played with them.
Gordon Matthew Sumner, later known as Sting was born 1951, near Newcastle in a middle class family, as a kid he fell in love with the old guitar given from his uncle and several times abandoned school and changed his mind about what he wanted to do in life. Eventually he decided that he wanted to be, you guessed - a school teacher teaching music education! Of course he also played in the school band there, and there was a big sweater that he wore for concerts, a black and yellow striped sweater, being dressed like this he looked on the stage like wasp or bee, and thus getting his famous nickname. For years he has been a local rocker in Newcastle, and perhaps he may have remained a local attraction for whom we, foreigners would have never hear of – unless there was his woman there. His first wife, Frances Tomelty, was a rising actress, much faster rising than he himself, which, of course, meant necessary migration to the metropolitan city London, and then unsuccessful trying to break into the big national scene with his band Last Exit and the other one, The Police, started together with Copeland and guitarist Henry Padovani. Sting's friend, critic and biographer Phil Sutcliffe describes that Padovani with brilliantly picturesque characteristics that say more than words: Corsican with beard, long hair and 3 chords. It is also interesting to mention that Frances Tomelty, just like Sting's today's wife Trudie Styler, still today can be seen occasionally in some British TV series.
However, unlike the certain achievements of his wives actresses, Sting's musical career then developed much worse. Despite the managerial and DIY skills in pirate recording and publishing of their first singles, designing of the covers and putting up posters across London, as well as the personal sales of the singles to record shops all over the city, the ambitious Sting and Copeland were then reduced to occasional backing performances to some second-class punk rock groups who then meant something, but today it's difficult to find any info about them on google. In fact nobody in the audience was particularly interested in their technically excellent played music. Despite the fierce debut single Fall Out, they were not enough wild and furious, not enough punks, too much musical and perhaps too old. They were already close to the age of 30. Both today both admit to Sutcliffe, then it was supposed to have an attitude and be rebellious. At the time nobody was paying attention on music playing, it was just an unnecessary surplus. So something should happen to spread the news about The Police, and of course it was the arrival of Andy Summers. The first strange thing about the future guitarist of The Police is that he is even 10 years older(!), not younger than the first two. So, if someone is worth a word "NEVER TOO LATE" it's worth more for Summers than for the first two members of the famous band. Summers of course, still before them had a long career in various bands, career full of ups and downs in Europe and America, but none of these bands had achieved international success and ultimately he had to be content with some solid earnings from playing for other well-known performers as rented studio and concert musician. Yet he wanted something more. This happened when he found Sting, the bass player whom his then band's leader, Mike Howlett wanted to engage, (for the band Strontium 90 if this name means something to you) and then what happened is a usual happy end in romantic movies. (Do not think that I allude here to anything else but music playing.)
Andy Summers listened to the sound of their band The Police, and then accidentally, or maybe intentionally, met outside in the street that drummer Stewart Copeland after the play and told him that they had to discuss something important at the nearby cafe. It was that famous acknowledgment: "Guys, you have a great group, the songs are great and you're all good except one detail. Get rid of that bearded guitarist and take another one – me!" Summers later defended himself in the same biography that he never said something so brutal but let's be honest, it is clear that sooner or later, all three of them: Sting, Summers and Copeland concluded the same. In the end, those who play really better than the others united their forces, those players who serve each other as a motivation for progression, and all others in the group who can't reach that quality drop out sooner or later. There is no reason to doubt that this is the truth that is repeated in every story of success. However, the three of them still had a long way to go, to the ultimate success for that we know them today. There were some concerts in France and other European countries, some which were travels in vain because their concert was canceled in the last moment, and on one of those in Paris, Sting first time visited the red lights district, saw prostitutes doing their job and there was some poster of theatrical performance "Cyrano de Bergerac", in which one name especially caught his eye, and became eternalized in his song - Roxanne.
How low they earned at the time admits Stewart Copeland too. He had to ask his brothers again for financial and managerial help to record the debut album "Outlandos D'Amour" in 1978. There is another proof, no matter how unpopular it sounds, that for this band one may rightly say that there wouldn't be The Police today if it wasn't that infamous CIA somewhere around. Then, things started to roll slowly, despite the fact that the single Roxanne, praised by critics, was hardly airplayed on the radio, because of the provocative theme of the song, all these, mostly Sting's songs that are classics today have started to build the cult status for the group that they still have today. The Police is not only a typical example of a band whose tracks generally did not achieve commercial success with the first release, and after a while they became big hits, while The Police became the favorites of all sorts of critics and rock magazines, but the general musical tastes also a little bit changed in their favour. At the turn of the 70s into 80s of the last century, music trends were turning more and more from punk towards new wave, which suited this band very well.
Then came those big commercial hits like “Every Breath You Take” and in this new wave period after punk, when romantic and sweetish music became preferable again, their high jazzy pop quality of playing got full recognition. That same music that was underestimated before or rated as something snobbish, now is logically on the top by pure change of trend and general taste of the audience. As we know, unlike some other bands that live too long, The Police didn't live very long life in its glory. 3 strong music personalities who helped each other to reach the top of the World which they wished so much, after that, in the middle of 80es went their own ways in the solo careers.
So, regardless the fact that all of them, especially Sting as dominant composer among them, later became soft and sweetish new wave musicians what the audience liked from them the most, the band Police is really worth that truth that SOME THINGS YOU CAN ACHIEVE ONLY WHEN YOU ARE YOUNG, BUT MOST OF THE THINGS YOU CAN ACHIEVE ANY TIME IN YOUR LIFE.
And for them that time came when they were nearly 30 years old (except "daddy" Summers) and having very little success at the time of that original punk explosion. It is strange that only much later that part of the Police's opus was recognized and praised. Then when the first heroes of punk era, Sex Pistols, Clash, Exploited and many others were gradually disappearing from the stage.
The final question. So you know all about them, and if The Police were a capitalist corporation they would be:
a) CIA
b) New Musical Express
c) Scotland Yard
a) CIA
b) New Musical Express
c) Scotland Yard
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