[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. If you are wondering what Stewart Copeland, the songwriter, film composer, and of course, drummer for The Police was doing 46 years ago on this day, you can find out in his new book, Stewart Copeland’s Police Diaries. The entry for October 24th, 1977 reads in part, "Check drum shops, airport, new hotel, eight tracks, airport again, Sting, hotel, studio, Chinese dinner. Stewart Copeland’s Police Diaries is made up of journal entries from 1976 to 1979 before the hit band hit big. The book documents Copeland's other musical endeavors and the founding years of The Police, their earliest successes, alongside the trials, tribulations, mundane chores, and all the curry dinners that came with them.

Here's a couple more examples. Saturday, May 7th, 1977, Sting's folks lunch, pick up car, drive to Cambridge. Howard Mallet Club sold 31 records, good gig, punky, lost truck key, took Sting's car home. Thursday, September 7th, 1978, KK mixing in the morning until 6:00 PM. Calypso police arrived, but Sting and I went home early, dead tired. The KK in that last entry is Klark Kent, Copeland's debut solo album, a record that earned him his first hit on the charts before any Police song made it there. He'll be reissuing a deluxe version of that album next month, and he joins me now in studio. It's so nice to meet you, Stewart.

Stewart Copeland: Well, it's nice to be here with you.

Alison Stewart: This book focuses on '76 to '79. Within a decade, The Police will be playing Shea Stadium, one of our favorite places, people who remember Shea Stadium.

Stewart Copeland: Where one of your crew I just met was there.

Alison Stewart: Oh, right on.

Stewart Copeland: She was there at Shea Stadium.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] When you--

Stewart Copeland: This is not about that part. This is about the starving years.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn about yourself revisiting that time?

Stewart Copeland: Well, how hard work it was. The grind of it. I mean, as you just said, wake up in the morning, go down the other side of London, pick up the truck, drive back, pick up the gear from Sting's place, and Sting go to rehearsal, rehearsal all day, drag the gear back, just grind upon grind.

Alison Stewart: It's the get-in-the-van years.

Stewart Copeland: Yes, yes, yes.

Alison Stewart: What is something about your creative process, the way you work now, that's pretty much the same from back then?

Stewart Copeland: Well, the musical instincts are exactly the same. The only thing that has changed is the skills, and as you go through the decades of life, you actually get better at it. Your skillset improves, but the actual musical identity is there from birth, I believe. As I've discovered, I once revisited an opera that I wrote 20 years before, because they had a different-- they had a much bigger orchestra for it now. I went back and discovering it, that's exactly what I would've written today.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Stewart Copeland: I've got more skills now, but the music identity is implanted at birth, I think.

Alison Stewart: How has the technology changed it?

Stewart Copeland: Oh my gosh. In olden times, you had to play the music your darn self. Now you can get a machine to do it. Not only the playing part but the composing part too. The technology has leveled the playing field and democratized the process so that-- the good news is that anybody can make music on their laptop. That's a wonderful thing. It widens the talent pool hugely. Artists like Moby would never have made it in olden times because he doesn't play guitar, to my knowledge, any particular instrument, but he was able to make really interesting music just by using the technology that enabled him to make cool records.

That's the upside, as for music lovers, there's all this talent that now hits the airwaves. Bad news for the talent is that every damn fool's making a record and getting noticed and pushing through is a lot harder.

Alison Stewart: Also some of them, and I've had this argument, not argument, conversation with a songwriter about how some things sound the same, but it's because they're not bringing in individuals to play the drums. People are sampling and using the same sounds.

Stewart Copeland: Yes.

Alison Stewart: I think something gets lost there.

Stewart Copeland: Yes and no. My kids are grown up now, but when I was still driving them to school, I would get my education in what's hip. My last daughter graduated and is now here in New York City, actually a wolf on Wall Street. Driving her to school, she would play her music, and I would be educated into the current zeitgeist, which ended up Kendrick Lamar. That's the last thing I heard. I have no idea what's been happening since that.

Alison Stewart: That's a good place that you can stop there. That's okay.

Stewart Copeland: Yes, but all my friends of my generation are really threatened by Kanye and the rest because there's no musicians there. Where's the musicianship? Well, the musicianship is in the concept, and finally, the tyranny of guitar-based drums has been broken and people are making great music without using completely different tools and speaking a different music language. That's a good thing.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Stewart Copeland. The book is called Stewart Copeland's Police Diaries. It's going to be out this Thursday. There's a photo in the book of your home studio around 1977. It's full of guitars and tape reels and amps and the snare that used in all The Police recordings and tours. I think there's even a vegetable box in there somewhere, and you write at the bottom of the blurb, as this book attests, I keep stuff.

Stewart Copeland: Yes. I've still got all that gear.

Alison Stewart: Why do you keep it all?

Stewart Copeland: I don't know. I just like it. I don't want to give it up and I love old instruments. They just have a vibe to them, and there's a lot of mystique around. I'm not religious or superstitious, but I'm superstitious about instruments. I can feel the blues that have been played on this guitar, the heartbreak that has been expressed on that piece of equipment, or whatever. I just like old gear.

Alison Stewart: Where were the diaries?

Stewart Copeland: The diaries are in a drawer. They're very small. Physically, they're very tiny, and so they only take out one drawer, right back through high school I was writing stuff, mostly gibberish.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] When you say gibberish, do you mean as your own personal code that yourself?

Stewart Copeland: Well, stream of consciousness. For any of your listeners out there, writing is actually very therapeutic, if you're tangled up in blue, just start your hand moving across the page, writing anything in any language, doesn't have to be on topic or just write and just somehow it dissipates the angst.

Alison Stewart: Let's go back to where the book starts, 1976. You're working with a band called Curved Air. How did you end up with Curved Air?

Stewart Copeland: Well, I was their tour manager. My brother Miles had a music empire, and that's where I learned. I started out roading for his groups, and then I made tour manager, and one of the bands I was tour managing was Curved Air, and the violin player and I had been just about to bust out with a group of our own. I came back from University of California at Berkeley, and we were about to form a group called Stark Naked And The Car Thieves, but Curved Air got a big tax bill. They had to go do a tour to pay this tax bill. Darn, there goes my band, but I've still got my briefcase, and I had tour managing chops, I became Curved Air's tour manager.

Then when that tour finished, and the drummer went off, they needed a drummer, so I joined the band. I was the last rat to jump aboard the sinking ship.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a song you co-wrote as a member of Curved Air. This is, I believe, Desiree.

Stewart Copeland: Desiree.

Alison Stewart: Desiree. Let's listen.

Stewart Copeland: Where did you find it?

[MUSIC: Curved Air: Desiree]

Alison Stewart: You haven't heard this in 15 years?

Stewart Copeland: No.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Oh, the joy. If you do a deep dive on YouTube, you can find amazing things.

Stewart Copeland: Yes. Well, those are my chords. It's my music, but the lyric came from somewhere else.

Alison Stewart: What was it like to hear that?

Stewart Copeland: Oh, great. With Curved Air, my first album that I ever recorded, actually no. My first album was recorded at Berkeley with this buddy who had a TEAC in his basement, self-released record. Anyway, my first real record with Curved Air was rejected by the record company. They sent us back to the studio, some hot shot producers out of Miami, who killed the group basically. They tried to turn us into, I don't know, the Eagles or something, whereas we were gothic, we were Prague Rock with noodly, noodly noodly, and that's what the band's following was. We were Prague. Totally, they didn't get it.

The first version of the album disappeared into the midst of time until I finally digitized all the tapes I've got in a locker somewhere, and I found that album, which was so much better than the album that was eventually released. It had life, it had passion, it had creativity, it was like really cool. That song that you just played a bit of there, I heard that song played with much more gusto and panache but lost to the midst of time.

Alison Stewart: What were the life lessons or the professional lessons from Curved Air that you learned?

Stewart Copeland: Punk rock, to join a--

Alison Stewart: Go to punk.

Stewart Copeland: Start a punk rock band was my rebellion against those two producers. I get to the studio, and for our new producer to rerecord the album, which we had so much fun making the album, we had to go and do it again, and they said, "Okay, go take a walk, we'll get your drum sound together." I come back, and they have killed my drums [beatboxing]. For this, they're talking about, "Yes, we got you a real nice fat back." What's a fat back? You mean, can I use some language on your station? Can I use--

Alison Stewart: You can't actually.

Stewart Copeland: Okay.

Alison Stewart: No, but we got you.

Stewart Copeland: What rhymes with nap?

Alison Stewart: Oh, you can use that one. That one's okay. [laughs]

Stewart Copeland: A map's back. It was the opposite, so as soon as I could tune my snare drum so high, it'd bring a bird down from the sky, and just played louder, faster. I didn't there because I was-- I hadn't, but my next band, man, I fixed that problem.

Alison Stewart: You did. Can we listen to Fall Out?

Stewart Copeland: Oh, yes.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen.

[MUSIC: The Police: Fall Out]

Alison Stewart: That's you on guitar?

Stewart Copeland: Yes.

Alison Stewart: That's amazing.

Stewart Copeland: Well, when the band started, it was completely cynical. I want a punk band. I needed two guys, one of them needs to be the singer and played bass, because I can't sing. I found this Lion King guy up in Newcastle who could play bass, and sing, and had an amp.

Alison Stewart: Most importantly. [laughs]

Stewart Copeland: Yes, most importantly. Actually, there was another feature that made him stand, which is the golden shaft of celestial light coming down from the heavens, and a lighting upon his magnificent brow. I mean, the guy had charisma up to here. He could play bass, had his own amp, but that charisma thing. I wasn't that concerned with singing quality because the punk scene was all about shouting. I called him up from London after I'd seen his band in Newcastle.

"Hey, look. I got this band. By the way, I'm talking to you. I'm not interested in your band, just you." He said, "Keep talking." Right there, I knew he's a free agent. Anyhow, a few weeks later, I get a call, "Okay, it's me, Sting. I'm downstairs in a phone booth." "Well, come on up." He came up, and he's a complete stranger. We plugged in and started playing.

Alison Stewart: That's interesting.

Stewart Copeland: The rest is history, but those songs at the beginning were all my dumb songs. Just basically baselines with yelling, and so we could play the punk clubs.

Alison Stewart: You write about the origins of Roxanne. Friday, October 21st, 1977, one night in Paris, when Sting was walking around Saint-Germain red-light district, and you add, "It wasn't the first song that he wrote for the band, but it was the first to inspire the musical language that became our hybrid reggae signature sound." Do you remember being conscious of a shift towards that sound, or did it just happen organically?

Stewart Copeland: Well, it was both. There was, in those days in the punk clubs, a lack of chill. Even punks high on glue, gots to chill sometimes, but there's no such thing as punk chill music. There was a DJ called Don Letts, and he would play in between the punk tracks. He would play dark dub reggae, which is suitably hostile, but chill, and so all these skinny white kids of London are hearing this music which is hostile but really cool, and trying to figure it out.

All the drummers were listening, "Wait a minute. What's he doing? The kick in the snare together on three? What? What? What?" I think it was the Clash was the first band to try it, but I had a secret weapon. My secret sauce was that I grew up in the Arab world where the Arabic music, the dabke, that's the dance, the ballady rhythms of the country music has the same building blocks, the emphasis on the third beat of the bar. You hide the one, [gasps] two, three, four, [pauses] two, two, three, four, [gasps] two, three. To play music back to front, reggae style came really easy to me, and we could do it more naturally.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk. Yes, you're born in Virginia, and your dad was in the CIA. You grew up in Beirut, correct? You lived in Beirut for a while.

Stewart Copeland: Yes. I left America when I was two months old. From there to Cairo, where my father was busy installing a dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who is actually very good for Egypt, and then to Beirut where I played in my first band in the American Community School in Beirut, and was surrounded by Arabic music.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting. Now, I'm going to listen to Roxanne with a new set of information.

Stewart Copeland: Oh, by the way, just before you do, so Sting brings in this bossa nova track as an afterthought. It totally did not fit our profile at all, but it's just such a great song. The question, what can we do? I turned the beat backwards, made the one into two, and the two into three, et cetera, and that just clicked.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen. This is Roxanne from The Police.

[MUSIC: The Police: Roxanne]

Alison Stewart: Sting sat on the piano during that song? [laughs]

Stewart Copeland: The tape starts rolling, he's waiting for his vocal entrance, and behind him, there's a piano. He sits down, not realizing that the lid was up, so he sits down, plays a butt chord, B flat minor, I think, and laughs because it was so ridiculous. It was just a spontaneous real moment. We love that stuff.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Stewart Copeland. The name of the book is Stewart Copeland’s Police Diaries, due out this Thursday. One of the diaries gives you sense what it's like to be a working musician. This entry from '78, "German checks cannot be clear, so I'm stuck with no home, no car insurance, no money, and some stiff debts." When you think back on those times, how desperate were you?

Stewart Copeland: Desperate.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Stewart Copeland: Well, I think one of the first entries of 1978 is like you just said, I'm out of money, I've got 15 quid to last me till my next lucky break.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Stewart Copeland: That came very soon. As my record, the Klark Kent record is getting picked up, and is being played on the airways, I'm experiencing my first hit, it's all going on as I'm being evicted through because I couldn't pay my rent. We were paid Deutschmarks for this gig that we did in Germany, but the bank manager says, "I don't know from Deutschmark, I'm sorry." I've been banking here since I was 14.

As a musician, it's a cash economy. All the cash went straight into my pocket, and straight into buying a curry dinner, or a truck or a roadie, or whatever. You don't exist, you have nothing in your bank account. He let me get thrown out of my apartment because he wouldn't lend me the money to pay my rent, "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha." Next time, I told him, "You can take my 17 pounds and transfer it to Coutts who are helping me buy my first house. Thank you very much."

Alison Stewart: Can't, get let thrown. The first time you, Sting, and Andy appeared together on TV, it wasn't a Police performance, it was for your solo single, Don't Care. Here's an entry from August 29th, 1978, a couple of days before it aired, "They got me on top of the pops, surrey sound, recorded reggae rift jam, started recording Don't Care for BBC. BBC chaps came and watched. We were all in masks, sounds great." We were all in masks?

Stewart Copeland: Well, Klark Kent was a secret identity. Since The Police was so uncool, unhip, had been spotted by the London critics as carpetbaggers, I figured, "How about I do this Klark Kent record incognito?" I wore masks, and I would do interviews. When it got played, it became a hit, I was doing interviews with Sounds magazine, Melody Maker that's in a mask, with a completely different bogus story every time. I'm an archaeologist working in Egypt, and I found these lyrics written on the tomb of Perneptah III.

Alison Stewart: It's hilarious.

Stewart Copeland: Then the next time, I talk to them, I'm a coal miner in Wales, and whatever. The first time we were on TV, and I'm glad you brought this up, because it does bring me to my favorite brag of all, which is the first time the three blond heads was on national TV was as, "Hmm, thank you." My backing band. Even though I sang and played all the instruments on the record, a truly solo act, when I had a hit and went on top of the pops, I didn't want to be that guy standing there.

I'm not into singers, I'm into bands, and so I got my chuckle buddies to join me on stage. Now, all these years later, after all that's happened, there is ole Stingo in a gorilla mask miming, "Oh, dear folks. This is the reward of life." Miming my baseline. Thank you. He did get his revenge, but just for that little moment in time until The Police came along and crushed everything in its path.

Alison Stewart: Let's savor the moment when we listen to Don't Care from Klark Kent.

Stewart Copeland: It's kind of dumb.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

[MUSIC: Stewart Copeland: Don't Care]

Alison Stewart: That is Klark Kent. My guest is Stewart Copeland. Okay, so you're reissuing a Klark Kent record, and that's the 17th November, I believe.

Stewart Copeland: Yes, and it's not just the record and a few more recordings since then, but also the home demo of every one of the songs, because I was a home recording enthusiast, and I would demo the songs on my TEAC 4-track and my Revox A77. I digitized all, and I've got the demo version of each one of these songs, including a version of that song you just heard with par ole Stingo singing it. That's how broad-minded he was. I feel guilty that I put him through that. He's a man of such depth, dignity, to hear him singing that dumb song. Stingo, I'm sorry.

Alison Stewart: Do you call him Stingo to his face?

Stewart Copeland: Oh yes.

Alison Stewart: Yes?

Stewart Copeland: If it's not, hey, listen pal.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Bud, buddy, buckaroo, so we have that. We have Police Deranged For Orchestra, which is really cool. The orchestrated versions of Police songs, Police Beyond Borders--

Stewart Copeland: Which is even cooler, if you ask me.

Alison Stewart: All kinds of musicians in different languages.

Stewart Copeland: How about this? Every Breath You Take in Zulu, complete with the clicking.

Alison Stewart: It's so cool. How did you end up doing all of this at the same time? How did this all end up just being in this year?

Stewart Copeland: Well, it was done sequentially, but it's all appearing at the same time.

Alison Stewart: Ah got you.

Stewart Copeland: I made the first version, Police Deranged For Orchestra, which is these messed up versions where I cut the songs up and mixed them all up, and then scored it for full orchestra, and that's the show that I've been doing for the last couple of years. I made the record it, and actually got to number two in the classical crossover charts, and number three in the actual classical charts, which makes me ask, where was Mozart that week? Cool, and then I thought, well, that's great.

My buddy Ricky Kej, with whom I won Grammys for the last two years, said, "Hey, send me those backing tracks." I sent them to him, and he fires up the Soweto Gospel Choir, Cui Jian from China, huge multi-gazillion-selling Chinese artist, Serj Tankian sings one song, Demolition Man, in Armenian, and all these Hindi versions, and it's the global version of the same album.

Alison Stewart: First of all, let's say, thank you, Stewart Copeland, for coming in.

Stewart Copeland: Ah, sure. Thanks for listening.

Alison Stewart: This is really fun. The book is really gorgeous. It's a really good read, and it's the beautifully art directed. We're going to go out on Can't Stand Losing You from Police Beyond Borders.

[MUSIC: Police Beyond Borders: Can't Stand Losing You]

 

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