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The Stewart Copeland Interview: an ARTISTdirect Exclusive

Drummer, opera and soundtrack composer Stewart Copeland can now add another job title to his list of credits: Filmmaker. This year, Copeland released Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out, a documentary about his experiences playing drums in The Police. Comprised largely of images Copeland shot with an eight millimeter home movie camera, it's a unique, firsthand account of life inside a phenomenally popular rock band. It premiered at Sundance and has just been released, with bonus footage, on DVD.

ARTISTdirect editor Andy Hermann sat down with Copeland at his home studio in Los Angeles for an in-depth chat about Everyone Stares and the legacy of The Police.

How many hours of footage did you have?

50 hours. A lot of it's other bands, a lot of it's way out of focus. But that's what I had to deal with.

And was a lot of it was stuff you hadn't looked at since you recorded it?

Yeah, most of it I hadn't looked at.

What was that like, going back to those images after so long?

It was exciting as a filmmaker 'cause the images were so cool. It wasn't like a misty-eyed trip down memory lane or anything. It was mostly, as a filmmaker, excitement over the material.

After the Police broke up, did you continue experimenting with 8mm, or shooting video in other formats?

No. In fact, I discontinued shooting Super 8 in the last year or so of the Police adventure. Pretty much because I had every shot. I had all the shots of backstage, every shot out of a hotel window -- I pretty much had it all. And where the film finishes off -- we carried on for another album and another year even bigger than before. But the story of the film was done by that time.

So the film really doesn't have anything from the Synchronicity era?

Yeah, but the Synchronicity tour was just more of the same. You know -- there we were on top of the mountain, and unlike Hilary, who had to climb back down again, we stayed up there. And then stayed up there some more.

And by the end of it -- I read a quote from you where you described it as like being inside a "golden cage."

Yeah. And actually a reviewer pointed out something which I didn't even noticed myself -- it was just like a subconscious thing. The last shot of the movie -- which for me, when I put it there, was all about Sting's quote: "I blame the man holding the camera for all this." And it just had a sort of fin de siecle feeling, you know -- the end of something. And it was the end of a tour. But what I hadn't noticed -- we're chained to the top of the world. We're on top of the building, handcuffed. It took someone else to notice and make that connection, but it was actually perfect.

Since we're talking about that shot -- what were you guys doing up there?

We were getting an award. Some French award. Nobody can remember what the hell the award was....And there was some kind of photo opportunity for some magazine or God knows what. So the concept was: "The Police -- arrested!" There were many, many of these moments, where we'd get an award for something, and the magazine wants to take a picture of us accepting the award, and they think up some backdrop, some concept -- "Okay, let's have the guys doing something!" In this case: "Okay, let's have the guys chained to the top of the building! Police arrested!" It was one of those dumb concepts -- which was very fortunate, though, because I got that cool shot.

Watching the movie, I got the sense throughout -- especially in the second half of the movie, after the band was gaining international success --

The Duran Duran phase.

Right. It really did have this sort of whirlwind quality to it.

That's another lucky accident. All that time-lapse footage, I just thought it was really beautiful. I'd think up any flimsy excuse for introducing these shots just 'cause I thought they were pretty -- and instinctively, they felt right. I never really thought about why they felt right. And again, it took someone else to point out -- well, of course. Life was a blur.

What gave you inspiration to make the film now, after all this time?

It wasn't inspiration, it was technology. First of all, they invented computers. That was a breakthrough. And then they invented Final Cut Pro. And most importantly, they invented cheap memory. Which sounds kind of poetic, but what I mean is a hard drive for my 50 hours of footage smaller than a house. And that's really what it's all about.

I'd forgotten about the Police, mostly. It's not any agenda or anything like that. The agenda was that I got a new application and I'm an application junkie. And I'm playing with Final Cut and looking for something to cut -- "Oh, right, I've got these images! Oh, wow, this is great! Look at this!" And it was really a home movie, just to show friends -- just the fun of assembling pictures, as recreation. That's where the film all began. And that arose from the technology. And I should've expected it, but I didn't expect how the old dragon would surface and reinflate.

The old dragon being The Police.

Yeah. 'Cause I haven't thought about it a lot. I've pursued a new career, new life, new family, everything. And it just hasn't been a part of my life. And suddenly, the last year has been dominated by The Police. But it's really different. It's not dominated by Sting and Andy [Summers] -- that environment we had when the three of us were together, which was an unbelievable environment. But the word "The Police" has been banging around my head every day. Suddenly, people are talking about the Police again.

It's gratifying that people are coming out of the woodwork who really appreciate what the band did, and may have forgotten about it in the interim period. Our music was always designed to be disposable. My generation is astonished that our kids still listen to The Doors, Cream, Hendrix -- and the Police, for that matter. Which is not how it was supposed to be, and not how anyone dreamed it would be. But the actual guys in the Doors, the guys in Cream -- their parents' music disappeared with their parents. And everybody -- and I'm at the very bottom of that generation, in fact I'm hardly even the same generation as Eric Clapton -- but we all expected our music to disappear the way our parents' music disappeared. We expected our kids not to be playing on electric guitars, but to be playing on some other instrument that was an anathema to us -- the way we turned our back on saxophone and trumpet and came up this obnoxious guitar stuff. And we expected our music to get shunted aside as well.

A lot of the immediacy of rock music and the nihilism that pervades it is this idea that it's disposable. And it's kind of strange 20 years later -- I talk to 24-year-old journalists who have no concept of what the band was. People know as much about the Police as they know about Mozart. They know the songs, but the difference between the world before and after the Police -- they don't know it. They just see a succession of bands, they don't really know the running order. They don't know if the Police is older than Hendrix or Hendrix comes before the Police. But the music still resonates.

You said that the Police is not something that you think about a lot in your life now. What was it like going back and looking at this footage? Did it take you back? Do you have a different perspective on it now?

No, far more than being taken back, I was just excited at the coolness of the images and thinking, "Aw, man, what a cool movie I can make from this!" Which completely blew out of the water any vestige of nostalgia.

I'd love to touch on some of the musical projects you've been involved in since the Police, since I think a lot of old fans of the Police have probably lost track of what the three of you -- well, not Sting, it's impossible to lose track of what Sting's been up to --

Lute.

Yes! Have you heard the lute album?

I haven't. Andy has.

I haven't either. I'm fascinated that he's doing it.

Well, I say, it's about time he got off that treadmill, which he's been on since 1977.

Of making pop music?

Of writing song after song after song after song. I've been expecting him to break free of that years ago. And he finally has. Odd choice -- but we have a bizarre competition. You know -- he did jazz, then I did opera. As career killers, I was leading as the opera composer. That's much worse than jazz. But now he's come back with lute, and I don't know how I'm gonna top that.

He's finally found a way to one-up you, huh?

Yeah, he got past me again, the bastard.

But I was gonna say -- for the benefit of people who maybe have not been paying as close attention to Stewart Copeland's career as they should be -- it's no wonder you haven't thought about the Police much all these years, because you've been really busy.

Pretty much, yeah.

And I have to confess that I had lost track of a lot of your work from the late '80s onward.

Well, that's because I've joined this anonymous musical world. You know, when you're in a band, you personally are the can of beans. You are the product. When you're a film composer, you're several steps removed.

Or a ballet composer, or an opera composer.

Yeah. You don't get wet. You don't get any on you. You can walk away. And [composing] has kept me really busy. But the main thing that's good about it is, you go under the radar.

But you've been busy with a lot of band projects, too -- Oysterhead, the Orchestralli project --

Yeah, in the last few years, I have been. You know, I stopped playing drums -- I lost interesting in drumming completely. Just never played them. I mean, in my studio, I had the drums there, but they're a really excellent place to hang wires. My drum booth was a really convenient place to make private phone calls.

So when you're composing, you're mostly just using keyboards or computers?

Yeah. And when I need drums on a film score, I'll hire somebody.

Really?

Absolutely. I'm on a different mission. And those session drummers are way slicker than I am at remembering the arrangement. They're more malleable than I am. You know, when I play drums, I'm not a film composer -- I'm a drummer. And I blast away -- the frenzy takes hold. So I want some guy who's a professional on drums. On drums I'm not a craftsman -- I'm an artist. In film composing, I'm not an artist -- I'm a craftsman.

Are there any musical projects you're working on now that you'd like to talk about?

No, because this film has consumed my life. It comes out in Europe in October and I'll be doing the promo bash there. And when that's over at the beginning of November, I don't know what I'm doing. This has been so consuming, the different stages of it.

It premiered at Sundance, right? Back in January?

Yeah. And that was when my little toy escaped and became the monster that ate my life. The phone call from them -- and I think this is kinda classy -- came on the night before Thanksgiving. So many filmmakers had a very happy Thanksgiving. But it was really a rough home movie that I sent to them. I guess they just saw something in the power of the images that transcended the roughness of the assembly. But as soon as that happened, I thought, "Shit, this isn't just for chuckles with Andy anymore." You know -- show my buddies in the Foo Fighters how rock stars are really supposed to behave. It's beyond that. Fucking real people are gonna see this and it's gonna be on screens up against real movies. So I immediately got serious -- dropped everything I was doing and got serious about it. Up to that point it had been a hobby I was doing in between other jobs.

I hired a crew to redigitize everything, for a start. Because I digitized it in the cheapest possible way. Sent it off to some place in Wyoming -- good enough to see what I have and select my shots. So I went and redigitized here in Los Angeles at a much higher expense and much higher resolution -- much higher everything. Each shot is color corrected and cleaned to get as much as possible from those tiny eight-millimeter frames. That was a huge process. And then, to reassemble my original shot list -- 'cause I'd done all these fancy fades and dissolves. In fact, the editor I hired was astounded by the results [I had] arrived at in a way that could only be arrived at by somebody who didn't know how you were supposed to do it. The means [by which] I would arrive at solutions to my problems were not the ones in the textbook and therefore the results were slightly different from the way you're supposed to do it.

Which is the fun of teaching something to yourself, isn't it?

Well, the other reason I made the film now instead of earlier is because of the other great invention of our time: Undo. I'll let you contemplate for a moment the ramifications of a world without undo. Super 8 cutting -- there is no negative, [you're working with] the master. The only copy. You have to cut a frame in the middle -- so you destroy a frame here, you destroy a frame there. You take the two ends, and you get a nail file, and you shave them down to make the celluloid thinner. And you're wearing these little gloves, 'cause there's dust and stuff. Then a little drop of glue -- like making a model airplane. Royal pain in the neck.

So was the first cut of the film you sent to Sundance done that way?

No. Back in the day, back when I shot the footage, I got a little editor [kit]. On tour, we each had our toys. I had my projector, I had my little editor, I had this splicing block, I had my little gloves, I had all the footage so far. I had a little kit -- a couple of trunks that would come up to my room and I'd open them up and assemble my little Hollywood.

Did the other guys think you were just nuts with this little project of yours?

No, they had their own projects, too. Sting's were all about -- you know, he had all kinds of training equipment. He went through a boxing phase, he went through a hanging upside down phase -- he had all kinds of exotic exercise trapeze equipment. And Andy was into photography. In fact, Andy's got, shot for shot, my whole movie, all in stills. And in my movie, you can hear Andy's camera going off.

Have Andy and Sting seen the movie?

Andy has. He's come to a lot of the screenings. Largely because he's the star of the movie. He really steals the movie. He got standing ovations at Sundance, the little bastard.

Yeah, between the two of them, he seems like the one who was more ready to play for the camera.

He was kind of the band comedian. He kept us laughing. Sting looks kind of aloof, but he isn't. He's just not a guy who....He's not garrulous. If you look closely, you can see that he's real excited. And he's more cheerful than he looks at first glance.

Well, the impression I got of Sting from watching the film -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- but he just comes across as incredibly intense and focused. And you and Andy were the ones who would cut up a little bit more.

No, Sting cut up, too. But he is really intense. He's a deep thinker. I'm a frivolous guy -- the surface is fine with me as long as it's a chuckle. But Sting's very deep.

And I guess the elephant in the room whenever talking about the Police is that there were tensions between the three personalities.

Well, yeah, there were. We would have real violent screaming matches. And we did indulge in gratuitous emotional violence -- mostly by way of entertainment.

As seen in the movie, in fact.

Well, yeah, you see Sting beating the crap out of Andy in two or three different shots -- and they're both laughing hysterically. The real truth about the band is that we liked each other, a lot. We enjoyed each other's company. We were in the foxhole together. The time we felt most comfortable was in the company of the other two guys. It's really clear in the film. Of course, there was conflict, as well, like there is with any siblings. And in any halfway decent group, there's creative tension, which is what makes the group excel.

And three perfectionists as well. That was something else I got from watching the movie.

Yeah, and three guys with three different visions of what perfection is. Sting's vision of perfection was a lot slower than mine.

One telling moment early on the documentary is when there's some early concert footage of the three of you and Andy turns to you during a song and says, "Too fast."

Well, that's the thing about this film: It's extremely subjective. It's not an analysis of the dynamic process of the Police. It's not an examination of the Police's contribution to music. It's a first person singular, subjective experience. This is what it feels like to be in the band. You watch this movie and you walk onstage as a member of the band. You walk across the front of the stage with fans grabbing at your heels. You sit down at the drums and you look over and Sting says, "Let's go." And you look over at Andy and he's shouting -- at you -- "Too fast!" When you watch this movie, you're the drummer in the band. Your name is Stewart. As distinct from an MTV video, where the camera's here and the artist is over there. This isn't about the band, it's of the band.

Right. In fact there's that one shot where you're literally operating the camera and playing drums at the same time.

And doing my backing vocals. Which were never important anyway -- I doubt if they had them in the PA. Eventually we got three chick singers. Before we got them, Sting in the studio would develop these big rich harmonies -- and he was frustrated that he was just one voice onstage. So he'd crank Andy and I to get us to sing, but he would hate the result. I did my best. I'm not a great singer. Andy actually was pretty good; he could hold a tune. He didn't have a great voice, not a great tone to his voice -- but he could hit all the notes and he was much more support vocally than I was. But it was just to show support really, that I would hit the microphone -- and hopefully the audience didn't get a chance to hear it.

Another thing I wanted to ask you about was the soundtrack.

Ah, yes -- the derangements.

Yes, tell us about the derangements.

These were tracks that I had made before ditzing with the film. And once again, it's just that I love to edit. That arose from the Oysterhead thing, which is all about cutting up jams. And I discovered that you could take these live moments and lift them, work with them, massage them, and create a backing track. And then I could go back to the master tapes and get guitar solos, stacked-up vocals, and lay them on these new backing tracks, which arose from improvisations onstage. And it was amazing how malleable the material was. But when it came to making the film and scoring it, these tracks supported the film much better than the original tracks in many cases. Because the original tracks were songs. But in a film, it's about a musical environment -- so the songs were kind of intrusive, even though that's the sound you want to be hearing when watching these images. So these derangements were the way to score the film. And each one of those score moments is a full track, three or four minutes' duration.

Do you think any of those tracks will see the light of day outside the film?

No, I don't think so. Simply because Andy and Sting have the rather exotic idea that for one member of the band to go off and lobotomize the tracks and produce his own version of them -- they see a problem with that.

How dare they?

How dare they?! [laughs]

Another question that popped into my mind as I was watching the film: Why did the three of you adopt such a frantic pace? I mean, you were touring almost non-stop, putting out roughly an album a year --

Well, we were blessed with a very prolific songwriter. And it's like a muscle -- the more he writes, the better he writes. So that was very fortunate for us.

But that probably also contributed for the need for all of you to get off the roller coaster.

Well, it contributed to the diminishment of our life outside the group, and the intensification of our life inside the group, and the thickening of the shell separating the two. As I say in the movie, the cocoon became so comfortable and so removed from the real world that it began to feel kind of unsettling. I felt like the Aztec Sun King -- any minute now the priests are gonna show up at the palace and drag me up a pyramid and cut my heart out with a glass knife.

Some of the most amazing moments in the movie are those band's-eye view shots, like the one where you're going to the loading dock and you're greeted by this mass of screaming fans.

The first of those shots was a total surprise. It was the first day of our first tour back in England [after touring America] and we were the support band. We were the opening act. We had heard that the BBC had been playing our single, and we had heard that the fanzines -- these teeny-bopper girl magazines -- were starting to print our picture. We didn't even realize it, but we were beginning to hit as a boy band. Which I think is kinda cool, actually -- I had forgotten with all of the accolades we had gotten about the depth and seriousness of our music -- it's fun to remember that we started as a boy band. But it hadn't really dawned on us until that moment, which I've got on film -- where we're leaving the gig, and I'm about three or four feet behind Sting, and the doors open to the outside, where we think our car is. But we can't see the car, because there's this mass of people. The car's buried. We have to fight our way to the car, and we get in the car, and [the fans'] faces up are against the window. That's the first time that ever happened to us. We had no security. We had no expectation that that was gonna happen at all. And I just happened to have the camera turning at that moment.

Well, the last question -- I hate to ask it, but it's the obvious question. What are the chances of the Police ever getting back together?

Slim to none. I would be keen, because I'm a film composer -- I'm not a recording artist. A Police concert would not be a step backwards, forwards, sideways or any direction at all. It would just be an extremely fun event, to get to play with Sting and Andy again. I'll be there, no problem. Andy -- probably the same. Sting -- it's all about Sting. And I don't understand -- well, I do, he's got his band, he's got his music, he's pursuing his career. That's what he's doing. I certainly would feel very uncomfortable about saying, "Oh, Sting, c'mon, let's do another Police thing." Because I got five albums out of him. We got so many hits out of that guy. Eight great years in an incredible band -- the account's closed. That guy owes me nothing. We hang out, we talk and we get along really great. But I sense that, for some reason that I cannot fully fathom, the subject of the Police makes him uncomfortable. Therefore, I don't bring it up. We've got lots of other stuff to talk about.

Even though, to this day, he plays the songs. The ones he likes, anyway.

Well, sure, he wrote the songs. It's curious that he's playing the exact Police arrangements this last tour.

Is he? Not the jazzified versions he did around the time of Blue Turtles?

No. You know, there were a lot of people who complained -- to me -- oh, he's ruined the arrangements, he should be playing it the old way. But I always thought, no -- when you've got Vinnie Colaiuta on drums, you wanna hear what Vinnie does. You've already heard my version -- Vinnie is worth checking out. So I thought it was the right thing to do to evolve the songs according to the musicians he was playing with. But now he's gone back to the original arrangements, which is odd. I don't understand it. And once again -- he can do whatever the hell he wants. Next time I see him, that's not what I'm gonna talk to him about. I'm gonna tell him, "Hey, my son's got a film going into Sundance, I hope. He just submitted it, I hope he makes it." And he'll say, "Aw, yeah, well my daughter's got a new record out." That's what we talk about. If he wakes up one day and wants to do a Police show, he's got my number.

Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out is available now on DVD.