Your first piece of music education was sitting at your mother's feet while she played the piano. She also exposed you to rock'n'roll and show music. How did that affect your musical development?
I just fell in love with albums, listening to "South Pacific," "Oklahoma," "Carousel," "West Side Story" -- just playing them to death. And falling in love with songs and orchestral arrangements and characters singing songs. I never saw any of the movies; they didn't show the musicals on TV. But I could probably sing bits of "Oklahoma" right now [breaks into "Poor Jud is Dead"].
I was learning harmony and song structure from masters. Coupled with listening to Elvis Presley and Little Richard and everything, it was a well-rounded beginning.
In "Broken Music," you recall thinking when you were 7 years old that "I will travel the world, I will be head of a large family, I will own a big house in the country, I will be wealthy and I will be famous." It's as if you wrote the blueprint of your life at 7.
Strange, isn't it? I had a lot of time to think and a lot of time to fantasize, because I was left alone so long. These are probably only a number of my fantasies. I probably also wanted to be a submarine commander, or a four-star general or something military. I was a fantasist; I still am.
After you discovered your mother's infidelity, you took refuge playing the piano at your grandmother's. Is that the first time you realized that music could alleviate your sadness?
I'm not so sure I realized it at the time; I think I just did it automatically. I self-medicated with music. The music at the time was pretty angry. It was kind of rock'n'roll, I suppose [laughs].
My grandmother called it "broken music"; that always stuck with me. I found in my research that broken music is also an old archaic phrase for music written for parts. Like in the 16th century, broken music was what they called music for different instruments.
You were accepted at St. Cuthbert's, an elite grammar school in Newcastle, which only increased your sense of alienation from your parents. But it spurred your love of reading, which clearly informs your music.
I came from a pretty tough background. There were no books in my family home. But I always aspired to that idea of having books. If there's one thing I'm inquisitive about to this day and age, it's not records actually, it's books. I've kept every book I've ever owned in various libraries throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
That's why you need eight houses -- for all your books.
That's why I need them. I've got stuff from school, college -- dog-eared paperbacks that fall apart in your hands if you take them off the shelf.
Do your kids read your books?
No, they don't go near my books [sheepishly laughs]. I never give a book away -- you never get it back.
Like most musicians, the Beatles had a profound effect on you. Why?
They came from a similar background to me, from a northern industrial town, a seaport. They had a similar education to me: They were working-class kids with a middle-class education. I recognized that. They also wrote their own songs, which was unusual. Songs up to that point had usually been written by Tin Pan Alley.
That idea that they could write their own material gave a whole generation of English people permission to try to do the same thing. The first songs I wrote just aped the Beatles or Bob Dylan.
Another pivotal moment in your musical development was when you saw Jimi Hendrix on "Top of the Pops" and then live at the Club A Go-Go in Newcastle. Is it true that that was the first time you saw a black man in person?
Yeah, really. I might have seen them on the telly, but I'd never seen them in the town.
He was like from another planet. He played left-handed. He had this hair that was like a giant brain. He was wearing clothes that were from the 18th century. Very heroic, actually. He looked very elegant. The way he played, I mean, Jesus, it was loud too [laughs]. The club was tiny. It was packed. The entire country saw Jimi Hendrix [on "Top of the Pops"], and he came to town literally a week later.
You picked up the guitar before the bass. Why didn't you stick with that?
By accident I picked up [the bass] one day. Some instinct told me this was my route, a quieter strategy than to be a guitar hero. Some instinct [told me] that you control the top of the band and the bottom of the band. You control the harmony of the band, you control the dynamic of the band. I was ambitious [laughs].
It's very difficult to play bass and sing. How did you train yourself to do it?
I realized you could play anything if you slowed it down. I still do it. I still practice. I play scales every day, a few arpeggios. I sit and practice the guitar more than I would the bass -- not that you want to hear me play the guitar.
I'm obsessed by Bach. A couple of years ago, I got the partitas for solo violin and solo cello and started to play them on the guitar. It was a reading exercise, but also sitting with a sheet of music in front of you and watching the composer make decisions is slightly different from listening to them.
You see a great mind at work. It humbles you, it teaches you. You can often steal ideas, and they won't complain [laughs]. It's a fantastic adventure that continues and will continue. The more you find out, the more you realize what an ever-receding mystery music will continue to be. That's why it's religious for me.
There's a continuing exploration.
I'm also lucky in that I always manage to work with musicians better than myself. It's the truth. I have a very musical mind, but it tends to stop at my wrist sometimes. My job as a writer is to engage their skill and their enthusiasm and to challenge them somehow. My skill is in arranging music or in giving people the parameters in which they can be creative. I'll reel them in if it's too much, but I like to tell them to play what they feel, because you can never anticipate what they can give you when you have that caliber of musician.
You were a journeyman in several bands early on: Earthrise, the Newcastle Big Band, the Phoenix Jazzmen and then Last Exit. What did that teach you about playing live?
I backed strippers. I worked on a ship. I was in the pit of a theater orchestra. I think I could still hold down a job in a nightclub. Throw a part in front of me, give me 10 minutes and I'll get through it. I pride myself on that. There aren't many people in my business who can do that. That's no insult to them; I've just had a strange education.
It was at a Last Exit gig that you met Stewart Copeland. What did you think the first time you heard him play?
He gave me a number up at Newcastle to call if I was ever in London, and I had this fantasy that I was going to go pretty soon, so I kept the number.
I called him [when I was in London]. He was rehearsing. He was squatting in a very posh part of London called Mayfair. What an amazing drummer, [a] 6-foot-3, rangy, American powerhouse, just blew me away.
I could see he was going places. He had an amazing energy -- not just music, but entrepreneurial, and his personality was very "go get 'em." And I thought, "Wow, here are some coattails I can definitely stand on for a while."
How did Andy Summers join the band?
We had a guitarist called Henry [Padovani], a lovely chap, but he was limited in playing ability. So my ambition was to really get a third member of the Police who was on par with Stewart and myself. Andy Summers was quite a famous guitarist in England, he had a great deal of respect and the fact that he wanted to play with the likes of me and Stewart was surprising. But he saw something in us, and we progressed from there. I began to see the Police as a vehicle for my songs, whereas before it had been Stewart's.
There was a club date in Birmingham, England, where you realized that your dreams could really be reached.
It was sort of a last chance. If this one didn't work, the momentum of the band would have disappeared, and we would have just vanished from the face of the earth. The chemistry of the band, the rapport with the audience was absolutely right. We got a great review, and it just gave us the courage and conviction to carry on. I remember all of those early dates much more than stadium tours [that] all seem the same. I remember CBGBs; I could describe it to you now. My son played there the other week. [Sting's son Joe is in a band called Fiction Plane.]
Is that weird for you?
Yeah. It's like an out-of-body experience. I mean, it's fantastic. I'm immensely proud. I'm like, "How does he do that?" DNA, it works. Evolution, too.
From the start, the Police were a rock/reggae hybrid. Why that combination?
Reggae isn't easy to play, and the Police were a sophisticated rhythm section that could play reggae as well as rock'n'roll and oscillate between the two. There was a kind of irony at work in doing that. It was kind of amusing to have great slabs of rock'n'roll sandwiched between skank and reggae.
After releasing a one-off single called "Fall Out," you recorded "Outlandos d'Amour."
We recorded this album very cheaply. In fact, the first two Police albums together cost, I would say, about £5,000. It was a very primitive studio and it was way out of town, and we would work in the downtime while another band was sleeping. When they tromped off at night, we'd go in there and work until the early hours. Like thieves in the night.
We even used other people's multitrack tape. I think we stole an album by Renaissance. They recorded their album on a 24-track tape, and we took it and recorded "Outlandos d'Amour" over it. I'm terribly ashamed that we did that, but we had no choice, we couldn't afford the tape.
Did you ever apologize?
I'm doing it now.
Until you started making the album, Stewart was pretty much writing everything. Then you came in, and it became almost all you. That's what started the rift that ultimately broke up the band.
I wrote just about every song on ["Outlandos d'Amour"], and I didn't think there would be any royalties from this record, to be honest with you. But when there were royalties from this record, obviously I got more than anybody else. So to try to redress the balance, I split up percentages. But that didn't really work. The other two wanted to write songs, and then that [meant that] for an album, there were 30 songs to sift through instead of 10 or 12.
And ones that wouldn't be suited for your voice.
Well, it just became exhausting. It was just too difficult to have to deal with all these songs and have to say, "Well, this song isn't very good." It's like telling someone their girlfriend isn't very pretty or that their mother wears army boots. It's an exhausting process that became a nightmare.
Also, we were in a band that had a particular signature with three instruments, and that worked for us very well, but my ambitions were to be writing songs that were a little more adventurous or varied.
What was it like the first time you heard "Roxanne" on the radio?
It's a little like the first time you've had sex, literally. Because you write songs in the privacy of your home playing to the cat or dog, and then you hear it on the radio and you realize people across the nation are listening to your song. I think I was painting the ceiling in my flat in London. Fell off the ladder. I called Stewart, who was listening as well, and we were kind of gabbling incoherently on the phone. It was a while before we made any sense at all, but there we were, on the radio for the first time.
How do you feel when personal words and thoughts you have connect with so many people?
I don't take it for granted. I write songs initially to amuse myself, because it's an instinct to do it, and then I play them to a member of a family, my wife or my kids, and then for a member of the band. But once it gets to the record company and to a radio station and out into the world, boy, it's kind of ridiculous, so I don't really ... I try not to think about it too much.
"Zenyatta Mondatta" had your first overtly political tune on it, "Driven to Tears," which you wrote after seeing Third World devastation on TV. What made you go from writing inside yourself to taking on a more political statement?
I don't think I'd ever tackle a political issue unless I had some kind of metaphorical vehicle to describe it with. I remember watching the television, and there was some terrible famine in Biafra, and the children were skin and bone. "Driven to Tears" came to me because I was literally driven to tears. Without that phrase or that refrain, I wouldn't have written the song.
Similarly much later, when I wrote a song called "They Dance Alone" about the Disappeared in Chile. [These are the thousands of Chileans presumed killed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet's security forces during his 1973-1990 rule.] The metaphor of women dancing with photographs of their loved ones who had been murdered really touched me, and it made sense, whether you knew the political situation in Chile or not.
[At] the end of that tour we did play in Chile with the mothers of the Disappeared, and they danced with me and Peter Gabriel in the stadium that their sons had been murdered in. It was one of those chilling and also wonderful moments in my career.
How do you feel when a song like that takes on such a bigger meaning?
It's kind of scary, and you feel a huge responsibility to say the right thing. To do the right thing. To not let yourself down. To be responsible, I suppose. Responsible to the situation you're trying to express. It's not just a love song about an abstract couple. This is a real tragedy about real people, so you have to keep that in mind. You have to respect them, respect their pain.
"Ghost in the Machine" is about alienation, and yet out of this album bursts the joyous "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic."
Yeah, I think that song is totally inappropriate for this record actually [laughs]. I'd written it a long time before. I wrote it when I was on the dole in London. I brought it out of a bag that seemed to be bottomless at the time, [and] that really pissed the other two off because I seemed to have an endless supply of songs and pretended I'd just written it, and, of course, it had been written a good five or six years before. It didn't really fit with the rest of the album, although it was a big hit. It justified its position.
In 1981, you played Madison Square Garden and sold it out. Do you remember that night?
At that time I think it had gone to my head a little bit. Even though I say I had my feet on the ground, the success had been so meteoric, I was a little bit swollen-headed. We all were. So it was, "Of course we're playing Madison Square Garden. Where else would we play? Shea Stadium?" And sure enough, the next gig we did [in New York] was Shea Stadium.
Before that, it seems like you wrote the rule book for rock bands because your then-manager, Miles Copeland, had you hopping in the van and playing everywhere. What were those early days like?
None of us had any time to spend any of the money we'd earned. We were still living in the van, still living in cheap hotels. We were a very frugal band [laughs]. Those first couple of albums we [had] were hugely successful, but none of the money had filtered through. The first check I got was a [performing-rights society] check for £30,000. I thought I'd never see that amount of money in my entire life. You could buy a house for that.
Miles Copeland never had you take record company money.
No, he was very smart in that sense. He didn't want that kind of feudal relationship that usually occurs between record company and artist where they own you. We had a partnership from very early on, and that was Miles' strategy and God bless him. That continues to this day.
"Synchronicity" came out in 1983. It was not only the Police's first No. 1 album, it stayed at the top of the Billboard albums chart for an astronomical 17 weeks.
Really, I had no idea. I was on another planet at the time. I was on the leaving planet. I was like, "I'm out of here. This is too crazy. I can just see diminishing returns every time I look ahead. It's great to be No. 1, but I want out."
