The Police drummer Stewart Copeland named the band he would join.
In a new interview with The Guardian, the drummer answered fan questions. When asked which band from the 70s and 80s he would have liked to play in, Copeland responded:
“If I could play guitar, the Ramones… on drums, could I go back even further?”
He also named the guitarist he would love to play with back in even earlier times:
“Could I play with Jimi [Hendrix]?”
Why Copeland Thinks Hendrix ‘Messed Everything Up’
Although Copeland stuck to being a rock drummer, in his words, there was one virtuoso who changed popular music within the genre’s limits. When praising his 1967 record, ‘Are You Experienced,’ Copeland said:
“Jimi Hendrix f*cked everything up.”
Though Hendrix might have ‘f*cked everything up,’ the drummer acknowledges that the energy of his creation was what changed it all for him:
“That was it for trumpets and trombones. Now it’s gotta be guitar with a row of giant Marshall amplifiers. I would sit in class and draw Marshall amps, which was pretty easy to do, actually, even with the angled top cabinets.”
Not only that, but his drum inspirations come from a similar place.
Copeland didn’t know he was taking inspiration from the one drummer Hendrix was in the same project with — The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Mitch Mitchell. He explained:
“Just recently I was on a plane and I watched the Hendrix documentary about the Isle of Wight. It’s one of the only live recordings on which you can hear the drums; on all the bootlegs the guitar is so loud. And you can see Mitch playing – the sh*t he did was remarkable. All of this stuff I did that I was rather proud of, I thought I came up with it. But no, I got it from Mitch.”
