The Police’s Stewart Copeland recently chatted with 95.5 KLOS’ New & Approved, where the drummer shared his tactics for convincing Sting to join the band. When Copeland was asked about the early days of the band when he was the songwriter, the rocker said:
“Yeah, I was the songwriter because I had to convince Sting to join this band. I said, ‘Yeah, we got material, we got gigs, yeah we got it all. I even got a guitarist.’ I had to find a guitarist and teach him the chords. But they were not written from my heart necessarily or from any great musicality. They were used strictly utilitarian.”
The drummer recalled how he needed to come up with punk tracks to play in clubs and be a part of the scene by adding:
“We needed punk songs so that we could play in the punk clubs, which was the only scene happening. I’d come from a Prague band where we played a lot of noodly noodly noodly, but this punk scene was like raw, do it yourself. We could have our own band and, you know, run it ourselves without record companies or going to the man for which we needed songs.”
Stewart also shared how Sting eventually took over songwriting for the band. He continued:
“I think I had four chords e, a, d, and g, you know basically bass lines with yelling was pretty much what they were and Sting, it amazes me now that he put up with that stuff. But when Andy Summers joined with all of his technique in his sophistication that’s when Sting started saying, ‘Well you know what I think I can start writing songs for this band,’ and the rest is history.”
The drummer had previously talked about Sting’s songwriting ability in an interview with Glide Magazine. Stewart had admitted that they were ‘starving’ as a band for a year and a half until Sting started writing great songs that changed the trajectory of the band.
You can watch Stewart Copeland’s interview with 95.5 KLOS’ New & Approved below.
