During a recent appearance on Drumeo, Stewart Copeland discussed a mistake he made while recording a Police song.
He mentioned, “It recorded very easily, I did f*ck it up though,” referring to their 1979 hit ‘Message in a Bottle.’
When asked how he messed up, Copeland explained, “At the end, Andy [Summers] must have gone out to play Space Invaders or something. He was usually quality control. And at the end for some reason, because Sting just likes to sing those choruses forever. I guess he likes singing. Go figure.”
He continued, “It was sort of going nowhere so I added a bunch of crashes for extra emphasis at the end, which I now bitterly regret. And I’m asking all these years later, where was Andy when I needed him to say, ‘Copeland back off.’ Andy was very good at that.”
Copeland has previously shared his thoughts on various Police songs. Last year, he mentioned on X that he considers ‘Spirits in the Material World’ to be the band’s most technically advanced track, describing it as a ‘rhythmical nightmare.’
He stated, “That’s an easy one. That would be ‘Spirits In The Material World,’ which has the fewest notes, and it is very sparse but, in fact, is a rhythmic nightmare for all three of us. There is no one. This is how it goes, how simple it is [showing it on the drums]. Lost it already, see? It is very simple, but it’s on the upside down of the back of nowhere.”
Earlier this year, Copeland also appeared on The Bob Lefsetz Podcast, where he discussed one of The Police’s biggest hits, ‘Roxanne.’ He admitted that his first impression of the song was not very positive.
“I was the one cracking the punk whip. No, we’ve got to be punk. We’ve got to be punk. And they’re saying, ‘Can’t we just play?’ I gave it a drum beat that was kind of bass-ackwards and made it into a Police song. It wasn’t punk-o-rama, but it was still a rock song, even though it was kind of a lament. It was a throwaway song.”
Currently, Copeland is on his ‘Have I Said Too Much? – The Police, Hollywood, and other Adventures’ tour in the UK, with his next performance scheduled for October 25 in Eastleigh.
