The Police: Back on the Beat

“Well, if the Grand Canyon were to rejoin itself, maybe there would be a possibility. We got back together for my wedding. It made me firm in my belief that it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.”

— Sting in a July 2000 Webchat for JAM, on the possibility of the Police reuniting for a tour.

“We started 30 years ago, so it would be nice to do something to celebrate. We don’t quite know what, but we’re talking about it. I’m very proud of the band we were in.”

— Sting, 2007

The Police, featuring lead singer and bassist Sting, drummer Stewart Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers were one of the true supergroups of the 1980s. From their punk-pop origins, the trio became one of the most popular and critically acclaimed bands of the decade. Their hits include “Roxanne,” “Message in a Bottle,” “Every Breath You Take,” “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” and “King of Pain.”

Although there was no official breakup, the band had not toured since March 1984. On Saturday, Nov. 3, thousands of fans will pack Boardwalk Hall to welcome the Police back to Atlantic City for only the second time in the group’s history (their other concert here was in 1984). Tickets range from $50 to $350. Fiction Plane (featuring Sting’s son, Joe Sumner) will be the opening act.

“The reunion they said would never happen” is a line often used to hype the reunion tours of supergroups. However, the “they” is usually not a member of the band itself. Before this year, Sting’s stock response to reunion questions was, “What would be the point?”

It wasn’t that Sting, who was born Gordon Sumner, felt the Police had done everything artistically that they could do. Simply put, Sting was disliked by his bandmates, and vice versa.

Things were especially testy between Sting and Copeland, who were rumored to have come to blows on more than one occasion. During the making of Synchronicity, the band’s fifth and final studio album, things got so bad that Sting would record his parts during the day and Copeland would record the drum parts at night. Remarkably, not only was the album completed, but it went on to become the group’s first No. 1 album in the United States, and its biggest seller worldwide.

Over the years friction between the band members subsided and they became, if not friendly, at least less adversarial. The trio performed an impromptu set at Sting’s wedding to Trudie Styler in 1992, and played a three-song set at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2003. Today, Copeland says the stories of constant fighting are overblown.

“We used to read in the papers about how we were fighting all the time,” he said in a recent interview for the New York Post. “I don’t know what we were doing, but it wasn’t fighting. When we did argue, it wasn’t about petty stuff, it was about the music, because we’re passionate about what we do.”

Copeland formed the Police in England in 1977 along with Sting and original guitarist Henry Padovani. Copeland and Sting had strong backgrounds in jazz, but Copeland envisioned a power trio to join the burgeoning London punk scene. Padovani lacked musical skills, but he brought punk credibility to the group.

Sumner joined shortly thereafter, and the Police performed briefly as a quartet. After an attempted recording session exposed Padovani’s weakness as a guitarist, he was asked to leave the band. The group decided to continue as a trio.

Realizing that they were too old to play straight out punk rock, they developed a sound that combined the energy of punk with a strong reggae influence and even some jazz overtones. Over the years, even as the group became a commercial success, it never abandoned its experimental nature.

Early this year, when it was announced that the reunion tour would take place, there was much speculation as to whether the trio could actually pull it off. Thus far, the tour has received almost unanimously positive reviews.

To their credit, Sting (56), Copeland (55), and Summers (64) are all in great shape, both physically and musically. Rather than a lot of bells, whistles, and backing musicians, the tour features just the three musicians performing on an uncluttered, half-circle stage. The trio plays all the hits in a generous, 20-song set. While some arrangements have been updated, most of the songs sound just like you remember them.

While some critics have dismissed the Police reunion as an attempt by the aging trio to cash in on their legacy, most fans are happy to have the chance to see the group perform at least one more time. Other bands notorious for internal fighting have let bygones be bygones. If the Eagles, Kiss, and three-fourths of Van Halen can do it, why not the Police?

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The Police Files: Things You May Not Know:

• Copeland chose the name, “the Police” because his father was a CIA officer and his mother served in the British intelligence.

• Stewart Copeland’s brother Miles Copeland, who managed the Police, also started I.R.S. Records in the ’80s, home to the Go-Go’s, R.E.M., Squeeze, and others.

• Sting got his nickname while he was a member of a group called the Phoenix Jazzmen. He once performed wearing a black and yellow jersey with hooped stripes, and bandmate Gordon Solomon told him he looked, “like a bumblebee.”

• Sting’s love for literature found its way into his lyrics: “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” includes a reference to Nabokov’s Lolita, and “Tea in the Sahara” includes a line about The Sheltering Sky, the title of a Paul Bowles novel. Ghost in the Machine is a book by political writer Arthur Koestler; “Synchronicity” a well-known essay by Carl Jung.

• Each of the band’s five album covers featured some representation of the three members’ faces, from the straightforward portraits on Outlandos d’Amour, Reggatta de Blanc and Zenyatta Mondatta, to the three colored stripes on the cover of Synchronicity. The cryptic cover of Ghost in the Machine is actually digital clock-style depictions of the three faces, with spiky-haired Sting in the middle.

• After one of the early reunion concerts in Vancouver, British Columbia, Copeland posted a satiric review trashing the show on his Web site (http://www.stewartcopeland.net/). For example, Copeland about one of Sting’s mistimed stage moves, “The mighty Sting momentarily looks like a petulant pansy instead of the god of rock.” Many in the media took Copeland’s post seriously, and predicted that tempers were already flaring among the band members.

• Prior to the reunion tour, the last official shows performed by the Police took place in June 1986, when the band reunited to play three concerts for the Amnesty International.

• The bleached-blonde hair sported by the trio on the cover of their debut album, Outlandos d’Amour was not a marketing ploy. The band members all dyed their hair blonde so they could do a Wrigley Doublemint Gum commercial.