Photo: Walter/Getty

On August 7th, the Police wrapped up their world tour with a blowout at Madison Square Garden. The day before, the boys were at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, taping a guest spot for Elvis Costello's upcoming variety TV show.

The S.S. had the pleasure of interviewing each Policeman, but drummer Stewart Copeland was especially amusing. For instance:

He went into great detail about Sting's "hairy asshole". 

Click more for the full Copeland transcript.

You guys got the big show tomorrow night. Can you tell me how you're feeling right now after the last year and a half and looking towards the finish line?

I guess in general it's like the end of a perfect holiday. There you are on Bora Bora, perfect holiday in every way. But you know when it's time to go home, you're in a hurry to get home and if the hotel manager would have called up and said, "Hey, we can let you stay for a couple more nights." By that time, you're ready to go home and resume life before The Police—which was actually pretty good.  

I remember I had just been in this blissful state and I was thinking, "I love my life." I've got a family, a career, we had just bought a house, everything's lined up and then The Police thing happened and just destroyed it. So I haven't been able to live in my new house through the last year.  

I see. Can you tell me about some of the high points of the last eighteen months? 

There are so many. Singing "Kumbaya" with Rage Against the Machine in my dressing room was a big moment.  

Really? When was that?

I had "Kumbaya" in my dressing room and a band hug and we sang it twice. Well, the first time was just as a laugh and then later on we were talking and fucking Brad Wilk said, "Stewart, so tell me, I hear you hate jazz." Immediately the temperature drops thirty degrees. Rage are all jazz freaks and immediately they're arguing. "What do you mean?"  I said, "Guys, guys, guys, guys. Calm down. I don't know Coltrane, Charlie Parker—I don't know which one's which. Couldn't care less. The problem with jazz musicians is they all suck."  It was really tense. Rage Against the Machine started raging for a minute there. Then they were all, "Kumbaya my lord, Kumbaya." Twice.  

Nice.  

I'm fond of lightening up a dinner party by dropping that in there, you know, "Problem with all jazz musicians is that they suck." I don't really believe that but it's just a wonderful way to keep the conversation going. But I have to amend that because I played the Savannah Music Festival during one of the little breaks on our tour and I had a little orchestra. And usually for my orchestral work I've got classical players/orchestral players. This time I had jazz players. These are the epitome of your jazz bastards, you know, just flinty-eyed, hearts of granite, they can read fly shit off the page. They kicked the shit out of my material. I've never heard it sound as brisk, as rhythmic, as hard, I mean I realize they get it. You know, my daddy raised me to be a jazz musician which is why I'm allergic to the stuff but—I have to amend that—"The problem with jazz musicians is that they all suck unless they're playing my music." In fact, I will seek them out in the future because they play my music really well. I don't know about Mingus and all those other guys. I'm sure they play that stuff really well too.

Yeah, sounds like you're about to embark on jazz odyssey.

No way. No fucking way. I am not a jazz player and I am not a classical composer either.  Fuck classical music. Just cause I use an orchestra doesn't mean it's classical music.

So, meeting Rage.... What else?

Surfing with Eddie [Vedder]. Yeah, that's a big moment there.

What about on stage?

Sting's ass. Ok…let's back up here. One of Sting's heinous crimes he commits that is a bad habit he got into from twenty years away from band life—each one of us has been president for life in our own world for twenty years and we've all got bad habits. I'm only gonna talk about Andy and Sting's habits. They'll tell you all about mine. In fact you can probably guess.

We're on stage in front of twenty thousand people or something like that and Sting's giving me the death stare. For me in my rule book of stage craft, you do not frag your band mates. You can give the monitor man shit…fucking throw some shit at that guy, but your band mates—there's only three of us on stage. 

So he turns around and gives me the look… I'm short circuiting. So we come off stage before the encore and immediately we're shouting at each other but we can't hear each other cause we got our ear monitors in. I have no idea what he was shouting at me.  He has no idea what I was shouting at him. And we're fucking shouting and he's throwing things and, you know, there's not much to throw back there either cause it's all big, heavy cases. So the only thing he had to throw was the little plastic water bottle which didn't have quite the, you know, it's not Sting enough. You know, a little plastic bottle. 

We go out and take our bows, "You fucking asshole." "You prick."  "Suck my dick, you piece of shit." We get in the car and we're racing across with the police escort to get us out of the stadium and into town and we're still flipping each other the bird through the window. "Fuck you!" like that. Eventually, we get into downtown Melbourne and we get to a traffic light and I look out of my window and there is a hairy asshole sticking out of that car window. At that point I realized I'm done; I have no further argument. I am defeated by a superior logic, as usual. The son of a bitch, he always pulls something out of the bag.

Ha!

And I guess that has to be one of the fond moments. Not the actual image of the hairy ass sticking out of the thing but the general concept. There we are in downtown Melbourne, Sting's ass sticking out of the car window. So I give that to you, Rolling Stone. 

Thank you. What about playing all this old music that you guys recorded twenty/thirty years ago? That wasn't a highlight?  

We didn't fit back together exactly and we had to readjust. We've all been bandleaders and to really get the band thing you have to surrender. You have to be part of something, not "the thing." You know, you don't have to carry the show yourself, you've got to fold yourself in. That was tough for all three of us.

We went through four months of rehearsal and by the time we hit the stage for the first show we had like the Treaty of Versailles. It was an eighty-seven-page contract. "Okay, 'Roxanne,' I promise to not play a drum fill there if you will agree to the yada yada here."  And we had a – 'Okay, okay.' We had this fragile truce just to get us on stage after four months of rehearsal, and of course, this was shattered within three nights. It was all gone, you know, transgressions on both sides of the armistice line. What was important was the audience validated and negated—all of our arguments were nothing. We got an audience responding or we didn't. 

And that there – because at this time we were wondering, "What the hell are we doing here?  Why are we here?" By the end of rehearsals we sold every ticket available and so we sort of understood that aspect of why we're here, but musically/artistically we were still shaking our heads, you know, like each one of us with our own opinion of what's wrong with this fucking group, you know, which is the other two guys. But we get on stage and we can just feel that this does work. You just don't get that response from an audience unless some aspect of it really works.

So we would come off stage having to shake our heads saying, "You're a complete asshole.  You're a dick.  You don't know anything about music.  Your head is up your ass, but I guess…" – and it took a while to actually go beyond those three little dots at the end of that, you know, and say, "I guess it's alright." And that carries over to the next portion of the tour. It's cool, I'll put up with it. Guys who work for me wouldn't be doing that, but I guess it kinda works so I'm gonna go with it.

Then we got to this last leg, which is all add-on; it's all extra. We had our little, I forget, a month off or something like that. When we came back on the road, this is the "School's Out For Summer Tour," where there's no treaty, there's no agreements, there's no fucking anything…and that's when we landed on our original formula, our true formula. 

I guess our true formula is to have fucking incredible songs that Sting wrote. That's the formula beginning and end but the details of what makes it kind of better than a bunch of songs was that you never know what the other bastard is gonna do and you better stay on your toes. Throwing each other curve balls instead of like taking offense, you run with it and you go with it. That's the part we got into in this last stage of the tour, which is where we go out there and I'm proud of the band now.

I know now that anybody, any musician, can come to our show and they will leave scared. I can just feel this is shit that nobody else can do. Those two guys, over here on my left and over there on my right, these fucking guys really make whatever it is that I do work.  And so we were crap. At the beginning we sounded like a high school band. With a little rehearsal we sounded like a college band. Eventually by the time we played stadiums we were sounding like a bar band. But now I truly feel all humility that we are worthy of…we're world class. 

Worthy of Madison Square Garden.

Worthy of Madison Square Garden. But by the way, the last proper Police show has been played—that was last night…

Okay.

Tomorrow night I mean, okay, we threw away the rule book, you know, a few months ago and tomorrow night we're throwing away our sanity, our hair pieces, anything can happen tomorrow. 

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