The Police: A Fragile Truce

Copeland says his 2006 documentary, Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out - compiled from reels of Super-8 film he shot during the band's first lifetime - has no footage of actual fighting, "because Sting works out. He used to run, like, twenty miles a day then. If you're trying to squeeze the life out of him, it takes two hands, with no free hand to film. So I never got that shot."

But in Vancouver, there are no raised voices or fisticuffs. A tall, brassy American as loud and direct in his opinions as Sting is cool and fixed in his, Copeland, 54, is blase about the British bassist's attention to minutiae. "We'll be fiddling with tempos," he says, "until sound check on the night of the first show."