But his family background is arguably the most mind boggling in the history of pop. His father, Miles Copeland Jr, was not only a former trumpeter in the Glenn Miller orchestra but one of the founding field officers of the CIA, America's often infamous intelligence service, and later a freelance political adviser to the sheikhs and oil barons of the Middle East.
This meant that Stewart spent his childhood in Cairo (President Nasser was a regular dinner guest) and then, for nine years, in a Beirut for which the news reporter's cliche "trouble-torn" was nearly as apt then as it is now. These settings were, incidentally, quite convenient for Stewart's mother, Lorraine, an archaeologist. While generally the Copelands lived in some luxury tended by a team of servants, tranquillity was never more than superficial. One of Stewart's earliest memories is of a Lebanese civil war: "I was just a toddler, but I remember explosions in the night, sandbags and tanks in the street, gangs fighting and gunfire. We were living in an apartment with the rooms full of food and the bathtubs full of water."
If the streets of Beirut weren't rough enough, his older brothers and sister provided him with an in-house school of hard knocks - Miles III was aggressively trying to emulate his father as an achiever and, worse, as disciplinarian during frequent paternal absences; Ian rebelled and joined neighbourhood Arab gangs; Lorraine, ("Lennie") fiercely went her own way against the rampaging masculinity around her. And so Stewart grew up with no kind of opinion of himself. Looking back, he's said: "I was a late developer in every respect. I was physically small for my age, bespectacled, utterly dreadful at my lessons, a real population statistic." All through his teens he worked away at his drumming, the one thing that made him special - but, sadly, he had to do it solo. There was no band for him to join.
A little excess political heat in 1966 took his father to England, where Stewart concluded his schooling. Then, he went on to the University of California, in Berkeley where he enjoyed his studies in Music, Public Policy and Mass Communications and at last began to acquire some self-esteem. And that was when, quite unpredictably, the Copeland brothers, who'd fought like dogs through their teens, were drawn back together by rock'n'roll.
At the end of the '60s, Miles III quit the stockbroking world he'd previously seen as his vocation and started a record company and agency in England specialising in Progressive bands like Wishbone Ash, Renaissance and The Climax Blues Band. Then Ian returned a bemedalled hero from a voluntary tour of duty in Vietnam, went to work for Miles and found that he was a natural telephone sweettalker, born to be an agent. So when, in 1972, Stewart came over from Berkeley on vacation, he was soon embroiled as on-the-road 'artistic director' for Cat Iron, Miles's hottest hopes (blighted as it turned out, but featuring a young drummer called Kim Turner, who was later co-manager to The Police). Thenceforth, Stewart's musical career was to be pretty much a family affair.
He road-managed Joan Armatrading across America and went back to California for a while but never quite finished his degree. Then he returned to England and joined Curved Air when the drummer left while he was road-managing them (they had lately come under the wing of Miles's company, BTM). It was hardly a promising gig. They had already broken up once and reconvened to pay off a tax bill.
Still, Curved Air did introduce him to the British music papers which were soon deluged with letters enthusing about "the dynamic force of this new percussionist". Some years later Stewart was to proudly confess that nearly all of these paeans were penned by himself. The erstwhile shrinking violet had certainly blossomed in garish technicolour.
(If you are interested please check out this great story a Police fan sent to me about Stewart as a youth in Beirut).
Having won a grant-aided place at an otherwise fee paying Catholic grammar school, he paid attention to social climbing by ridding himself of the local Geordie accent. Perversely though, he gave himself no chance of the outstanding academic achievement which might have given him a way out. In class he was a routine disaffected teenager. Among his contrasting recollections are being caned a school record 42 times in one year, and giving up a promising athletic careerwhen he could finish "only" third in the 100 yard sprint National Junior Championship - it was no use to him if he couldn't be Number 1, it seemed.
Still, he showed a natural gift for music, playing and making up his own songs from the time he picked up an uncle's discarded guitar at eight or nine. He spent his formative years listening intently to artists and styles as diverse as The Beatles, Stax, Tamla, Bob Dylan, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Mingus. The first band he saw live was the 1965 edition of The Graham Bond Organisation, featuring his early bass hero Jack Bruce (later of Cream) - and the second, as it happened, was Zoot Money's Big Roll Band with one Andy Summers on guitar (Sting was unimpressed at the time). The following year, a friend gave him his first bass, homemade and crude, but nonetheless an introduction to the instrument.
In 1969, he qualified for a university place in the Midlands but was so uninspired by what he found that he returned to Newcastle and his parents' home within a month. He drifted for a couple of years through unskilled labour on a building site, a bit of bus conducting and a brief shot at a career in tax collection. Then, in 1971, he at last began to sort himself out. He trained as a teacher and enjoyed the stage-like aspects of the classroom. He took his music out of the bedroom too.
Impartially, he played bass for a college rock group called Earthrise, two trad jazz line-ups - in one of which a waspish yellowand-black striped sweater earned him that perfect nickname - and the ramshackle but locally beloved Newcastle Big Band, game to tackle anything from Coltrane to The Beatles with boozy gusto. Eventually, in 1974, with three friends, he formed Last Exit.
Two years later, with Last Exit still playing local pub residencies, in May 1976 he married Frances Tomelty, a fast-rising actress he'd met while playing bass for a rock musical at a Newcastle theatre 18 months earlier. That October their first child, Joe, was born. All of this could have implied a settling-down phase. Instead, he quit his job as a teacher so that he could move his family down to London with Last Exit and make it big. Their farewell-to-Newcastle gig was already booked before he met Stewart Copeland.
He left school at 17 to work in a music shop and performed in public for the first time at the Blue Note jazz club in Bournemouth, filling in between the headline band's then-traditional two sets. There, he met a musical soulmate called Zoot Money, a Hammond organist, whom he'd first known at school. Their careers were to be interwoven for several years. But in 1961 they had a while to wait before their brand of rhythm & blues became commercial. In the meantime, Andy played the Blue Note and earned his living via residencies in the big seafront hotels.
Then, in 1963, when The Beatles were about to burst out of Liverpool, Zoot got a job in London with British blues guru Alexis Korner and Andy decided to go too, in the hope of establishing himself. They soon struck out on their own as Zoot Money's Big Roll Band, starting at The Flamingo, where they replaced Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames as the house band. They regularly chalked up more than 10 gigs a week, often at 400 Pounds a time - very good money indeed - although glory somehow eluded them, apart from their one hit single, Big Time Operator. (A Big Roll highlight was playing with James Brown in Paris, the performance featuring Zoot's trousers being pulled down by Eric Burdon, a sensation which, Andy avers, doubled their gig money thereafter.) Struggling to find a niche in the psychedelic market, in 1967, the year of Sgt. Pepper, the Big Roll Band became Dantalion's Chariot, all cosmic philosophising, strobe lights - and some very good music too. But still nobody wanted the records. And that was when the 10-year steady flow of Andy Summers' musical life was broken.
Within 12 months in 1968, the Chariot was brought to an end by a bad car crash in which Andy was injured; he did a stint with avant-gardists Soft Machine, leaving them after a three-month tour; he rejoined Zoot in Eric Burdon's Los Angeles-based New Animals and they split up when the singer decided he wanted to be an actor. Deciding this was a moment to pause and reconsider, Andy stepped back to work on his music more formally. With, he says, $5 in his pocket, he married a Californian singer called Robin Lane and, for three years, studied classical guitar at Northridge University. He earnt a hand-to-mouth living by giving lessons himself.
Then his marriage broke up and Andy found himself at the lowest ebb of despair he'd ever experienced. He has described a period of weeks when he rarely got out of bed because he just couldn't see the point. But, at length, he shook himself out of it by picking up the electric guitar again. He found he had more determination than ever before: "I'd been through a lot. I'd watched musicians drop away left, right and centre - the carnage was dreadful - but I could play and I had the ego that wanted to succeed. The need to be a supreme musician was the strongest force."
Feeling renewed, he returned to Britain in 1973 and quickly re-established himself as the complete, reliable sideman, renting his skills out successively to Tim Rose (of Morning Dew fame), Neil Sedaka, David Essex, Kevin Coyne, Jon Lord (of Deep Purple), Kevin Ayers (formerly in Soft Machine) and Eberhard Schoener (an avant-garde German composer). He even took the Mike Oldfield role in a live orchestral performance of Tubular Bells at Newcastle City Hall - with Last Exit as the support band. Andy didn't rate them.
A formidable track record. But when, at a party around Christmas 1976, Mike Howlett started chatting him up about Strontium 90, Andy Summers was still unfulfilled, he still wanted more.
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