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Am I? What's New?Part of the inner dynamic that makes the Police stand out from the crowd in modern pop is the way the group's founder, Stewart Copeland, plays through the music; not merely marking time, but creating a kinetic fabric of melody and motion. While Sting marks the backflow of the music with his subtractive basslines (and relates to the women), and Andy Summers straddles timekeeping and orchestration with his polytonal arpeggios, Copeland almost takes on the role of a lead instrument, providing a subversive collage of off-beat accents, five-alarm flourishes and songlike phrases - without ever abrogating the pulse or failing to support the vocals.
The celebrated tensions and artistic conflicts within the Police include matters of interpretation, the ratio of instrumental music to singing, and Summers' and Copeland's inclination to compose Police songs. But these tensions lead to something greater than the sum of their arguments, for while Copeland acknowledges a "battling brother" characterization of him and Sting, the fact is that his group has grown beyond his original conception. "That's certainly the case," Copeland says matter-of-factly. "But you see, one of the things that the fans - including myself - expect from the group is the songs. and if it sounds to you like the band's contribution to the songs isn't nearly as great as on past albums ... well, Synchronicity is all about songs - and everything else is subservient to those songs. And that's good, because we all like working on songs, developing them. And my contribution isn't limited to playing the drums, but to producing and arranging the overall sound. Same with Andy. But it's always been that way. Sting isn't limited to bass or vocals, either.
"In writing material for this Police album, we were put in the same frustrating position that musicians all over the country are in, which is trying to write the next Police song. And I suddenly found myself trying to copy the Police - just like everybody else. We've certainly tried to go beyond the boundaries of our past music, but without getting distracted by the quirks or trying to be too individualistic - just straight-to-the-point - - whereas in the past we'd take a great song like 'Roxanne' or 'Can't Stand Losing You' and try to do something weird with it.
"The music that I've been writing recently hasn't really been song material, and when I do write songs, they're not really Police songs. I regard songs as pop culture, and I don't tend to take it so seriously; it's serious, but it's still just pop music. Sting has the ability to write pop songs that are serious ... and I think 'Darkness' qualifies, but it's not really my forte. Mind you, I'm working on a film score now for Francis Ford Coppola, Rumblefish, and I've discovered anew, a new medium for music. Which is, instead of having a lyric or a vocal as the top line, you have a picture as the top line, and that is really exciting. And I'm really still too close to recording Synchronicity to be sure about the results. All the ideas of the past album are distilled right down to the point where they're almost subliminal. And I really don't know if they worked or not. Sometimes I think we distilled it out of existence, and other times I think we've concentrated it in such a way that it's more powerful than it ever was."
Stewart's ambivalence is understandable. Gone are the trademark blips and bleeps of ambient color and percussion, the jazzed up dub: these are superceded by a kind of rhythmic shorthand as Sting catches up to his persona and tries to reinvent himself, put the recent past in perspective (confession is good for the soul), and evolve the melodic contour of his narratives in spare, tender pop miniatures with an electro-ethnic flavor.
Side two sandwiches Andy's manic 7/4 Vincent Price-raga "Mother" and Stewart's bouncy iron-curtain pop "Miss Gradenko" in between some more arena-sized gestures. "Those two tracks by Andy and me are concessions, like on the Jim Hendrix albums where there'd be one Noel Redding track. We've all been growing in different directions, so our songs stand out as being different from the other tracks more obviously than they have on other albums.
"I think this album will be considered more mainstream than some in the past, and I don't know if we expanded the frontiers of our music as much as we all hoped to, as we've always tried to do," Stewart muses, "but there are a lot of interesting details. I'm using a Tama system where you attach a contact mike to the drum, so they're dynamic and respond to attack, plus Paiste rude cymbals. And one instrument that I used on almost every track was the Tama gong drum, which is like a cross between a great big bass drum on a stand and tympani; you play it with a large felt mallet. We use a lot of room ambience; so there're two Sennheisers at the other end of the room, compressed beyond belief, and that gives a lot of the crack, the power to it. Also I've been experimenting with putting a 4/4 type backbeat over a 6/8 rhythm, and I thought we were pretty clever on that one. So I play the backbeat over threes, and the backbeat switches: so for one bar it's the downbeat; and the next bar it's the backbeat; and the next bar the downbeat again. There's a lot of that, and it's an interesting effect."
Stewart'll probably end up liking the album as much as I do, once the novelty wears off, and with some distance from it he can let himself fall for the plain-spoken, deceptive simplicity of it ... and get a chance to bend it in live performance, his real passion. "In the studio, perhaps, there are all kinds of things I would own up to, but onstage it's almost like a religious experience, even after five years." Which only serves to amplify their collective midlife crisis - that's a long time for any modern relationship. "It's an inevitable thing, and every group has to go through this. After five formative years and five albums you grow apart. Now, the only thing that the three of us have in common is onstage and on that album. That's the only place we achieve synchronicity."
He pauses and considers. "It sounds like I'm telling you that we're going to break up tomorrow." Well, you break up every few weeks, I suggest. Stewart laughs. "That's right. I mean, we've reached the breaking point, but we've never seen it. It sounds kind of jaded to say, but we've achieved all our goals. When it comes to the Police, we have to think up some new goals. In a way I kind of hunger to start all over again. And probably the guys I'd pick would be the same two guys."
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