The story of The Police

Three roads to London

The singer we know as Sting was born Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner on the second of October 1951 in Wallsend, a shipbuilding town just outside Newcastle. He was the eldest of four children. His mother Audrey was a hairdresser and his father Ernest was a milkman, and young Gordon helped out on the milk round. The shipyards loomed at the end of his street, and he later said that watching the Queen Mother glide past in a Rolls Royce made him want a bigger life than the yards could offer. By the age of ten he was obsessed with a battered Spanish guitar left behind by a friend of his father who had emigrated. As a teenager he went to Newcastle clubs to watch Cream and Manfred Mann, and those nights shaped his taste.[1] [2]

Gordon's route to music was anything but direct. He lasted one term at the University of Warwick, then worked as a bus conductor, a building labourer and even a tax officer. He trained as a teacher, qualified in 1973 and spent two years teaching at a first school in Cramlington. In the evenings he played jazz bass with the Phoenix Jazzmen, the Newcastle Big Band and a fusion group called Last Exit. The nickname came from those jazz nights. He liked to wear a black and yellow striped jumper, and bandleader Gordon Solomon said it made him look like a wasp. The name stuck so firmly that he once said you could shout Gordon in the street and he would simply step out of your way. In May 1976 he married the Northern Irish actress Frances Tomelty, whom he had met on a stage musical in Newcastle.[1] [2] [3]

The drummer came from a very different world. Stewart Copeland was born on the sixteenth of July 1952 in Alexandria, Virginia, the youngest of four children. His father, Miles Copeland Junior, was a founding member of the CIA, and his British mother Lorraine was an archaeologist who had served in wartime British intelligence. A few months after Stewart was born the family moved to Cairo, and when he was five they settled in Beirut. He started drum lessons at twelve and was playing school dances within a year. After boarding school in Somerset and college in California, he came back to England, first as a road manager for the progressive rock band Curved Air and then, in 1975, as their drummer. He fell for their singer, Sonja Kristina, and the two later married.[1] [2]

The guitarist was the veteran of the three, a full decade older than the others. Andy Summers was born on the thirty first of December 1942 in Lancashire and grew up in Bournemouth, picking up the guitar at ten and falling for jazz. By nineteen he was in London with Zoot Money's Big Roll Band, which mutated into the psychedelic group Dantalian's Chariot. In September 1966 he was the first guitarist Jimi Hendrix met after landing in Britain. Summers spent a summer in Soft Machine and joined Eric Burdon and the Animals in 1968. He then spent five years in Los Angeles studying classical guitar, graduating in 1972, before returning to London for session and touring work with Kevin Ayers, Kevin Coyne, Joan Armatrading and Neil Sedaka.[1] [2]

Keep talking: the birth of the Police

In September 1976 Curved Air played Newcastle, and the music journalist Phil Sutcliffe took Stewart Copeland to see Last Exit. Copeland was bowled over by the singing bass player. When he later rang Sutcliffe for the number and started gushing about punk, Sutcliffe refused to hand it over. But his partner answered the next call and cheerfully read out the number. Copeland phoned, pitched his plan, and heard the reply keep talking. On the fourteenth of December 1976 Sting arrived in London with his bass, his wife Frances, their baby son Joe and a dog. He called from a phone box and minutes later was jamming with Copeland in a Mayfair flat. That night the two went to the newly opened Roxy club and watched Generation X, convinced they could outplay everyone there.[1] [2] [3]

Copeland wanted a trio, because that is how Jimi Hendrix and Cream had done it, and he already had a name: the Police. For a guitarist he found Henry Padovani, a Corsican friend of a family friend who had just shaved off his waist length hair after seeing a punk show. Padovani barely spoke English but he looked the part, and he was the only punk minded player Copeland could find who could really play. Sting was less keen on punk but saw the opening it offered an unknown newcomer. The Police played their first concert on the first of March 1977 at the Alexandria Club in Newport, Wales, a set that lasted about ten minutes. They then worked London pubs and punk clubs, backing and supporting Cherry Vanilla and Wayne County and the Electric Chairs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Their first single, Fall Out, was recorded on the twelfth of February 1977, before the band had even played live, on a budget of one hundred and fifty pounds borrowed from a friend, Paul Mulligan. Copeland wrote the song and played most of the guitar himself, with Padovani adding the solos. It came out on the first of May 1977 on Illegal Records, a label run by Stewart's older brother Miles. Mick Jagger reviewed it in the music weekly Sounds, which the band counted as a coup. The cover photo was shot on the roof of Copeland's flat, and Padovani's sneer was genuine: he had a raging toothache that day. Copeland later admitted the single sold mostly because punk fans bought every punk record that came out.[1] [2] [3]

In May 1977 Mike Howlett, formerly of Gong, invited Sting into a side project called Strontium 90. Sting brought Copeland along on drums, and the guitarist was Andy Summers. Summers impressed Sting, who was growing frustrated with Padovani's limited playing, and after a Strontium 90 show Sting asked him to join the Police. Summers agreed, but only if the band stayed a trio with him as the one guitarist. Out of loyalty, Sting and Copeland first tried a four piece with both guitarists, playing the Music Machine in London and a French punk festival at Mont de Marsan. After an abandoned recording session with John Cale in August, Summers delivered an ultimatum and Copeland phoned Padovani to let him go. The trio of Sting, Summers and Copeland played its first gig on the eighteenth of August 1977 in Birmingham, and that line up never changed again.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Punk purists never quite trusted them. All three were skilled players with jazz and progressive rock pasts, and other punk bands accused them of lacking street credibility. They even moonlighted in Germany with the experimental composer Eberhard Schoener, which made Sting's high voice familiar on German television. The famous bleached hair happened almost by accident. In February 1978, badly short of money, they were hired for a Wrigley's chewing gum advert directed by Tony Scott, on condition that they dye their hair blond to play a punk band. Summers remembered carrying a giant packet of gum across the set. The advert never aired, but the blond hair stayed and became their trademark.[1] [2]

Roxanne and the long climb

In October 1977 the Police were in Paris to play the Nashville Club, staying in a seedy hotel near the red light district. Walking those streets, Sting started writing about a man in love with a prostitute. He took the name Roxanne from an old poster for Cyrano de Bergerac hanging in the hotel foyer. He imagined the song as a bossa nova, and Copeland pushed it towards a tango rhythm. During the recording Sting accidentally sat down on a piano keyboard, and the jarring chord and his laughter are still there at the very start of the track. The band thought it was a throwaway. It was slow, quiet and melodic, nothing like their fast punk set, and they were embarrassed to play it to Miles Copeland.[1] [2]

The first album was made with no manager and no record deal. Miles Copeland lent them one thousand five hundred pounds, and they recorded in spare hours at Surrey Sound, a small studio in Leatherhead run by the brothers Nigel and Chris Gray. Miles sneered at most of what he heard, until the end of one session when he heard Roxanne. The next day he took it to A and M Records and landed a deal for a single. Released in April 1978, it flopped. The BBC did not put it on its playlist because of the subject, and A and M cheekily promoted it with posters saying Banned by the BBC, even though it never was. Miles had wanted to call the album Police Brutality, but after Roxanne he suggested Outlandos d'Amour, loosely the outlaws of love.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The second single, Can't Stand Losing You, was about a heartbroken teenager contemplating suicide. Sting later called the lyric juvenile and said it took five minutes to write. Its sleeve showed Stewart Copeland standing on a block of ice with a noose around his neck, waiting for the ice to melt, and the BBC refused to play it because of that photo. Even so, it became their first hit, reaching number forty two in October 1978. That month they made their television debut on The Old Grey Whistle Test, with Sting in huge sunglasses after a hairspray accident in make up that needed a hospital visit. Outlandos d'Amour came out on the seventeenth of November 1978. Amusingly, Copeland had already beaten his own band into the charts with a solo single, Don't Care, recorded under the name Klark Kent.[1] [2] [3] [4]

America changed everything. Late in 1978 the trio flew over on Freddie Laker's cheap Skytrain for about a hundred pounds each, and toured in a Ford Econoline van with their gear in the back. Stewart's brother Ian Copeland, a booking agent, got them into clubs, at around two hundred dollars a night, enough for two hotel rooms, fuel and a small allowance for food. They played CBGB in New York, and a radio station in Poughkeepsie started playing Roxanne. Issued in North America in early 1979, it reached number thirty two in the United States. That success sent it back into the British charts, where it climbed to number twelve. A reissued Can't Stand Losing You then reached number two, kept off the top only by the Boomtown Rats, and So Lonely went top ten in early 1980.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Copeland remembered the moment the mood changed. The Police were supporting the comedy rock band the Albertos at Birmingham Town Hall, and the headliners' manager joked that the Police should have paid to be on such a sold out tour. When the trio walked on stage they were met by a wall of screaming teenage girls, and they realised who had bought the tickets. After a year of scraping by as a so called fake punk band, they were suddenly on the front of teen magazines, fighting through a crowd to reach their cars. Summers admitted there had been months when they were hanging by a thread, splitting a couple of pounds each a night, before that first American tour turned things around.[1] [2]

White reggae and a world tour

For their second album the Police ignored A and M's wish for a bigger studio and a famous producer, and went back to Surrey Sound and Nigel Gray. The budget was small enough to pay from their own profits, so the label had no say in the music. They were short of new songs, and even thought about re recording Fall Out. Instead, Sting and Copeland raided old material. Bring On the Night began life as a Last Exit song about Pontius Pilate, and Does Everyone Stare grew from a piano piece Copeland wrote at college. The title Reggatta de Blanc loosely means white reggae. Released on the fifth of October 1979, it went straight to number one in Britain, and its title track won the band their first Grammy.[1] [2]

Message in a Bottle gave the Police their first British number one. It tells of a castaway who sends out a plea for love, hears nothing for a year, then finds a hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore, proof that everyone is lonely. Summers built the shimmering riff from several overdubbed guitar parts, and he called Copeland's performance the finest drum track he ever played. The follow up, Walking on the Moon, also hit number one. Sting said he came up with it drunk in a Munich hotel room, pacing and singing walking round the room, then changed it to something he thought was even sillier. Its video was shot at the Kennedy Space Center in October 1979, with Copeland drumming on a Saturn Five rocket.[1] [2] [3]

In March 1980 the Police set off on a tour that took them to places few Western rock bands visited, including Mexico, India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Greece and Egypt. The trip was filmed and released as The Police Around the World. Sting later said that when they reached India it drove people just as crazy as anywhere else, and that playing outside Europe and America confirmed for him that the music really connected. Back home, A and M boxed up their singles in a set called Six Pack, which reached number seventeen on the singles chart. The band's early records were now selling strongly on both sides of the Atlantic, and the pressure was on to deliver a third album quickly.[1] [2]

That third album, Zenyatta Mondatta, was made in a rush. For tax reasons they could not record in Britain, so they flew Nigel Gray to a studio in Hilversum in the Netherlands and gave themselves four weeks. They finished at four in the morning on the day their next world tour began, grabbed a few hours of sleep and drove to Belgium for the first show. All three later said they regretted the haste. The title is invented, meant simply to roll off the tongue, with hints of Zen, of Jomo Kenyatta and of the French word for world. It was released on the third of October 1980, spent four weeks at number one in Britain and reached number five in America, their true breakthrough there.[1] [2]

Its lead single, Don't Stand So Close to Me, is about a teacher tempted by a pupil, with a nod to Nabokov's Lolita. Sting, a former teacher himself, has told the story of its inspiration in different ways over the years. It spent four weeks at number one and was the best selling British single of 1980, and it also won a Grammy. De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da, which critics dismissed as baby talk, was meant as a comment on how words are used to manipulate people. The album also carried darker themes, with Driven to Tears about world hunger and Copeland's Bombs Away about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And Summers won a second Grammy for his instrumental Behind My Camel, a track Sting so disliked that he says he buried the tape in the studio garden.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ghosts, tax exiles and hunger strikes

For the fourth album the Police swapped Leatherhead for paradise. They spent six weeks at George Martin's AIR Studios on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, which Copeland described as a twelve hour flight from the nearest record company. They also changed producer, bringing in Hugh Padgham, famous for the huge drum sound on records by Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins. Padgham put each musician in a different room: Summers in the main studio with his amplifiers, Sting in the control room with his bass plugged straight into the desk, and Copeland in the dining room for a livelier drum sound. Sting played all the saxophones himself and brought in keyboards. The title came from Arthur Koestler's book The Ghost in the Machine, and Koestler said he was slightly tickled by the tribute.[1] [2]

Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic was an old song. Sting had written it around 1977, soon after arriving in London, and first demoed it alone in Mike Howlett's loft. In January 1981 he recorded a new demo in Quebec with the keyboard player Jean Roussel. When the band could not beat that demo in Montserrat, Sting persuaded Summers and Copeland to play over the top of it, much to their irritation. Summers found Roussel pushy and felt the keyboards smothered the trio. It became their fourth British number one and reached number three in America. Spirits in the Material World caused another fight. Sting wanted it played on synthesizer only, Summers wanted guitar, and the compromise buried Summers under the synth.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The darkest song on the album was Invisible Sun. Sting wrote it in Ireland in 1981, during the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland's prisons. He said he wanted to write about that despair while still offering some light at the end of the tunnel. Copeland heard it differently. For him it was about Beirut, the city where he grew up, which was then being shelled. The lyric mentions the Armalite rifle, and the video used footage of the conflict in Northern Ireland, so the BBC banned the video. The single still reached number two in Britain. Sting was living in Ireland as a tax exile, in Roundstone in County Galway, while Summers had moved to Kinsale in County Cork.[1] [2]

By 1982 all three were stretching beyond the band. Sting had already played the Ace Face in the Mods film Quadrophenia in 1979, and in 1982 he starred in Brimstone and Treacle, scoring a solo hit with an old show tune, Spread a Little Happiness. In 1981 he made his first solo stage appearances at an Amnesty International benefit, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball. Summers made an album with Robert Fripp of King Crimson, and Copeland scored Francis Ford Coppola's film Rumble Fish, earning a Golden Globe nomination. The Police were named Best British Group at the 1982 Brit Awards. Behind the scenes, marriages were breaking. After the birth of his second child in 1982, Sting separated from Frances Tomelty and began a relationship with their neighbour and her friend, the actress Trudie Styler. Summers was going through a divorce too.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Synchronicity: paradise and hell

With his first marriage collapsing, Sting escaped to Jamaica and stayed at Goldeneye, the former home of James Bond author Ian Fleming. Sitting at Fleming's own writing desk, he wrote Every Breath You Take, King of Pain and Wrapped Around Your Finger. He said he woke in the night with the line in his head and finished the song at the piano in half an hour. It sounds like a tender love song, but he meant it as something sinister, about surveillance, jealousy and control. King of Pain came from a moment with Trudie Styler, when he pointed at a black spot on the sun and said that was his soul up there. He was also reading Carl Jung and Arthur Koestler, and Jung's idea of meaningful coincidence gave the album its name, Synchronicity.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The sessions began at AIR Montserrat in December 1982 and were grim. Padgham said that after two weeks they had nothing usable on tape, and that Sting and Copeland hated each other, with verbal and even physical fights in the studio. Miles Copeland flew in and there was a meeting about whether to carry on at all. Summers went to see George Martin, who happened to be on the island, and asked for help. Martin told him it was typical group stuff and that they should sort it out themselves. Copeland later summed up those weeks by saying they were in paradise creating their own hell. The drums for Every Breath You Take were built up piece by piece, in a dining room so hot that his sticks had to be taped to his hands.[1] [2] [3]

Every Breath You Take arrived as a demo with Sting singing over a Hammond organ, and nobody could agree how to play it. Sting finally told Summers to go and make it his own. Summers, who had been practising Bartok violin duets for a project with Robert Fripp, played a rippling pattern through the chords in a single take, and the control room erupted in applause. There were lighter moments too. Murder by Numbers began when Summers idly played jazz chords at the dinner table, and the first time they ever played it became the finished recording. When Summers's roadie fell asleep, the band recorded his snoring and used it as the Loch Ness monster in Synchronicity Two. Copeland later said being in the Police was like wearing a Prada suit made of barbed wire.[1] [2] [3]

Synchronicity was released on the seventeenth of June 1983. It entered the British chart at number one and in America spent seventeen weeks at the top, interrupting the long reign of Michael Jackson's Thriller. In Canada it held number one for twenty four weeks in a row, a record that still stands. Every Breath You Take was number one in America for eight weeks and was the country's best selling single of the year. Its moody black and white video by Godley and Creme became an MTV staple. At the Grammys the album lost Album of the Year to Thriller, but Every Breath You Take beat Billie Jean for Song of the Year. By now critics were calling the Police the biggest band in the world.[1] [2] [3]

On the eighteenth of August 1983 the Police played Shea Stadium in New York, where the Beatles had famously played. The fifty five thousand seats sold so quickly that the field was opened to fans, bringing the crowd to about seventy thousand. Near the end Sting thanked the Beatles for lending them their stadium. He later said that on stage that night he thought this is it, you cannot do any better, and decided to stop. The tour rolled on through Britain, including four nights at Wembley Arena, with Sting's hair dyed orange for his role in the film Dune. Tempers still flared. Copeland has admitted he once broke Sting's rib, though he insists they were only play fighting. The final show came in Melbourne on the fourth of March 1984.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The long goodbye

There was no announcement. After Melbourne in March 1984 the Police simply stopped. Sting made his first solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, with jazz players including Branford Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland, and it came out in June 1985. Its first single, If You Love Somebody Set Them Free, was, he later said, the antidote he had to write after poisoning people with Every Breath You Take. Copeland travelled across Africa for a film and album called The Rhythmatist, which includes him drumming in a cage surrounded by lions. Summers made a second album with Robert Fripp. In February 1985 the band received the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, and that July Sting and Copeland both appeared at Live Aid.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In June 1986 the trio reunited for the last three shows of Amnesty International's Conspiracy of Hope tour in America. At the final show, at Giants Stadium in New Jersey on the fifteenth of June, they closed with Invisible Sun, brought out Bono for the last verse, then handed their instruments to U2. Bono called it a very big moment, like passing a torch. In July they went into the studio to make a new album. But the night before, Copeland fell from his horse playing polo and broke his collarbone. With no drumming possible, he programmed his Fairlight computer while Sting pushed for his Synclavier, and Copeland recalled two weeks of screaming at each other. They re recorded Don't Stand So Close to Me, which reached number twenty four. Summers called the whole attempt an empty exercise.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The years that followed brought private grief. Sting's mother died of cancer in 1986 and his father died of cancer the following year. To keep the press away, Sting did not attend either funeral. His 1991 album The Soul Cages was dedicated to his late father. Then came a betrayal. Sting's accountant of fifteen years, Keith Moore, had secretly moved around six million pounds out of the singer's accounts, losing much of it on schemes Sting knew nothing about, including Indian restaurants in Australia and a plan to turn Russian military aircraft into passenger jets. In 1995 Sting gave evidence at Southwark Crown Court, and Moore was jailed for six years. Stewart Copeland's father, the former CIA man Miles Copeland Junior, died in 1991.[1] [2] [3]

All three built long careers outside the band. Copeland became an in demand composer, scoring films such as Wall Street, the television series The Equalizer and the Spyro the Dragon video games, and he formed the bands Animal Logic and later Oysterhead. In 2002 he was hired by two surviving Doors, Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger, for their revival band, and when he was dropped he sued them for more than a million dollars. Summers made jazz and instrumental albums, scored films including Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and exhibited his photography around the world. The old bandmates still crossed paths. Summers played on Sting's album Nothing Like the Sun, Sting returned the favour on Summers's Charming Snakes, and on Sting's fortieth birthday in 1991 Summers joined him at the Hollywood Bowl.[1] [2] [3] [4]

When Sting married Trudie Styler in August 1992, Summers and Copeland were among the guests, and the crowd pushed them into playing Roxanne and Message in a Bottle. Copeland said that after about three minutes it became the thing again. On the tenth of March 2003 the Police were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility, and played together, ending with Every Breath You Take alongside Steven Tyler, Gwen Stefani and John Mayer. In May 2006 Ian Copeland, the agent who had booked their first American dates, died of melanoma at fifty seven. That year Stewart premiered Everyone Stares, a documentary built from Super Eight film he shot on the road, and Summers published his memoir, One Train Later.[1] [2] [3] [4]

We are the Police, and we're back

For more than twenty years Sting said no to a reunion, again and again. Then on the eleventh of February 2007 the trio opened the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Sting announced that they were the Police and they were back, and they launched into Roxanne. The next day, at the Whisky a Go Go, they confirmed a world tour for the thirtieth anniversary of the band. The opening act would be Fiction Plane, fronted by Sting's son Joe Sumner. Sting explained that he wanted to go back and make the band better, saying he was a better bandleader now than he had been. In rehearsals in Vancouver he stopped songs repeatedly to fix tempos and chords, while Summers joked that the Police were not a democracy but an ego cracy.[1] [2] [3]

The tour opened in Vancouver on the twenty eighth of May 2007 in front of twenty two thousand fans, and the reviews were glowing. Then Copeland posted his own review on his website, calling the second night lame. He joked that they had mangled the key changes, that Summers seemed to be in Idaho during the opening song, and he poked fun at one of Sting's leaps. The press read it as a feud just two gigs in. Copeland apologised to his buddy Sting and blamed his own hyper self criticism, saying the three had fallen into each other's arms laughing after the show. In July they closed the Live Earth concert in New Jersey with Message in a Bottle, joined by John Mayer and Kanye West.[1] [2] [3]

Tickets for the British leg sold out within thirty minutes, and they played two nights at Twickenham Stadium in September 2007. In Paris that month the original guitarist, Henry Padovani, joined them for the encore, and the Police played Next to You as a four piece for the first time in thirty years. Their biggest crowd of the tour was in Dublin, about eighty two thousand people. France made all three members knights of the Order of Arts and Letters. Copeland later remembered a show in Turin where he sped up during a Summers guitar solo and Sting started shouting at him in front of eighty thousand Italians. He said he wanted to kill him, but that it was one of the best shows they ever played.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In February 2008 Sting made it official: no new album, no more tours, and when the reunion ended, that was it for the Police. The final show was at Madison Square Garden on the seventh of August 2008. They opened with Cream's Sunshine of Your Love, brought on the New York City Police marching band for Message in a Bottle, and donated a million dollars to a city tree planting scheme. They finished with Next to You, then a costumed opera singer appeared and Porky Pig announced that's all folks. Sting told the crowd the triumph of the tour was that they had not strangled each other. The tour sold about three point seven million tickets and grossed more than three hundred and fifty million dollars, making them the highest earning musicians of 2008.[1] [2] [3]

Separate lives and a courtroom

Sting's solo career kept widening. He recorded Elizabethan lute songs, reworked his hits with orchestras, and wrote The Last Ship, a musical about the decline of shipbuilding in his native Wallsend, which reached Broadway in 2014. He received Kennedy Center Honors in 2014 and the Polar Music Prize in 2017. There was controversy too. In 2009 he was criticised over a concert in Uzbekistan, after reports that he had been paid between one and two million pounds by the regime of President Islam Karimov, accused by the United Nations and Amnesty of human rights abuses. In November 2016 he reopened the Bataclan in Paris a year after the terror attack there, and Henry Padovani joined him for Next to You. As of 2026 he was touring a new version of The Last Ship, playing the foreman himself, with Shaggy beside him on stage.[1] [2]

Copeland wrote operas, ballets and orchestral works, published a memoir in 2009, and narrated an arena production of Ben Hur in London on horseback, until the horse bolted in front of eighteen thousand people. He started a YouTube channel of jam sessions from his home studio, which he calls the Sacred Grove. In 2023 his album Divine Tides with the Indian composer Ricky Kej won a Grammy, and he released an orchestral album of Police songs. He also toured a spoken show about his life. Summers kept recording jazz and ambient guitar albums, published books of photographs and short stories, formed the band Circa Zero, and in 2017 started a Police tribute band in Brazil called Call the Police with two Brazilian rock musicians.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The music kept earning. In 2022 Universal Music Group bought Sting's songwriting catalogue, covering his solo work and his Police songs, in a deal reported at between two hundred and three hundred million dollars. In 2023 the Library of Congress added Synchronicity to the National Recording Registry. In July 2024 the band released a deluxe fortieth anniversary edition of Synchronicity with dozens of unreleased demos and outtakes, the first time any Police album got that treatment. Copeland said it was the Beatles' Get Back documentary that changed their minds about showing songs in their underpants. Asked by Mojo about another reunion, he put the chances at a tiny fraction of one percent.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Then the old tensions reached court. Legal action began in late 2024, and in August 2025 it became public that Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland were suing Sting and his company, Magnetic Publishing, at the High Court in London. They did not have writing credits on most of the hits, but they said the band had agreed in 1977 that whoever received publishing income for a song would share around fifteen percent with the other two, as an arranger's fee. That deal was written down in 1981 and revised in later agreements, including one in 2016. Summers remembered the original deal being struck on the street outside Miles Copeland's office. Sting's side said there was never an oral agreement, and his lawyers called the claims illegitimate.[1] [2] [3]

The case turned on streaming. Summers and Copeland argued that their share should cover money from streams and downloads, which now dwarf record sales. Sting's lawyers argued that the 2016 agreement only covered income from the manufacture of records, and that streaming counted as public performance. At a High Court hearing in January 2026, the court heard that since the action began Sting had paid his former bandmates more than eight hundred thousand dollars, around six hundred thousand pounds, for what his lawyer called certain admitted historic underpayments. The bandmates' lawyers said their full claim was worth at least eight million pounds. Sting continued to deny the wider claim, and a full trial was expected at a later date.[1] [2] [3]

The legacy

The Police made only five studio albums in six years, yet they sold more than seventy five million records and won six Grammy Awards. Four of their five albums appeared on Rolling Stone's list of the five hundred greatest albums of all time, and Rolling Stone ranked them among the hundred greatest artists. They are remembered as leaders of the second British invasion of America, the band that proved new wave could fill stadiums. Sting described what they did as finding the empty space between untrained punk and bloated corporate rock, something clean and simple. Their sound mixed reggae rhythm, jazz trained musicianship and punk energy, and Summers built his trademark shimmering chorus guitar tone so a trio could sound different on every song.[1] [2] [3]

Every Breath You Take has taken on a life of its own. In 1997 Puff Daddy and Faith Evans built their tribute to the Notorious B.I.G., I'll Be Missing You, on it, and it became a worldwide number one. In 2019 BMI named it the most performed song in its entire catalogue, with nearly fifteen million radio plays. Its video passed a billion views on YouTube in 2022, and the song found a new generation through Stranger Things and TikTok. In January 2026 the Guardian reported it was racking up about three and a half million Spotify streams a day. And it is still misread. Couples play it at weddings, while Sting has called it a nasty little song, really rather evil.[1] [2]

How do the three look back? Copeland says they tore each other's throats out in the studio but got on well on stage, in the van and on the plane, and that they still send each other silly clips online. He calls the idea that he and Sting fought all the time a myth. Sting told Mojo in 2022 that no grown man can really be in a band, because a band is a teenage gang, and said the reunion was hugely successful but that he would never do it again. Summers said in 2015 that despite the headlines they were good friends and supportive of one another. The courtroom battle of 2025 and 2026 showed how tangled that friendship remained.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around The Police

Sting and Stewart Copeland. Copeland founded the band, found Sting in Newcastle and talked him into London. Their rhythm partnership was the engine of the Police, and so was their friction. Copeland bristled at being told what to play, and producer Hugh Padgham said that by 1983 they hated each other. Copeland once broke Sting's rib play fighting. Yet Copeland also says they still share silly clips online, and he calls working with Sting a Prada suit made of barbed wire.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sting and Andy Summers. Summers was the older, calmer professional who liked to serve the singer, but he grew frustrated as keyboards and saxophones crept in and as Sting refused to sing his songs, such as Someone to Talk To. His guitar part helped make Every Breath You Take, and he has long felt it deserved credit. Musically they stayed close, playing on each other's solo records, until the royalties case of 2025 put them on opposite sides in court.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland. The two were often allies against Sting's dominance. Copeland praised Summers for turning the guitar into an orchestral cloud around the band, and backed his claim to a share of Every Breath You Take as early as 2000. In the studio Summers, by Copeland's account, liked to stir up the younger men's arguments. In 2025 the two sued Sting together over unpaid arranger's fees.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stewart Copeland and Miles Copeland III. Stewart's eldest brother Miles ran the Illegal label that issued Fall Out, lent the band money for their first album, and became their manager after hearing Roxanne. He built the Police into a stadium act and used their success to launch I.R.S. Records, home to R.E.M. and the Go Go's. He also acted as referee, flying to Montserrat when the band nearly split during Synchronicity.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sting and Miles Copeland III. Miles was doubtful about the band until Roxanne converted him, and he went on to manage Sting through seven solo albums. He was not part of the 2007 reunion, and later said in an interview that money was the issue. His office in Notting Hill is where, according to Andy Summers, the band's 1977 royalty sharing deal was agreed.[1] [2] [3]

Henry Padovani and The Police. The Corsican guitarist was the original third member, playing on the first single, Fall Out, before being eased out in August 1977 when Summers joined. He went on to Wayne County and the Electric Chairs, then worked as a vice president of I.R.S. Records under Miles Copeland. Relations stayed warm. Sting and Copeland played on his 2007 solo album, and he joined the band on stage in Paris in 2007 and Sting at the Bataclan in 2016.[1] [2] [3]

Sting and Frances Tomelty. Sting married the Northern Irish actress in 1976 after meeting her on a stage musical in Newcastle, where she played the Virgin Mary and he was in the band. They moved to London with their baby son Joe as the Police began, and had a daughter, Kate, in 1982. They separated that year, when Sting fell for their neighbour and Tomelty's friend Trudie Styler, and divorced in 1984. The split fed songs like King of Pain.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sting and Trudie Styler. Styler was a neighbour in Bayswater and a close friend of Sting's first wife before the two became a couple in the early 1980s. She was with him in Jamaica when he wrote King of Pain. They married in 1992, have four children, and together founded the Rainforest Foundation. In 2025 Sting said she had inspired Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Police and Hugh Padgham. Padgham co produced Ghost in the Machine and Synchronicity, putting the three in separate rooms at AIR Montserrat partly for sound and partly for social reasons. He witnessed their worst fights, nearly quit during Every Breath You Take, and later argued that the tension helped make Synchronicity so good. He kept working with Sting as a solo artist.[1] [2] [3]

The Police and Nigel Gray. Gray ran Surrey Sound in Leatherhead with his brother Chris and produced the first three albums on tiny budgets, helping to shape the band's sparse reggae rock sound. For Zenyatta Mondatta he followed them to the Netherlands for a fee of twenty five thousand pounds. He shared in their Grammy wins, and died in 2016.[1] [2] [3]

Stewart Copeland and Ian Copeland. Stewart's brother Ian, a Vietnam veteran turned booking agent, co wrote the lyrics of Nothing Achieving, the band's first B side, and booked the low budget American club tour that broke the Police in the United States. His agency, Frontier Booking International, was known as FBI, which delighted his CIA father. He died of melanoma in 2006.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about The Police

• Stewart Copeland used to write fan letters to the NME praising the Curved Air drummer, who was, of course, himself. Rolling Stone reported in 1984 that before the Police took off, Copeland sent letters to the New Musical Express saying how amazing the drummer in Curved Air was. He was that drummer.[1]
• The Police's trademark bleached hair came from a chewing gum advert that was never shown. In February 1978 the broke band took a Wrigley's commercial directed by Tony Scott on condition they dye their hair blond to look like punks. The advert never aired, but the look stayed.[1]
• Sting accidentally sat on a piano at the start of Roxanne, and the noise and his laughter were left on the record. The atonal piano chord and the giggle you hear just before the band comes in on Roxanne were a studio accident that the Police decided to keep.[1]
• Roxanne was named after a poster for Cyrano de Bergerac in a Paris hotel lobby. Staying in a seedy Paris hotel in October 1977, Sting borrowed the name of Cyrano's beloved from an old poster in the foyer for his song about a man in love with a prostitute.[1]
• Stewart Copeland had a hit single before the Police did, under the name Klark Kent. His song Don't Care, on which he played every instrument, reached number forty eight in August 1978, months before Can't Stand Losing You charted. The three blond Police members first appeared on Top of the Pops as Klark Kent's backing band.[1] [2]
• Mick Jagger reviewed the Police's very first single. Fall Out, made for one hundred and fifty pounds, was reviewed by Jagger in the music paper Sounds. He called it competently played rock with nasal vocals, and Sting counted the review as a coup.[1]
• Henry Padovani's snarl on the cover of Fall Out was caused by toothache. The punk grimace on the first Police single sleeve looked perfect for 1977, but it was really because Padovani had a severe toothache on the day of the photo shoot.[1]
• Sting wore giant sunglasses on the Police's first TV appearance because of a hairspray accident. Before their 1978 debut on The Old Grey Whistle Test, a mishap with hairspray in make up sent Sting to hospital, so he performed Can't Stand Losing You in oversized shades.[1]
• So Lonely was voted Britain's most misheard lyric, with fans singing Sue Lawley. A 2020 survey of British adults found the chorus was most often misheard as the name of the BBC newsreader Sue Lawley. Salami, Sigourney and Zamboni were also reported.[1]
• Sting has admitted So Lonely was lifted from Bob Marley's No Woman, No Cry. He said the song was unashamedly culled from the Marley track, with the same chorus, and that the Police's invention was switching back and forth between thrash punk and reggae.[1]
• Andy Summers was the first guitarist Jimi Hendrix met after arriving in Britain in 1966. In September 1966, when Hendrix landed in the UK, the young Summers was the first guitarist he encountered, years before Summers joined the Police.[1]
• Sting buried the tape of Behind My Camel in the studio garden, and it still won a Grammy. He hated Summers's instrumental so much that he refused to play on it, so Summers played the bass himself. Sting says he took the tape outside and buried it. It won the 1982 Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental.[1]
• A champion racehorse is named after the album Zenyatta Mondatta. A and M co founder Jerry Moss named his mare Zenyatta, born in 2004, after the album. A character in the video game Overwatch also carries the name.[1]
• One rejected title for Zenyatta Mondatta was simply the studio's street address. Copeland said Caprido Von Renislam was suggested because it sounded like the address of the Dutch studio, Catharina van Renneslaan in Hilversum. Miles offered Trimondo Blondomina.[1]
• Copeland's song Bombs Away was written over a secondhand tape of Siouxsie and the Banshees. He bought used tape for his home studio, found Siouxsie backing tracks on it, and wrote Bombs Away over one, changing the speed and sound so the drums became his own.[1]
• In the Walking on the Moon video, Copeland drums on a Saturn Five moon rocket. The video was shot at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the twenty third of October 1979, with the band miming among the spacecraft displays.[1]
• The Police gave their entire fee for a famous BBC concert to a college. They debuted Message in a Bottle on BBC television's Rock Goes to College, filmed at Hatfield Polytechnic, and donated all the money from the show to the college.[1]
• Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic is the Police playing over Sting's solo demo. Unable to beat his Quebec demo with keyboard player Jean Roussel, the band overdubbed their parts onto it. Roussel said Sting had considered keeping the song for a solo project.[1]
• Spirits in the Material World was the first song Sting wrote on a synthesizer, a cheap Casio, in the back of a truck. He said he tapped it out by accident on the little keyboard. Copeland later called it his hardest Police song to drum because it has no obvious first beat.[1]
• Every Breath You Take was written at James Bond author Ian Fleming's desk in Jamaica. Escaping his collapsing marriage, Sting stayed at Fleming's Goldeneye estate, where he also wrote King of Pain and Wrapped Around Your Finger.[1] [2]
• The Montserrat dining room was so hot that Copeland's drumsticks were taped to his hands. Hugh Padgham had Copeland record in the dining room for its sound on Every Breath You Take, but the heat made the sticks slip without tape.[1]
• The Loch Ness monster on Synchronicity Two is a sleeping roadie's snoring. When Summers's roadie Tam Fairgrieve dozed off, the band stuck a microphone under his face, loaded his snores with effects, and used them as the monster rising from the loch.[1]
• Stuck during Synchronicity, Summers asked George Martin for help. Martin, who owned AIR Montserrat and was on the island, told him it was typical group stuff he had seen before and that they should sort it out themselves.[1]
• On the Wrapped Around Your Finger picture discs, Sting's face outnumbered each bandmate's ten to one. Of twelve thousand picture discs, ten thousand showed Sting and only a thousand each showed Summers or Copeland, making theirs the collectors' items.[1]
• Synchronicity still holds the Canadian record for most consecutive weeks at number one. It spent twenty four straight weeks at the top in Canada in 1983. Adele's 21 later spent more weeks there in total, but not in a row.[1]
• Sting taught himself the oboe for Tea in the Sahara. Copeland marvelled that Sting picked up an instrument known for sounding awful in beginners' hands and quickly got the hang of it for the Synchronicity track.[1]
• Murder by Numbers was recorded the very first time the band ever played it. It started as Summers noodling jazz chords at dinner. They walked to the studio, Padgham hit record, and that first pass is the finished track.[1]
• Shea Stadium sold out so fast that the Police opened up the playing field for fans. The fifty five thousand seats went quickly, helped by the new phone booking service Ticketmaster, so another fifteen thousand tickets were sold for the field.[1]
• Stewart Copeland's father was a founding member of the CIA, and his mother served in British wartime intelligence. Growing up in Beirut, the Copelands were family friends of Kim Philby, and Stewart played with Philby's son until his father vanished and was revealed as a double agent.[1] [2]
• Ian Copeland's booking agency was called FBI, to go with a CIA father and a brother in the Police. Frontier Booking International booked new wave acts across America, and Stewart says their father loved it when people thought the whole thing was a CIA plot.[1] [2]
• Sting's accountant stole around six million pounds from him without Sting noticing. Keith Moore was jailed for six years in 1995. The court heard Sting's finances ran through a hundred and eight accounts, and that Moore once gave Sting a Jaguar for his birthday.[1]
• A Colombian tree frog is named after Sting. Dendropsophus stingi honours his work with Trudie Styler to protect the rainforest through the Rainforest Foundation they founded.[1]
• Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov once beat Sting and four of his band members at chess simultaneously. In a 2000 exhibition game Kasparov took on Sting, Dominic Miller, Jason Rebello, Chris Botti and Russ Irwin at once and won all five games within fifty minutes.[1]
• Copeland wrote the ringtones for the BlackBerry Bold. In 2008 the phone maker commissioned a one minute percussive theme from him, which he turned into six ringtones and an alarm tone.[1]
• When Copeland scored the Spyro the Dragon games, he played through each level before writing its music. He scored the first three Spyro games for PlayStation from 1998 and wrote a new title theme for the 2018 remake.[1]
• During the 2007 tour, Copeland joked to a stranger that he named his band the Police to get police escorts. After a Boston show the band was driven the wrong way up a one way street under full escort. Asked why he deserved it, Copeland said that was why he had named his band the Police.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.