Police Drummer To Release Unconventional Autobiography
Posted by Aaron Mayagoitia on 09.30.2009
Book will include insight on Police reunion...
Stewart Copeland (drummer for The Police) will release a new book called "Strange Things Happen: A Life With the Police, Polo and Pygmies," but he doesn't want it to be a conventional autobiography...
"It really isn't because of all the stuff I left out, the boring stuff -- I was born here, then I moved there, then I went to this school, then that school... Who cares? These are war stories," Copeland told Billboard.com.
Such stories come from -- you guessed it -- his days with the Police, though he admits that "the eight years of Police supremacy back in the day get a little bit of short shrift. The first part (of the Police), I told that story with my movie ("Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out"). Sting and Andy (Summers) both wrote books about it and covered it very well, I thought. But the last third of my book is all about the reunion tour, which, unlike the first eight years, is untold," Copeland explained.
"I think I did succeed in clarifying the conflict in the band. It has always been too easy to assume it was just a clash of egos, and that was always very frustrating for me because it's so far from the truth. In fact, we are very selfless in the Police, all three of us; we really leave our egos at the door and go in there and take a pasting from each other -- and we take it. That's what life in the Police was all about. It was always a clash of musical ideals... We were fighting over the right things."
But the Police isn't the book's only focus. Stories about Copeland's CIA agent father, his youth in the Middle East and England, and his other musical projects, such as Oysterhead (a supergroup that included Primus' Les Claypool and Phish's Trey Anastasio), jamming with Rage Against the Machine and Foo Fighters, and the time when he nearly went on tour conducting an orchestra for the Moody Blues made the cut.
As for those that didn't, the drummer plans on publishing them episodically in magazines, which was the original idea for all the stories before he was "persuaded to save them and put them all in a book."
Copeland is currently finishing a concerto for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra that will premiere in 2010.
