Mention the Police – the band, not the law enforcement agency – and we tend firstly to think of Sting: he of the boyish voice and blithely melodic songs. Drumming aficionados will certainly remember Stewart Copeland’s flamboyant, reggae-tinged playing, and only then do we come to Andy Summers, the trio’s virtuoso guitarist. Yet, Summers did just as much to make the band unique.
No other guitar-based band boasted a player who combined such sophisticated chords and orchestral thinking with the absence of the howling solos that made his peers into gods. “That is because we came out of the punk scene,” he explains via Zoom from his Los Angeles home, “where you were not supposed to be able to actually play a solo. Stewart [Copeland] in particular was very sort of mean about that: ‘No guitar solos!’” Andy Summers was an integral part of the unique sound of the Police.
Summers says that the orchestral approach was partially driven by the advent of more refined pedal-boards that allowed for a much wider palette of electronically treated sounds, with which he tried to keep the show sonically interesting across two hours. The unusual chords, meanwhile, came from his long-term immersion in jazz – something he shared with the younger Sting, and which directly collided with the way they were selling themselves. “We were in a so-called punk band – a fake punk band,” he says, with a laugh, “and we had to play punk music .
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