“Disappeared”: Andy Summers on the vanishing acts of hardcore punk

Posted On May 24, 2025May 24, 2025

Not every genre is meant to last forever. For as much as people thought that disco was going to be a thing of the past the minute that the ball dropped on January 1st, 1980, there’s a reason why it has seen a significant revival in recent years, while genres like the ska revival tend to be cast by the wayside. It’s never easy to judge the longevity of a style of music, but part of what made Andy Summers work with the Police was that they never stayed in the same place for an extended period.

While they started out as the kind of CBGBs-style punk rock act, there were always times when they would slowly be inching towards something else, like on ‘So Lonely’. Even on some of their intentionally retro songs like ‘Born in the 50s’, Sting’s melodies always managed to sound a lot more sophisticated than what everybody else was doing at the time.

And as they got more experienced at recording, there would be times when genres would change within the span of one song. ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’ could be looked at as a basic pop tune, and while you would be right from a technical perspective, hearing them go from drawn-out bass tones and piano into a calypso rhythm on a dime is a feat of musical brilliance when they pull it off.

But that wasn’t what the rest of the world was doing when The Police first formed. The calling card of punk rock didn’t concern itself with learning about other genres, and when listening to a band like Sex Pistols, you can hear them pulling from the old guard of rock and roll rather than worrying about how a reggae beat would sound under everything or if they could throw in a random jazz chord into everything.

And for those who wanted to get even heavier, hardcore punk was right around the corner. Many of the groundbreaking in hardcore punk may have looked up to The Police’s contemporaries like Ramones, but when looking at their approaches to music, Black Flag were bound to take one look at the video for ‘Every Breath You Take’ and want to make sure that they were as far away from that style of music as possible.

The hardcore punk fans may have wanted nothing to do with the power trio, but it turned out that the feeling was mutual when Summers heard those first few records, saying, “There were other bands I liked: Talking Heads, Television – the American ones. U2 later when they turned up had promise and fulfilled it. Most of the hardcore punk bands didn’t come to anything and disappeared.”

That’s hardly fair, looking back on where hardcore has come. There were bound to be people who were flashes in the pan or kneecapped themselves by not bothering to move to a major label, but there were also acts like Fugazi that helped push the entire movement into new territory solely based on the emotion in their performances.

Because that was always what the real division was between The Police’s brand of punk and what the new kids in town were doing. Summers may have wanted to see rock and roll move forward, but as far as hardcore punk was concerned, none of his strange augmented chords mattered if there wasn’t any soul behind it.

Related Topics