“It was a joke”: The one gig that The Police were embarrassed to play

Posted On January 6, 2025January 6, 2025

Any band that has been around a long time tends to look at the stage like it’s second nature. Sometimes the stage fright might get to someone, but if everyone knows the ins and outs of how their bandmates approach the instrument, chances are there’s nothing that can get thrown their way that they aren’t able to tackle. While The Police usually were only a danger to themselves when they were onstage, every member recalled that this one gig was something each of them would rather forget.

Looking back on all of their iconic tours, though, the fact that so much noise was able to come out of a trio is mind-boggling. Although Sting was already a phenomenal songwriter by the time ‘Roxanne’ began to take off, the real groove behind all of their songs came from what Stewart Copeland was doing, usually taking the crux of the beat and throwing in different jazzy pieces with the hi-hat or tuning the snare as tight as possible to get that signature crack.

While Copeland and Andy Summers were all based on the musical complexity of a tune, that didn’t always suit what the song needed. Summers may have come from a jazzy background, but no one was going to listen to a tune like ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ if he had decided to throw in different Django Reinhart-style chords or create major extensions on the main riff.

So when the group eventually disbanded, it was more about being realistic. Each of them could have kept up playing and still been wealthy rockstars, but looking at where Sting was going with his melodies, it was clear that each of them needed to do their own thing, with the bassist moving on to a solo career and Copeland eventually turning to the world of orchestral score.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, though, and every now and then, there would be subtle hints that the group might get together again one day. Once the band got together to play at an impromptu gig at Sting’s wedding, though, no one would have blamed them if they never wanted to play with each other ever again.

While they certainly hadn’t lost their chops, Sting remembered that none of the hidden animosity had cooled in the years since they last played, saying, “All of the tensions appeared like that. We’re back in the same frame of mind, scowling at each other. Stewart [would be] throwing drumsticks at me.”

The whole gig was even enough for Summers to disown it as a proper Police performance, saying, “I mean, it was a joke. This is not the Police. These are three guys who are all drunk, banging through a couple of songs.” Judging by their proper reunion, though, the tension tends to come as second nature to the group as well, with Sting telling Copeland in one rehearsal that he couldn’t fit a certain number of beats into the song before Copeland plays it perfectly and then reprimands him for thinking that he couldn’t pull it off.

Then again, it takes a special kind of dysfunction for a group to cough it up so bad it’s making the wedding band look like seasoned pros. No one may have been expecting the Police of 1983, but this was enough for most of the band to either block it out of their memory or have a good laugh about it after the fact.

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