Stewart Copeland on the Police reunion: “‘Sting and I ended up in therapy” – Watch the video interview on Billy Corgan's podcast

Stewart Copeland has once again opened up about the turbulent reunion of The Police, recalling the tensions that marked the band's 2007-2008 world tour, more than twenty years after their split. A guest on Billy Corgan's podcast “The Magnificent Others” (The Smashing Pumpkins), the drummer remembered how returning to the stage alongside Sting and Andy Summers was a huge commercial success, but also an experience marked by frequent clashes. Below is the full video of their conversation.

The tour, with over 150 shows in 27 countries and grosses close to $362 million, was one of the most lucrative in rock history. Yet according to Copeland, the musical magic of The Police was no longer what it once had been. “We weren't as good a band anymore, because we'd drifted apart in the meantime. We no longer had the same chemistry, we weren't interdependent anymore. But the songs were still amazing, and so was the atmosphere the crowd created,” he explained. “I think we're all really glad we did it, even though there were some genuine blow-ups.”
At the heart of the tensions was above all the relationship with Sting, which had already been decisive in the crisis that led to the band's breakup in the Eighties. Copeland admitted that their artistic differences had remained essentially unchanged: “We're on this planet as musicians for different reasons. We don't share the same mission.”

In an effort to manage the conflicts during the reunion, the two even went as far as undergoing group therapy together. “We sat cross-legged, with incense, new age music and massage-parlour soundtracks playing in the background, putting our hands on our hearts and looking into each other's eyes,” the drummer recalled with amusement. “And it worked! My God, so you're not really a bastard after all! I thought that was exactly the problem.”
The therapy didn't erase their differences, but it helped both of them understand and deal with them more calmly. After all, Copeland added, neither of them is capable of holding a grudge for long: “Luckily we both have a very limited supply of bile. Neither of us can keep up a row for more than twenty minutes. After twenty minutes we end up hugging.”

Today relations among the three former Police members are friendly, but the possibility of another reunion continues to be ruled out. Copeland, currently busy with his autobiographical show “Have I Said Too Much?”, in which he looks back on his career through stories, photographs and footage, reiterated that the three of them work far better as friends than as bandmates. The 2007-2008 reunion thus remains, for now at least, the final live chapter in The Police's history.

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