Hues difference: “disparate people” Andy Summers, Sting and Stewart Copeland
‘‘WHERE’S my fucking hi-hat?” Another session, another argument in the angry world of The Police. The band are in Le Studio, in the mountains about 50 miles north of Montreal, finishing recording their 1983 album, Synchronicity. Previous sessions at George Martin’s AIR studio on Montserrat have not gone well – the band almost split up, twice. But the mood has improved since the sessions moved to Canada – until, that is, an issue arises over Stewart Copeland’s hi-hat on “Every Breath You Take”. The hi-hat, recorded the previous day, has mysteriously vanished from the recording while the drummer was absent from the studio, skiing. He thinks Sting is to blame.
“Yeah, we went back and forth over the hi-hat and I have no idea where we ended up,” says Copeland today. “We had a shouting match over him erasing my hi-hat. Then I went in the next day and re-recorded it. That was another classic dumb Police moment. The Police was like a Prada suit made from razor blades. We weren’t kind to each other. There were no passengers. None of us wanted to let the side down. All three of us wanted to step forward and impress the two other guys.”
“Sting was very good at mentally torturing Stewart, and Stewart gave as good as he got,” says co-producer Hugh Padgham, who was caught in the middle of the warring rhythm section. “I couldn’t wait to finish it. It was a very unhealthy dynamic, but that fed into the music and helped make the album so good. Listen to something like ‘Synchronicity I’ or ‘Synchronicity II’ and they have a real edge to them.”
Even before the battles began in Montserrat, guitarist Andy Summers had a hunch that their time was ending. But such was his commitment to the band, he was still excited to be back in the studio working on new music. “I was looking
