Stewart Copeland was asked about certain Police songs in an interview with Vulture, and he says their “geekiest song for drummers” is “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.”
“During one of our tours, I was playing [it] at every show. At a certain point in the tour, Sting said to me, ‘You know what? I never liked that drum. Why don’t you just leave a space there? That’d be really cool.’ I said in response, ‘I’ll be hanged, drawn, and quartered.’ [Laughs.] He says, ‘Nobody gives a [damn] about that.’ Are you kidding? In Drum World magazine, they write editorials about that drum fill. We’re kind of laughing and we’re pulling each other’s chains about it, rattling each other’s cages, as we are so fond of doing.
“So a couple of years go by, and now we’re on our reunion tour. A fan came up to us in Spain, and he’s got the Spanish version of Drum World magazine. He said, ‘Could you sign my magazine?’ He opens it up, and there’s a page with that song and that drum fill. I’m sitting next to Sting at the bar. I turn to him and go, ‘Listen, you [expletive]. See that, you [expletive]?'”
Asked about a drum part on a Police song he’d like to re-do, he says it’s “Wrapped Around Your Finger.”
“I can hear my hesitancy. I can hear that I wasn’t very comfortable in that rhythm there, but my drummer buddies tell me that’s what’s so cool about it, that it has an exploratory feel, so go figure. I got another one for you. The end of ‘Message in a Bottle.’ I put one too many drum overdubs at the end. I went kind of ape crazy at the end. Too much crashy-bashy at the end of ‘Message in a Bottle,’ I think nowadays. I would’ve cleaned that up. But then again, my tastes are not necessarily the zeitgeist. Sting had a much better idea of what normal people like.”
Copeland is in Nashville this week for three shows with the Nashville Symphony on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
