Interview

ILLUSTRATION PHIL DISLEY

Stewart Copeland, drummer, composer, filmmaker and erstwhile polo player, is at Sting’s Tuscan estate an hour from Florence, rehearsing for the reunion tour of The Police. Twenty-three years after the group split up, Copeland, Sting and Andy Summers are back together. Between pilates and ashtanga yoga sessions organised by Sting and virtually dawn-to-dusk rehearsing, Copeland takes time out to reminisce with me.

‘Some of your readers may not want to hear this,’ Copeland says, ‘but drumming is really more fun than polo, especially if you’re good at it. The two activities do have one big thing in common for me: that old adrenalin rush. In polo, it comes from chasing a ball around a beautiful grass ground with seven other equally mad riders. In drumming it’s chasing eighty thousand fans in a stadium with my music.

‘A big difference, of course, is in the economics: in drumming and composing it’s been money in, happily. In polo it was all cash out – horses are hungry beasts.’

Copeland’s background was a pretty unusual one for a rock star. His father, Miles Axe Copeland Jr, was a ‘spook’, although, says Copeland, ‘I never really realised this until I was in college.’ His father served with the American intelligence organisation Office of Strategic Services in London during World War II, where he met and married Copeland’s mother, who was in British intelligence. After the war, he was in on the founding of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Copeland was born not far from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in 1952 and was only a few months old when his father was posted to the Middle East – first Cairo, then Beirut, where Copeland spent his childhood.

‘I didn’t know it then,’ Copeland said, ‘but in those days my father was involved in some pretty high-powered covert operations in Middle East politics. I thought he was just an ordinary businessman and an accomplished trumpeter. In his earlier days, he had played with Tommy Dorsey and Glen Miller bands. I still have his trumpet. So music was in my blood: big band jazz from my father, classical music from my mother, who was and still is an archaeologist (his father died in 1991). I started drumming when I was 11 or 12, and formed my first group with some mates, playing at the British and American embassies’ beach clubs in Beirut.’

Then the family moved to England and Copeland went to boarding school at Millfield in Somerset, where he learned to ride and play polo. Back then Millfield was the only school in the country that played polo, with its own instructor, own ponies and polo ground. ‘Alan Kent was at Millfield with me,’ Copeland recalls, ‘and already showing the talent that eventually took him to 8 goals and onto the England team.’

After leaving Millfield, Copeland says, ‘I left polo behind and didn’t see another horse until I was a rock star and ensconced in the obligatory country palace wondering what the hell to do with myself out there in the sticks.’ When a mate then took Copeland to watch chukkas on a back field at Guards Polo Club, memories of the game came flooding back.

‘Aha,’ he thought, ‘just the thing. So I strode into the clubhouse thinking “sell me a pony, sign me up!” This was at the height of the Police hysteria and the girl in the office was blushing, fawning and fainting –obviously a fan – as she ushered me into the inner sanctum of Major Ronald Ferguson, the polo manager. Eyebrows bristling, Ronnie began grilling me: “Who the devil are you? Are you a member of the HPA, at least the USPA? Do you have a handicap? No? Well, I’m afraid you’re rather an unknown quantity.” Maybe he was put-off by my turquoise polka dot shirt, my badly peroxided hair and the wild gleam in my eye. I often wonder whether, when he got home, Ronnie asked his daughter Fergie (who became the Duchess of York): “What the hell is The Police?”’

Copeland’s welcome at the smaller Kirtlington Park Polo Club in Oxfordshire, which happened to be close to his country place, was entirely different. ‘When I said I had played at Millfield, it was like I had come from Sandhurst –much respect. So that’s where I got back into the game. I found it amusing when, some years later, I was back at Guards winning the biggest low goal tournament of all, the Archie David.’ So much for Major Ferguson’s ‘unknown quantity’.

Over the following years Copeland got really serious about his polo, with a practice ground on his Buckinghamshire property and as many as 12 ponies in his string. ‘I had two favourites,’ he recalls. ‘One was Horatio, a bay gelding on which I won in the second chukka of overtime in the Archie David. Then there was a New Zealand mare, Zola, who was so fast and nippy that she would make up for any mistake I made. It was as if she knew where I wanted the ball to go.’

Copeland called his teams Outlandos, after The Police’s first hit album Outlandos d’Amour (1978). He remained faithful to Kirtlington as his ‘home club’, but started playing everywhere. ‘One day at Cirencester Park Polo Club,’ he remembers, ‘a big voice came booming across the ground: “Hey, rock star – let’s play some polo!” It was Colin “Sooty” Dhillon, and from then on, maybe for twelve years or more, we played together as the Outlandos.

‘Neither of us were that concerned about collecting bits of silverware, we were just out to have fun, playing as amateurs in low goal and medium goal tournaments. We lost a lot but won some as well, like that Archie David and, in 1994, the Hurlingham Polo Association 8-goal tournament at the Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club.

‘We also played abroad for several years, notably in the USA,’ says Copeland. ‘After the English summer season, we would fly over to play in the States, a tour if you like: Los Angeles, Long Island, Dallas, Denver, Atlanta, Washington DC. We even played 20-goal polo in Hawaii, with New Zealand 9-goaler Stuart Mackenzie on the team. Sometimes a club would bill us as ‘England’, which must have put a few noses out of joint back home.’

In 1992 Copeland, by then living in California, was brought into a subsidiary celebrity match organised by the Empire Polo Club near Palm Springs. It was a 40-40 spectacular with all the 10-goal superstars of that day. Copeland recalls the line-up: ‘Music promoter and publisher Bryan Morrison and

my fellow drummer Kenney Jones flew over from England, joining me and Micky Dolenz, late of The Monkees, as ‘Rock World’ playing ‘Film World’ with Bill Devane, Doug Sheehan and a couple of other Hollywood types.’

Copeland also remembers playing charity exhibition matches in England with Prince Charles, including one Fourth of July at Cirencester Park with Copeland playing at number one and Charles at back.

Over the years Copeland has played all over the world: Argentina, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Switzerland, Kenya, even Japan (‘a lot of places I’ve toured as a musician –of course I’m not the only drummer to be attracted by the rhythm of horses’ hooves on turf’). ‘There’s Ginger Baker of Cream; Mike Rutherford (Genesis, Mike & the Mechanics) and Kenney Jones (Small Faces, The Who). In music, by coincidence, we all have been involved in revivals over the past couple of years. In polo, Kenney owns his own club, Hurtwood Park, and Ginger is developing a place in South Africa. Mike was playing polo until last year. I’m the only one who’s been out of the sport for some time now.’

Copeland ‘retired’ for several reasons. ‘I just got too busy with my music,’ he says. ‘Drumming and recording and composing film scores, operas and orchestral works – if for some reason I had to drop everything but one, I would stick with orchestral composing. Then there were the risks involved in playing polo. I never minded them and have had my share of cuts and bruises and broken ribs. But studios and record companies and especially insurers don’t take kindly to stars risking their necks in such activities.’

Copeland remembers his polo-playing days like they were yesterday: the players, the ponies, the victories and defeats and especially the camaraderie: ‘Normally musicians don’t hang out with non-music or non-artists – “civilians” as we call them. What polo taught me was that “normal” people – bankers, real estate developers, all sorts of types who play the game – can be damned interesting and amusing.’

After Tuscany, the band hit the road: 43 gigs in North America, 23 in Europe and finishing at Wembley Stadium. Most venues, up to 80,000 seats, had been sold out within an hour of tickets going on sale. After Europe, the group heads back to the US, then to Latin America and Asia. Maybe Copeland can be enticed to watch a match at Palermo, and return to polo with the Outlandos. Now that would be a great revival. For tour dates visit www.thepolicetour.com