Message in a Bottle: four random things you didn’t know about The Police
Nee-naw nee-naw! No, not that police.
1. Sting got his nickname because he dressed like a bee
Gordon Sumner’s habit of wearing black and gold striped shirts in his old jazz band the Phoenix Jazzmen earned him the nickname. It says something about the difference between us and Sting that you and I got nicknames like “specs” and “fathead” and Sting got the nickname “Sting”. If I wore a black and gold striped top I’d probably get called “bumblebutt”. Or “Wolves fan”.
2. Andy Summers was a successful musician pre-Police
Shit-hot-hotter-than-shit-off-a-shovel musician Summers was inspired to start playing after watching jazz greats Thelonius Monk and Dizzy Gillespie play a gig in London as a teen.
He went on to play as a session musician for Neil Sedaka, Joan Armatrading, David Essex among others before joining the Police, and was in The Animals and Soft Machine for a spell.
No wonder he was pissed off about Sting getting all the love — and allegedly dissing his and Stuart Copeland’s song ideas, leading to their split.
3. Stuart Copeland is not only an amazing drummer but also writes soundtracks
Also shit-hot-hotter-than-shit-off-a-shovel musician Stuart Copeland, ranked #10 in Rolling Stone’s Greatest Drummers of all Time, used to write songs for the Police before Sting became the more prolific hit-maker in the band.
When the band split, Copeland went into a successful career composing soundtracks for movies, including Rumblefish (which earned him a Golden Globe nomination), Wall Street and TV show Babylon 5.
4. The band went blonde for a chewing gum advert
Before the band got big, they bleached their hair to appear in a Wrigley’s ad, directed by Ridley Scott. The ad never aired but the blonde hair stuck, becoming the Police’s trademark look.
The advert appears to have been lost in the intervening years but Andy Summers recalls it had a shot of the band carrying a 6ft pack of chewing gum across a room. Surely such a sight would have been up there with Rutger Hauer’s “tears in the rain” speech as Scott’s finest cinematic moment. But I guess we’ll never know.
I wrote this (mercifully short) post as part of the #write52 project, which is a writing initiative to encourage lazy writers like me to bust out their own content instead of dossing around doing client work and tax returns.
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What, me? I’m Penny Brazier, a freelance writer and content strategist who just can’t let the crap-fact-listicle thing go. Here is my Twitter where I can’t help retweeting political things and here is my Instagram which features many pictures of coffee cups and me standing artfully against brick walls.
