Stewart Copeland interview on CIA DAD and founding THE POLICE Later with Bob Costas 1/11/90

january 11th 1990 episode or later with bob costas is a fascinating one not just because it's a musician in this case stewart copeland best known as drummer of the police but because of copeland's upbringing and his interests in intellect son of miles copeland famous c-i-a huge figure code stuart grew up in lebanon syria and beirut he thought his dad was just a businessman uh consulting to the oil companies um he said his parents threw a lot of cocktail parties meeting the next new uh dude that would be propped up by his dad's real job and anyhow he uh got raised listening to arabic music and he had a pakistani annie and hey that's a great name for a pakistani nanny cheese little weeds anyhow uh he didn't come up with that one i did um costas asks him about his attitude of hey punk rocker after you were in curved air he was the first like a pry rocker actually um but uh punk rocker whose dad was in the cia how do you reconcile all that and uh totally pro america totally pro cia looks them his eyes in the ears and it's the politicians who screwed things up and uh great great perspective on how things actually work i mean this guy's been exposed to it on in a couple of different venues um he was on the promotional tour of the animal logic album with uh stanley clark and speaks about stanley as a bass player and a giant and uh deborah howland who's the girl that sings the songs and wrote them for animal logic and he also significantly talks about holy blood and crescent moon the opera he was commissioned to write and uh the process he went through turning onto a wagner and world premiering it in cleveland ohio got almost 40 hours of video of the world premiere of that opera that only had five performances ever and copeland's hilarious talking about the reviewers and i wonder which of the cleveland re review folks are quoted here in this interview so enjoy uh it's a great one thanks for staying up later we're joined tonight by stuart copeland the drummer and founder for the police now an ex-cop i guess is the way you can put it in and off on your own well no actually i'm still a cop i'm an honorary lieutenant in the new orleans police department what a fine honor that is oh yeah stops me getting speeding tickets all the time i decorated you on bourbon street and everything no they just gave me a little card if you had to pick two or three police compositions police recordings what would you say would be the most prototypical ones if someone said all right here's the time capsule this is what goes in there of your work make the choice what would it be i would choose a message in a bottle for the energy i would choose every breath you take for the clever simplicity um and what else i don't know you pick a team well early on you might take something like roxanne just because okay all right indicative of the early stuff well i would take can't stand losing you as a matter of fact because i just like that tune a little better now both of those songs from your first album uh ran into some sensors trouble didn't they well bbc wouldn't play it yes there he goes matter of fact that's true i'd forgotten about that roxanne because it was about a hookah and um i can't stand losing you because it was about suicide in fact the single sleeve showed it was a great sleeve it showed me from behind with the noose around my neck standing on a block of ice with a heater next to it you know which is fairly creative i thought did you uh did you raise a voice in protest and say wait a minute this is not uh an advocacy of suicide kind of thing this is a this is tongue cheek the message is different uh no we were a punk we were punk group at the time when we wanted to get up uh we wanted to ruffle feathers and uh make it hot for people and we were proud of the fact we weren't looking for radio play we were just looking to sell 2000 records to our direct fans who came to the gigs we never expected to get any radio play or to have any mass appeal in fact the more we irritated the bbc the better we felt about things how did you reconcile eventually your commercial success with that sensibility early on that idea that anything that came out of a garage and was angry and uh really appealed to about 20 people was good but anything that sold 20 million records couldn't be good well when i bought my first house my anger subsided just a little bit it has a way of doing that i don't know what happened i still get a little irritated now and then but uh i guess it mellows you out it's amazing you know how you start out as a fire brand and then you start getting rewarded for your revolutionary fervor and you become a lot less revolutionary in fact you become part of the status quo and the status you know like if they if they knock the world over what's going to happen to my uh or you know my bank accounts or something you know didn't you recently terrible make a film kind of on your own where you you went around with uh and talking to young punks in uh oh yes in britain now with it's unclear to me were these just punks in the classic sense guys hanging out on the street or were they punk rock no they were punks with a capital p punk walkers in fact i went on tour with four groups called one was called the anti-nowhere league and the other one was called cron gen for chronic generation and the others were called the bathrooms or something i don't know something hostile were they disdainful then of of the police and yes they were yes i was by that time i was part of the old guard but i got along well with them i could still speak their language the days before the police before you'd hooked up with sting you're with a group called curved air and you weren't above a bit of crass self-promotion oh boy you've got everything they're all a dirt well i'm actually very proud of it now although i kept it secret for for many years and the secret was that there's a paper they're very important trade paper called melody maker it's a music paper and i joined this group called curved air that had been famous and i joined it on its last its declining years i joined it just as it was fizzling out as a matter of fact and um and i wasn't getting the attention i felt that i deserved as the newcomer of the group in fact i was in danger getting fired every day so i um every time we played it and i wrote letters and different handwriting on different papers saying who's this incredible new drummer that curved air's got in different ways and some of them were you know like uh pseudo-intellectual uh someone were just that new drummer is uh great or what sticks does he use and just different things on different handwriting and then mail them from every town sure enough it appeared it was it appeared on the any questions page and um they called up and said look um we've had a question about you know tell us about yourself who are you so i gave my whole life story with them yeah and everything and um and they printed it and had a big picture of me with my drums and seeing through curved arrows coping because i had this glass drum set you know and um and my whole life story well the question was what sort of sticks does this amazing new drummer use answer i grew up in beirut my life was that is that i'm interested in this and then the other i'm this you know and um it was my first press and i'm very proud now that i've grown up that my first public notice was self-generated i guess eventually the quality of your work if it's good or if it's not its lack of quality will speak for itself and catch up with any publicity but early on any mention in a prominent place is perceived as a body of thought a school of thought one letter one article becomes in the next interview there are those who say exactly it makes no difference what they one guy one bozo how do you respond to those who say becomes the next thing and it perpetuates itself well it becomes things become facts uh that are stated i can't think of any right now but many times something is stated and in one one article and it becomes a fact um but really in in that instance there it's just a question of when you're starting out just bring that spotlight over here shine it on me i got something to say and if you got nothing to say then you get laughed off the stage um and i didn't have anything to stay in in those days but that was just the start of it you know when'd you first run into stink well now i was playing with curved air at the time we were up in a town called newcastle which is in the north of england distant little town and the local journalists there we had a night off took took us to see his favorite group which was this jazz band and they were playing return to forever type material and so on and i was actually bored to tears by the group except for this bass player um who just had like a light from heaven shining on him you could just see it from any any anyone could see it that he's got that special quality the x factor um and um he was playing with this jazz band playing material these songs were like each one of them was 15 minutes long we shall now play a piece entitled opus in g you know and uh it was very serious stuff but it was in a classroom as well they the the college that they were playing it wouldn't let them play in the theater so they're playing in the classroom with a couple of reading lights was their uh light show and uh there was no stage or just at one end of a classroom and they ripped the place up or rather sting ripped the place up and i was introduced to him at the time as staying i thought that's a kind of dumb name but but i mean just he was calling himself sting even then oh yeah well everyone his mom called him sting that's what his name is you know in fact you can always tell a fan by if they call him gordon you know um but um and then later on when i was setting up a punk group i called him up said i was in london and i said look i'm setting up this group you want to be a part of it and uh he was a jazz musician and he obviously a punk group well it's the only person i know in london so he came down to london which he wanted to do anyway he had his um his wife and child and so on and he knew that he had to get out of newcastle to the big city and i was the only person he knew so he he took the job kind of thing yeah but very very soon he took the job and made it into his own thing i mean very quickly he started writing songs and it wasn't a punk group anymore it was his group back now with stuart copeland i guess a lot of people are surprised when they find out that you were born if not raised in alexandria virginia they just assume that you're from britain uh well i was born there but i wasn't raised there i left when i was about two months old and went to cairo in egypt and i didn't come back to the united states until i was 18 years old i've been an american all my life but i've never lived here the entire stretch in cairo or various places no um i was a diplo brat and um my father was transferred to syria after that when i was about four and then uh lebanon when i was a little bit older than that and i was up there until about 18. your dad miles copeland was in the cia that's right he was one of the uh founder members as a matter of fact now i didn't of course i didn't know anything about this until i was in college and which was right during the andy period when the cia was suddenly becoming very unpopular and you know he writes his his book and i see in the liner notes that my dad is a spook uh was very surprising how did you adjust to that what kind of rationalizing did you have to go through to still be on good terms with your dad well i didn't have anything against the cia in amer in beirut at the time i lived there for 10 years and the american meddling in foreign and foreign affairs was not such a an unfashionable thing to do in fact the american public was crying out in the days of like the the glory days of the fbi people were saying that the cia wasn't doing enough what do you mean they're not knocking off foreign tyrants and things like that and um in 1958 the u.s sixth fleet came and saved lebanon from a civil war uh and this was all orchestrated by underhanded dealing and it was a very positive event it saved lebanon for you know for another 15 years before the same civil war broke out again and so i didn't have any hostile feelings about the cia myself in fact i regarded it as the eyes and ears of america as an american living abroad one is very sensitive to america's behavior and its foreign dealings and americans america's intentions have always been very good better than any other superpower in history but their actions have often been clouded by ignorance and so i very much value the eyes and ears of america and when they start meddling and knocking off people well that's a different story how does a cia parent present himself to what does the wife know or is it just kept from the kids and what did you think daddy did i think the wife does know and i don't actually know i should ask my mom whether she i think she did i think they did know in fact i think everybody in town probably knows but for me it just seemed like my parents were having a hell of a time they threw lots of parties and beirut was a very social scene and uh i suppose the way they would meet uh their kgb counterparts or their the kernel that they're intending to install once they've knocked off the current despot you know it all happened to cocktail parties and so my parents seem to be just having living a wild life entertaining people all the time what kind of schools did you go to i went to an american schools called the american community school in beirut and it was all american kids whose parents were either skull duggars like my parents or oil people a lot of oil people had their kids go in there so even though from two months to 18 you never set foot in america you had a definite sense that you were an american that entire time absolutely merkin and you're in fact i'm more of an american than if i'd grown up in america because i was surrounded by non-americans so i was very distinctly aware of my american-ness it was a part of my everyday life whereas if you live in america everyone's american and it's no big deal when the other kids at the american school in beirut said what does your dad do what was your answer uh he's a businessman he didn't enjoy parties didn't your curiosity get the better of you by the time you were 12 13 years old he was a businessman and he was an advisor to oil companies or something yeah what were your musical influences as a kid um well there was the arab debkey the there's a lot of music and ospo's everywhere there's music but um i was steeped in arabic music coming out of every radio my palestinian nanny was a singer or rather she sang to us a lot and various kids would come back from the states you know their parents go on home leave or something like that and they'd come back with records and so on and uh i suppose it was mothers of invention jimi hendrix cream beetles stones how do you suppose then that this uh this almost unique filtering of musical influences the way it came to you as opposed to some of your other contemporaries in popular music how do you suppose it manifested itself later when you wound up in a recording studio and started writing songs well i do know that it gave me a very different melodic sense the notes that i grope for when i'm composing are a different set of notes and i've often wondered why it is that i can whistle a tune that nobody else thought of and i guess that uh it must be that i left listen to entirely different melodies and different modes and different scales when i was growing up your new group animal logic uh the album is out now yes the album is out now it's a new group featuring the uh bass legend lord of the low frequencies stanley clark and my humble self and korea oh yeah and returned to fair he's played with everybody he's he's he's definitely the top of the base tree there is no other he has no other pier um in the base world uh in fact he's reinvented the bases but the important thing about this group is something new which is the singer-songwriter in the group deborah holland who is the singer-songwriter and she's the focus of the group stanley and i have created this album and the sound to go around her but she's the important thing um he and i are old ingredients that the world has seen before she's brand new uh she she was when we found her a piano teacher in los angeles who's been writing these songs she's a real woman she's um she's not a madonna or paula abdul or anything like that she's writing songs about real people and herself who and she's a real person he's very intellectual very deep holy blood and crescent moon your opera when i was first commissioned to do it i knew nothing about opera i thought it was just people shouting at each other in foreign languages uh but i realized that it has to be a very powerful medium it's wall to wall music they sing everything the story has to be so dramatic that they have to sing it there's no realism like there isn't a film where you have you have sequences that are designed to make the characters real you're not worried about that the only thing you're worried about is uh drama in opera and it has a packs about the most powerful punch that any art form can pack um when the music and the drama and the singing and the acting and the staging all hit with that operatic power there's nothing else that can fry you or can make your hair stand on end the way opera can and it took me about a year to figure out how it works and what it's all about then i discovered wagner and everything changed um and so i wrote this opera went up in cleveland it was there uh for five days packed houses standing ovations um critical um the critics were extreme uh let's see uh unredeemed disaster was one thing uh smash hit was another the cleveland paper had uh photographs of the audience you know on the front page picture of the the audience dancing in the street outside the theater um you know you can't ask for a better response than that yeah um for a first-time composer gee this is this is unheard of um and so it's pretty pretty amazing moment speaking of reviews what do you make of rock criticism in general and i realize that's a broad subject but a lot of people think well sure some of this is valid and it's a valid school of scholarship but a lot of it is very overblown after all this is entertainment it's about energy and let's not make this into an intellectual exercise and analyze it to death well there's two ways of looking at it one is um can be encapsulated by the no coward line a bad review can spoil your breakfast but should not interfere with lunch and there are those of that school who say they never read their reviews well i read all my reviews don't believe anyone who says that they don't read their reviews everyone reads their reviews and um or that you shouldn't read your reviews or that you should only listen to sycophants i think that uh the reviews are very useful even if they're hostile if you strip away the malice uh even the preconceptions can be uh instructive uh if people are looking at you the wrong way it can tell you something about yourself even if they completely miss the point it tells you that you haven't made your point clearly enough and they don't represent the value of your work really they just show you a random uh perspective on it because your audience is the reviewers who will come to show to a show are a random selection they're just anybody they could they could be for you or again you uh but the people in the seats of the theater or the people who buy your record or whatever are not random they're the people who you have turned on and who are who like what you do who respond particularly music is a very nebulous thing no one can say why it affects one person positively it has no effect at all on someone else i for instance i'm immune to mozart but i love wagner and how there must be something wrong with me to be immune to mozart because it's obviously so brilliant but that's just the way music works and so the audience is not a random selection the critics are um and the real thing is the response of the audience in the seats time to say goodnight to stuart copeland the founder of the police and most recently with animal logic this album has come out only within the past month or so and they're guessing that spy in the house of love will be the first hit single off of it good luck with it thank you very much thanks very much stuart copeland i will see you later bob's guest monday will be hill street blues joyce davenport veronica hamill [Music] you

Channel: Cleveland Live Music

Views: 11,181

Keywords: The Police, Stewart Copeland, Later, Bob Costas, Holy Blood Crescent Moon, Animal Logic, Stanley Clarke, Miles Copeland, CIA, Beruit, Syria, Lebanon, Curved Air

Id: HQKEDapx4O4

Length: 21min 59sec (1319 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021