Stewart Copeland has told Billboard that he “gets along fine” with Sting these days, despite the fact they are still in a dispute over royalties.
“We’re not [in court]. The bean counters are, somewhere over in London,” Copeland said. “For me it’s, ‘Lemme know how it works out…'”
The case has yet to resolved completely. Earlier this year it was revealed that Sting has paid Copeland and Andy Summers £800,000 of the royalties they were alleging were owed to them. They are still seeking the rest of the claim.
But away from the courtroom, Copeland says he still talks to Sting about “kids, Instagram memes, bullshit… I’m happy that we get along just fine.”
“We had a spell where our music universes overlapped and we created some incredible stuff,” the drummer reflected. “We really achieved everything we needed to achieve. Really, as I’ve been saying a lot recently, ol’ Sting-O and I, we make music for different reasons, and it has a different place in our lives. So we get along great as long as we’re not trying to make music together.”
Copeland says in the interview that he has “fully retired” from music, at least commercially: “Now I just do it for kicks and put [music] up on YouTube for folks to enjoy, without any agenda.”
He hasn’t stopped being creative though. He’s currently on a spoken word tour of the States, which is titled Have I Said Too Much? The Police, Hollywood and Other Adventures tour.
And he’s written a book. Not a straightforward memoir, but “a guide to living the life with people chasing you for autographs, with interviews asking you pointed questions, with all the stuff that goes with rock ‘n’ roll celebrity, all the weirdness. ‘Cause it’s a very weird place. It’s not normal; people don’t treat musicians the same way they treat dentists, even though dentists are far more important for their health. Inhabiting that weird world on that precarious pedestal is a strange thing.”
He’s interviewed therapists as well as artists like Gene Simmons and Carly Simon for the project and can’t resist dropping in a tidbit from his interview with the latter.
“I get into band dynamics [in the book], and I was talking to her about the phenomenon about romance in a band, like Fleetwood Mac, like ‘How does that work?’ And she says, ‘When I was recording (her 1971 album Anticipation) in London and feeling all the mojo and all the excitement… with these incredible musicians, staying at this beautiful house near Hyde Park and recording by day, and at night with all the musicians, I fucked them all.’ I said, ‘Can I put that in the book?’ ‘Sure’ - she didn’t use the F-bomb, but, I mean, it’s pretty amazing.
“And the dynamic was clear. By day they’re making music, which is very emotionally engaging, very tense, and the natural result of all that manifested itself by night, and then the next day they would make the music of love, and it was even bigger than her first album.”
It all sounds fascinating. Doubtless, they'll be more details on that in the fullness of time...
