“No, it wasn’t a photo of my bandmate.”
Then a mischievous grin spreads across his face and he says; “I wrote ‘F*** Off You C***,’ across the four tom-toms in Sharpie”.
Ah, right. Glad we cleared that up. Myth busted.
He chuckles at the memory before insisting that the salty message “wasn’t aimed at the person downstage right”.
“It was addressed to me,” he clarifies. “A personal provocation. There was an idle moment in the sound check when they were noodling over the guitar sound, and I was just sitting there…”
Almost as an afterthought, he adds; “I thought it was rather poetic. I’ve still got the Sharpie”.
Stewart Copeland wrote ‘a personal provocation’ on his toms.
Copeland is a natural raconteur, playing up his verbose tendencies with good humour and a roguish energy and appearance that belies his 73 years.
This will all serve him well when he brings his speaking tour Have I Said Too Much? to Auckland and Wellington in January.
“I may not be banging my drums, but I will be banging on,” he jokes about the show, which is half his rock and roll stories and half audience Q&A.
“That’s my favourite part,” he says.
“People ask you the shit that they really want to hear about. It’s unexpected.”
The show marks the first time he’s been to Aotearoa since The Police’s world reunion tour in 2008.
“We saw Rage Against the Machine play the night before we did,” he says, revealing both excellent taste and that the three-piece must have been out and about amongst the crowd at that year’s Big Day Out music festival.
“We got haka-ed at the airport, which was memorable.
“You know, the haka works for me,” he continues.
“When I see clips of it on Instagram or something like that, I always choke up. I always get a lump.
“Particularly when I see white people doing it because it shows respect for the indigenous culture that was already in New Zealand when they got there.
“Seeing that relationship with the pre-existing culture feels good. It’s inspiring. It’s something that really impresses me about New Zealand culture.
“Whenever I see the women’s rugby team, or a woman in parliament doing the haka and they’re getting into it, it chokes me up every time.”
“When I see clips of it on Instagram or something like that, I always choke up,” Copeland says of watching the haka.
As a drummer, Copeland stands tall in the pantheon of all-time greats. His energetic, endlessly inventive grooves fused the syncopated polyrhythms of the Middle East, where he grew up, with the off-beat swing and space of reggae and dub, recontextualising them into a Western pop rock format.
The result powered The Police to more than 75 million album sales off the back of hits like Roxanne, Don’t Stand So Close to Me and Every Breath You Take.
As influential as his unique style is, his approach was also the source of friction between him and the band’s songwriter Sting.
As a drummer, Copeland hated his grooves to be set in stone. He wanted freedom within a song to mix things up and react. Much to the chagrin of his bandmate.
“Many, many tears have been shed on that very point,” he cheerfully admits.
“Within The Police, there were two of us with entirely different agendas. I want to bang my drums and be inspired by raging guitar. That interaction, that mud fight, that’s what I play music for.
“It’s not about the song. It’s about the band. Within The Police, there was another member who saw himself as a ‘songwriter’.
“In fact, he was quite a prodigious, important songwriter. The composer of one of the biggest songs of all time.
“This is a person for whom the song is boss, and the band is there to serve the song. My attitude conflicts with this idea.
“My humble opinion is that although songs are very valuable — and we would have got nowhere without good songs — the songs are there to serve the band. The songs are there to make the band look cool.
“I’m not banging drums to make some song sound meaningful. I never listened to the words. I couldn’t give a s*** what a song meant. F*** the song!”
The Police lead singer Sting, guitarist Andy Summers and drummer Stewart Copeland performing in Auckland, 2008.
He laughs at his own rant, before saying that through band therapy he and Sting were able to stop “screaming at each other” and learn to appreciate that the source of their creative clashing was, “good, honest, artistic reasons”.
“We approach music differently. We’re on different missions, seeking to achieve different goals. When we were young, that conflict was our secret sauce. In fact, it was a big ingredient of our success.
“We knew where the short and curlies were,” he chuckles at one point.
“We could do much more damage with words than we could wrestling.”
I’m a little surprised by the affection that emanates from Copeland when discussing The Police and their combative personal relationships given he and guitarist Andy Summers are currently suing Sting over claims they are owed “millions in lost royalties”, the one topic that’s off limits in our interview.
“We were living the dream. Achieving everything that we ever could have possibly imagined and more. And yet there was a strange sense of disquiet.
“There was a pervading anxiety about it all. You could describe it as social vertigo,” he says.
“Our persona became exaggerated. All three of us were strangely uncomfortable.”
He pauses for a moment, the one time during our interview where he goes quiet. Then Stewart Copeland says; “I enjoy looking back on it much more than I did living it”.
Stewart Copeland performs Have I Said Too Much? The Police, Hollywood and Other Adventures at Wellington’s Opera House on January 20, and Auckland’s Bruce Mason Centre on January 21. Visit birdsrobe.com for tickets