Gordon Sumner received a Gordon Summons this week, as People reports that the man known in music circles/hack tantric sex jokes as Sting has reportedly been served a High Court writ in the U.K. by Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland, his former bandmates in The Police. People states that the lawsuit in question is listed in records databases as “general commercial contracts and arrangements,” but it’s being widely reported that the disagreement centers specifically on royalties and songwriting credits for the trio’s decades of work together.
Interestingly, The Guardian reports that legal representatives for Sting have issued a public statement outright denying that the case in question is specifically related to “Every Breath You Take,” the band’s biggest single (and one of the biggest singles in all of ’80s music, period). Which is somewhat surprising, given that neither Summers nor Stewart have been shy, in the past, about claiming that they (and especially Summers) deserve a songwriting credit on the mega-hit. (As the story goes, Sting, who’s listed as sole songwriter on most of the tracks on 1983’s Synchronicity, wrote the lyrics and melody, but basically left Summers to his own devices to come up with the track’s distinctive guitar part.) As recently as 2023, Summers was popping up on podcasts to declare that disputes over the song’s credits are “very much alive.”
Although The Police are one of those bands where the break-up seems to have been both undeniably and genuinely acrimonious—despite a massively successful 2007 reunion tour that Sting later labeled an “exercise in nostalgia” that he regretted doing—this is, as far as we know, the first time anybody’s decided to become The King Of Plaintiffs and actually sic the lawyers on anybody else. Tabloids on both sides of the Atlantic quote sources saying that the suit—which also names Sting’s Magnetic Publishing Limited as a defendant—has apparently been brewing after years of failed negotiations between the band members.
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