{"id":115698,"date":"2025-08-28T07:16:06","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T07:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/115698\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T07:16:06","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T07:16:06","slug":"the-rest-of-the-police-are-suing-sting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/115698\/","title":{"rendered":"The rest of The Police are suing Sting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gordon Sumner received a Gordon Summons this week, as People\u00a0reports<\/a> 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\u00a0states that the lawsuit in question is listed in records databases as \u201cgeneral commercial contracts and arrangements,\u201d but it\u2019s being widely reported that the disagreement centers specifically on royalties and songwriting credits for the trio\u2019s decades of work together.<\/p>\n

Interestingly,\u00a0The Guardian\u00a0reports<\/a> that legal representatives for Sting have issued a public statement outright denying that the case in question is specifically related to \u201cEvery Breath You Take,\u201d the band\u2019s biggest single (and one of the biggest singles in all of \u201980s 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\u2019s listed as sole songwriter on most of the tracks on 1983\u2019s Synchronicity, wrote the lyrics and melody, but basically left Summers to his own devices to come up with the track\u2019s distinctive guitar part.) As recently as 2023<\/a>, Summers was popping up on podcasts to declare that disputes over the song\u2019s credits are \u201cvery much alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although The Police are one of those bands where the break-up seems to have been both undeniably and genuinely acrimonious\u2014despite a massively successful 2007 reunion tour that Sting later labeled an \u201cexercise in nostalgia\u201d that he regretted doing<\/a>\u2014this is, as far as we know, the first time anybody\u2019s decided to become The King Of Plaintiffs and actually sic the lawyers on anybody else. Tabloids on both sides of the Atlantic<\/a> quote sources saying that the suit\u2014which also names Sting\u2019s Magnetic Publishing Limited as a defendant\u2014has apparently been brewing after years of failed negotiations between the band members.<\/p>\n

The Police’s new Synchronicity box set balances the band’s egos<\/a>The Police’s 30 best songs of all time, ranked<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gordon Sumner received a Gordon Summons this week, as People\u00a0reports that the man known in music circles\/hack tantric…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115699,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88],"class_list":["post-115698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}