Bearing in mind that he was 35-years-old when The Police scored their first UK Top 10 single (Can't Stand Losing You), Andy Summers' declaration in a new interview that the trio “weren't exactly a boy band” is unlikely to cause many jaws to drop.
However, just because the trio were superb songwriters, a thrilling live band and “superior, musically, to almost every other band” in the guitarist's humble opinion, doesn't mean that The Police weren't also sexually-stimulating hotties, basically.
“We were cute guys,” the 81-year-old guitarist tells Vulture. “We were nice looking guys. Everybody went mad because we were completely sellable as a pop unit. If the three of us were together and we turned up anywhere, a huge crowd would appear. It was one of those moments, and we were at the forefront of it. We weren’t exactly a boy band, but we had tremendous adulation and appeared to the female section of the audience, to put it politely. They wanted to be with us, talk to us, and give us their money.”
Other revelations in Summer's highly-entertaining interview with the website include his belief that The Police's manager (and drummer Stewart Copeland's brother) Miles Copeland “hated us, really” (“I think he hated me in particular”), that “guys in record companies don’t know shit about music” - “Sorry. That’s the grim truth” - and that he once went in search of Beatles producer George Martin on the island of Montserrat “like Tarzan hacking his way through the jungle” believing that only the fabled music industry legend could instil a sense of harmony to the fractious studio sessions for The Police's final album.
“I thought, Of course he’s going to help us. What a shot for Sir George!”
Read the interview in full here.
