Stewart Copeland On ‘The Police: Around The World’ Documentary, Now Re-Released Decades Later

By 1980, the British rock trio the Police had already established themselves as a successful group in the U.K. and U.S. with such hits songs as “Roxanne,” “Can’t Stand Losing You,” “Message in a Bottle” and “Walking on the Moon.” In that particular year, the band members—drummer Stewart Copeland, guitarist Andy Summers and bassist/singer Sting—were on their first and most ambitious international tour that saw them make stops in Mexico, Egypt, Japan, Australia, Greece, Hong Kong and India. It’s a memory that still lingers in Copeland’s mind over four decades after the fact.

“That tour was probably the most fun tour of the whole [Police] adventure,” he says. “We were the first rock band in Greece and Bombay. These were really not markets—they were just extremely exotic places where bands did not tour. But we did, and it was darn photogenic.”

Footage from that tour was filmed and later released in 1982 as The Police: Around the World on VHS and Laserdisc. Having been long out of print for decades, the documentary has now been newly restored and is available in three formats: Blu-ray + CD; DVD + CD; and DVD + LP; its extras include four complete live performances. This new reissue via Mercury Studios is another indication of continued interest in the Police’s music as well as a sign of potentially more archival material to come from the band’s vaults.

“Recently, for some reason, we got our act together and we now have a presence on social media,” Copeland says of his former band. “And the incoming message was, ‘More product.’ ‘What have you got?’ ‘What about The Police: Around the World that no one’s seen but everyone’s heard about?’ Because when it was previously released, it was on Laserdisc. Nobody had Laserdisc, which was very soon an orphan technology. So although it technically has been released before, it’s not been out there. And it has been remastered and all of the assets have been remastered…they’ve gone out and cleaned it up a lot and found a lot more live material and so on.”

The idea of playing outside of the traditional music markets at the time came from Miles Copeland, the band’s visionary manager (and brother of Stewart), in a bid to maximize publicity for the band. “I would give Miles 100 percent credit for that idea,” says Copeland. “We, of course, get credit for leaping on it–‘Are you kidding? Yes!’ But Miles had that vision. And also he had the worldwide savvy to pull it off. Other rock roll real managers don’t know who to call in Cairo or how to deal with what was then called the Third World. But Miles did have that worldly experience.

“Those were cool places to visit. We had a lot of fun doing it. That was the best part. But also, we got a cool movie. It was very photogenic, and Miles’ vision was to establish this worldwide presence of the Police.”

The original Around the World documentary captured the band members performing on stage across the globe as well as soaking up the local surroundings and culture that revealed the camaraderie and humor from a group that had been known to clash. But “bands do bond,” Copeland explains, “and we were very far away from the studio, which is where all of our tensions arose. When we were out on the road playing shows and having a blast, we got along great. You can see that in the movie. Also in my own movie that I shot back in the day with a super 8 and then I later released it as Everyone Stares, you can also see how much we enjoyed each other’s company.”

As seen in the documentary, the audience’s reaction to the band’s energetic performances is enthusiastic, especially in Bombay. “It was an outdoor venue with a capacity for maybe 100 people or something like that,” he recalls. “But then in the afternoon, when we did the soundcheck outside, people thought there’s a concert going on. They climbed the walls and stormed. By the time we had finished the soundcheck, the place was packed with, I don’t know, 3,000-4,000 people. That was not a standard-issue, fire department regulation audience there. And there were people right off the street. So that was a very visceral response. It did strike us that when Sting goes “Eee-yohhh!”, the people from the streets of Bombay go “Eee-yohhh!” That tells you something about humanity.”

For Copeland, the Police’s trip to Egypt seemed fitting given that he spent his youth in the Middle East where his father worked on behalf of the CIA. “We got to ride around the pyramids,” the drummer remembers about his band’s activities in that country. “In those days, you go to Giza and you walk up to [someone] who will hire you either a camel or horse for 50 piastres, and you take off across the desert and ride unsupervised and unconstrained. It was like the Wild West. We hired these horses and galloped around it and visited the three big pyramids out there. It was just an incredible adventure that you could never have today.”

1980 was a hectic year for the Police not only with the global tour but they also recorded the Zenyatta Mondatta album, which later generated the hits “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.” According to Phil Sutcliffe’s liner notes for the Police’s 1993 box set retrospective Message in the Box, the band went back on tour just hours after the album was finally completed in the studio. “We were living the dream,” Copeland says. “That’s what our whole life was for: playing shows in cool places night after night. That’s the reason why we drew breath every day. I’m now in my 70th year. There are other matters of life that get one’s attention, you know, grandchildren and such. But when you’re 29, you just wanna play shows.”

Coincidentally, the re-release of Around the World comes on the 45th anniversary of the band’s formation in the U.K. during the height of the punk explosion—a milestone that is not lost on Copeland. “When we made those records, we didn’t conceive of them as high culture that will persist through the ages,” he says. “We conceived them more like sandwiches to be consumed right now, and we’ll come up with another one next week. We just ‘slam, bam, thank you ma’am.’ We churned them out with love and joy and excitement in our hearts, but we never expected them to last, to our surprise. They did disappear and were supplanted by the next generation of bands and everything.

“But then a weird miracle happened at the turn of the millennium where kids started to rediscover Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, AC/DC and the Police, and there was kind of a resurgence of interest in the originals. My kids now listen to Led Zeppelin AC/DC and even the Police. That’s something that none of us ever expected.”

As for himself, Copeland (who recently won a Grammy for Best New Age Album for Divine Tides, a collaboration with composer Ricky Kej) is continuing the legacy of his former band. He has been touring Police Deranged for Orchestra, which sees him revisiting the Police’s back catalog with an orchestra and singers. Copeland’s rearrangements of such Police classics as “Roxanne,” “Every Breath You Take,” “King of Pain” and “Demolition Man” present them in a new light while still retaining the essence of the originals.

“They have emotional baggage,” says Copeland of his the band’s music. “People grew up with those songs. And even though I can play ‘hide the hit’ sometimes—where I extrapolate beyond recognition and then come back to the hook—it really does have a lot of impact because it’s sort of new but it hits that emotional spot that a known song–and only a known song–can hit. It’s been a really fun show. The orchestras love it too because I turn them into a rock band for the night. I use the orchestra with all of its huge vocabulary to do what a rock band does, which is wake up the room and rock the house.”

Additionally, Copeland, who is also a composer for film and television, is set to premiere his latest opera The Witches Seed at the Tones Teatro Natura located in the Italian Alps this July. “It’s about the persecution of women in the Alps in medieval times,” he explains. “It’s a fun piece. It’s set in the Alps and it’s being performed in a quarry, which has been turned into a performance space. They project up on the huge stone quarry face and they put these productions on there. In fact, the reason I said yes to the commission was just to go there and do opera in Italy, in that location. That’s living the dream: ‘Rock drummer dreams of being an actual musician and composer.’”