Fame
& Fortune: Andy Summers'Police' guitarist profits with
'Every Breath You Take' | | |
| Bankrate: Some
of which had to do with the fact that the music you were playing didn't fit with
the blues-based rock that the guitar gods of the day were known for.
Summers: Yeah, I was getting into
these other things that needed a different setting. I wasn't prepared to be a
Clapton or a Hendrix clone -- that just wasn't who I was. I just sort of stuck
to my guns and eventually, in a sense, surpassed all of that. We went as far as
you can go. Bankrate: The Police
were instrumental in helping speed the demise of the 20-minute guitar solo.
Summers: Yeah. I mean,
I was certainly used to playing 20-minute guitar solos and was very
good at it, but one of the tenets of punk was that you weren't supposed
to be able to play your instrument. In a sense, it was very naive
and fresh; anyone could be in a band, which was sort of the idea.
But they got nasty with it and made it like, if you played a guitar
solo, it made you part of the old guard and not cool. It got turned
around for a second. We started out in the punk era, and unfortunately
for me, it became a slight signature, which of course was difficult
because I was a great guitar player. I came at it in a whole other
way, which is one of the reasons that the Police were so fantastically
successful. I started coming up with all this other stuff on the
guitar that couldn't be suppressed. We didn't do a lot of overt
guitar solos, but they are sprinkled throughout the records.
Bankrate: Did you feel
that the music you had in you, waiting for a setting as you say, was the Police
sound? Summers: Yeah, one of the
things we found out early on was, once we really committed to playing as the three
of us and started understanding what one another could do, I found that I could
play these more off-the-wall chords behind Sting and it didn't throw him at all,
he was able to sing right over it. It was like we were getting into a different
territory and I had all of this information. I mean, we were a rock band whichever
way you came at it, so there had to be a certain amount of aggression in the music,
but I was able to start playing different kinds of stuff behind the vocals, which
became part of the signature. Bankrate:
Do you remember when your finances turned the corner? Summers:
I guess it would be once we really got going with the Police. Not immediately,
but maybe by February or March of 1979, it looked like we were going to be all
right, it was clear that we were hot and people were getting really interested
in us and our records started going in the top 10, in the UK anyway. That's when
it really started to become more secure. | 
