Police winding down reunion tour with stop in Salt Lake City
By all accounts, the tour has been a huge success. So, what is Police drummer and group founder Stewart Copeland looking forward to after the group plays their final show next month? The answer is not recording a new Police album or waiting for the next Police tour. It's passing out pink slips.
"With great joy I'll say, 'Andy, Sting, you're fired. And so am I,"' Copeland said. "Tell everyone to go home and get a life, find something else to do."
Once Copeland, Andy Summers and Sting play their final show in New York City on Aug. 7, the band will go into retirement again. And this time, Copeland said it's for good.
"This band is not just about the three of us anymore. We belong to it. It's this huge monster that generates enormous wealth for others. It's not our band anymore. The three of us come together to provide this cash cow. It's a commodity. It's a brand name. It's bigger than us. We can't control it anymore. The only way to own ourselves is to slay this dragon," he said.
When the Deseret News talked to Copeland by phone a couple of weeks ago, he was at a hotel in Valencia, Spain, after the Police had just played their farewell concert in London's Hyde Park before 40,000 fans.
"We burned the city down. If you're planning on going on holiday in London, make other plans," Copeland said. "We really felt like it was a homecoming show."
Now that the end is in sight, Copeland said all the pressure the band had been feeling the past year was off. He predicted the final leg of its tour, including Utah, would be "outrageous."
"This whole last leg has been the party tour. The 'School's Out for Summer Tour,"' he said. "The thinking has all been done. The thinking and the talking are all done. It's just playing now. Sound checks are just jam sessions. The business of the day is there is no business of the day. Let's go burn the city down. We enjoy, we found, that thing that put us here in the first place, which kind of eluded us the first half of the tour. The first half was good, but now we feel this is what got us here. Now we're terrifying our colleagues and other musicians."
But while Copeland and his bandmates are looking toward the end, for Salt Lake fans it's a very long-awaited return.
The Police are widely considered one of the music world's most influential bands. Rolling Stone ranked them No. 70 in its list of the top 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
Recent comments
Utahns get more encores than anywhere else I've been for concerts...
DleeD | July 18, 2008 at 11:54 a.m.
I've always been amazed at the crowd here in the Salt Lake area...
ditto that | July 18, 2008 at 11:53 a.m.
maybe you should go to a concert in salt lake and find out! It is...
salt lake city | July 18, 2008 at 9:30 a.m.
