STEWART COPELAND

Every month we get inside the mind of one of the biggest names in music.

- Words: Philip Wilding

This issue it's Stewart Copeland. The Police's long-limbed drummer has had a colourful life so far taking in time with Curved Air and Gizmodrome, as well as scoring movies by big-name directors Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone. He discusses working with the British naturalist dubbed 'The David Attenborough of sound' on Wild Concerto; his role as an accidental Police archivist; and why he's loving life as a aseptuagenarian.

Stewart Copeland keeps moving. Professionally, creatively, behind his drum kit and, as it turns out, in interviews, too. Over an hour or so, as we chat via video-call, he does circuits of his expansive Sacred Grove home studio in Brentwood, Los Angeles, stopping only occasionally to flop down on the sofa. His flow of conversation only pauses when he thinks how to frame an answer or recall some minor historical detail. He's a great advert for getting to 72.

We're here to talk about his Wild Concerto classical album and anew Police picture book due later this year, charting the band's very earliest days living hand-to-mouth as squatters in London, called The Police Lineup. Though both simply act as jumping-off points for conversational diversion: his one-man spoken-word shows, his time in Curved Air, his spirited leap from one of the biggest bands in the world – case in point, Synchronicity was selected by the US Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significane®” – to successful composer of anything from opera to toacckilmed tlm scores (he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his debut score for Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish). We also explore his friendship with both the Foo Fighters' Taylor Hawkins and Rush's Neil Peart, and why he and his brother still aren't speaking.