We caught up with Stewart Copeland at the UK premiere of "Everyone Stares: Inside the Police", a documentary movie he edited together from the reams of Super 8 footage he shot during the rise and peak of one of the world's biggest rock bands.

Looking at all the footage for "Everyone Stares", what did you think of those Police live performances?
The performances sound really fast! And when I watch, I mainly see me, this young little **** on the screen, like a Duracell bunny...

The Police sounded like no one else: where did that unique new sound come from?
That's because we didn''t know how to play normal music. We certainly wanted to do something new - like, the drawing board said "Something New", but it was just following our instincts, and we were very fortunate that our instincts took us in directions that were not well-trodden paths. We meshed very well musically - that's something that every great band has, the players are fortunate to find each other and find that X Factor together. And that's just a matter of luck.

Police Songs always seemed to have amazing chops, fantastic groove playing and great hooks. Were you always trying to have all three in every song?
We were very fortunate to have all three of those elements working for us. But "Every Breath You Take" - one of our biggest songs - didn't have much in the way of playing. Except for the guitar riff - that was very cleverly conceived. I mean Slipknot - that stuff is hard to play. The Police stuff is very easy to play. You have to get your head around the ass-backwards concept of it, but once you have, it's not hard to play.

Was it odd to be the most famous drummer using Orthodox grip?
Oh no, Vinnie's orthodox, there's a few of us left! What I like is that the youngsters REVERE the orthodox grip, they're full of reverence for it. I was taught from the age of nine, I am classically trained, in the drums at least, the harmony came a while later. All my technique is absolutely correct. And it really helps. I warm up with rudiments. I just find that I have a better show, if I warm up correctly, doing the correct rudiments, get my paradiddles just perfect. It's like eating my greens! My technique is absolutely correct.

Lots of people think of orthodox grip as something weak and fiddly, but it is absolutely about power, that's how you GET the power is by doing it right, that's what orthodox technique is all about. (grabs marker pen from table, holds it in orthodox grip and starts to whack it on his knee) Look at the wrist muscles, these are the biggest muscles for making the stick move, but this... (switches marker pen to matched grip, makes thumb-up nodding movement with hand, marker pen thwacks more weakly against his knee)...match grip is good for bouncing but for a really hard whack, look here... (switches back to orthodox grip, thwacks immediately increase in volume)...my biggest finger, my thumb, pulling that ****er down like THAT! - (huge thwack, marker pen cap pings off into a corner of the room) THIS is where all the power is. For me, matched grip is just using the wrong part of the thumb.

Of course Technique in general is taking everything and maximising the ergonomics of your connection with the instrument whatever the instrument is. You can get a long way just being self-taught and having talent is way more important than technique, but technique enables physically to go way further.

What was your musical education? You’re classically taught and you studied at Berkeley, but not Berklee, and you didn’t actually study music there?
There's a confusion there. There's the Berklee School of Music, which is in Boston and I went to the University of California in Berkeley, which has a music department, which I didn't qualify for, so I ended up studying communications and public policy instead, which was way more use. I had studied music at my previous college, but I'd started late, I was kind of the runt of the litter in music class. One of the pieces of homework that I did, this was at the School of Performing Arts at Cal Western, to write some figured bass. We'd learnt how you don''t want parallel fifths, and the progression of the thirds, all that stuff, and the teacher said the homework is to write sixteen bars of figured bass, obeying all the rules of harmony, nicely arranged, and I went home and worked up some chords I''d been working on, something I really liked, and took it into class. All the other students had written some string of chords that were technically correct but a computer could have written them, they had no emotional impact at all. She gets mine, plays it, and says "Well you got parallel fourths here, and there are a few mistakes in your voicings...but...this is an actual piece of music!" and I was very heartened by that. And years later those chords turned into a Police song called "Does Everyone Stare The Way I Do?" (on 1978’s Regatta de Blanc) and the royalties for that song alone would have paid for my entire college education. I wish I could find that teacher now. It was a big moment for me.

All your performances have an enormous focus and energy - is that a deliberate performance style, or just the way you play?
No, it's something that actually I try to contain. And whichever musicians I was playing with had to be very robust to survive the experience. And fortunately Sting and Andy are very robust. I think I tuckered them out after 8 years though. It's kind of a drag for me now, because in my advanced years if I go and play, I'm still expected to explode on stage; I wish I had a reputation for being Mr Cool Groove guy instead. I mean, obviously now I'm a "Swayve and Deeboner" film composer, but I still explode on stage. Something comes over me, the red fog, the shirt rips - I literally turn into The Hulk. It takes me an hour and a half to two hours to calm down and return to humanity. Oyster Head (all-improvised supergroup comprising Copeland, Trey Anastasio of Phish and Les Claypool of Primus) is hard work. That's two hours with no material - THAT is a mountain to climb. An Oyster Head gig is a LOT of physical and mental preparation. We did an Oyster head gig after not playing together for five years, we played the Bonaroo festival for 80,000 people, two hours. When you play in a band with songs, it's easy, you've got the songs. But with Oyster Head we have to make it up, we don't have material, we have to blast and improvise, and it has to all be good, so that's really hard work. Now every summer I go to Italy and play for a month, and I have to bulk up, I go on the bike path, I actually had to learn how to use exercise machines and I get pretty fit.

Do you have all the chops you want to play those gigs, or do you still work on new vocabulary?
I'm always working on new vocabulary. Right now, for the last couple of years I''ve been working on double bass drum. I'm getting there. It's relatively new. I went and saw Slipknot and thought "I'm going to ****ing figure that out". So I went away, put a double pedal on the bass drum. I'm getting it together. I'm still not where I want to be with it, I''ve got a long way to go, but I'm getting to the point where I can do chops without thinking about it and that's the critical factor. Most of the time when I go to the double bass drum, it's a conscious thing, which is non-musical. Everything else is instinctive. And it's getting to the point where the double bass drum stuff is instinctive, just part of my vocabulary, I don't have to think about it, just say it. My fills still tend to be pretty short, none of that up and down ten toms twice: short-sharp shock is still my style

How much of your hi-hat technique did you get, consciously or not, from Buddy Rich?
A lot. I was raised on Buddy Rich. In fact, I raised my kids on Buddy Rich; and that''s the only jazz I will permit in my household. Because I was raised to be a jazz player which is why I'm allergic to jazz. You know, the problem with jazz musicians is that they all suck. My honest heartfelt belief is that jazz is the music you play if you don't have the gift of music. If you don't have talent, but you really want to be a musician, Jazz is what you do. Because all you got to do is practice for five hours a day; you don't need any talent, you just need determination. They lack music, they lack heart, and pretty much the purpose of modern jazz is to show off. I've raised my children by starting them out on the easy stuff, which is jazz, which is just finger-wiggling. And when they mature as human beings, when their personality evolves, when they have some depth to their personality, gradually they work their way up to the highest expression of personality, which would be Blues. The Blues, where all you have is one note. And you better mean it. Jazz, you can fake it. You don't have to just rely on one note that has meaning, and you have to actually have something in your heart. You don't have to have any meaning in your heart to play Jazz, you can just wiggle your fingers really quickly and Jazz-lovers are impressed. Blues doesn't work unless you have something real to say.

What advice would you give to young drummers just starting out?
(turns to his son) Jordan, what do I always say to a young drummer starting out? (they both chorus)"Get On The Mic". Because the drummer works for the singer. Also, Plug And Play. Keep it simple and just get on with it. Do you want to hire the guy who's going to fiddle with his kit all day on other people's time, because the toms are too high? Forget it. Plug and play. But mainly, Get On The Mic, because no matter how you slice it, the drummer works for the singer. You can get to the top of the drumming tree, be King of the Mountain in drums...you still work for the singer. As I found in my own band! I'd walk out to the front of the stage - it's my ****ing band, goddamit - I'm going to play guitar and sing if I want to! And I found that the drummer works for the singer...even when the drummer is the singer. The drums are the most fun instrument, the coolest, the flashiest, but the drummer doesn't get to work until the singer decides to work. You can fire the drummer, but you can't fire the singer.

With all the DVDs and books available these days, is it harder from drummers to develop a unique style?
Having a unique voice is about as hard as it has ever been. The thing is, it always seems that you're swamped in crap: the music of the 200's doesn't seem as good as the music of the 90's. Well, that's because the only music of the 90's that you hear nowadays is the cream, the ten percent at the top, all the other 90% of crap you don''t hear anymore. So you think that the music of today isn't as good as the music of yesterday, but actually the music of any age, 90% of it is crap. The older the period, the more distilled: the 60's is more distilled than the 90's, and classical music is even MORE distilled. The handful of guys you remember from the 60's is really the crème de la crème, the best of the best. It seems like 60's music is much better than 90's music, but it's an illusion. It's an audio illusion.

Certainly the job of the drummer has got a lot easier. In my day, you had to finish the song, you had to play the whole damn song. Nowadays you just need one good bar and we can loop it. Young musicians shake their head at the enormity of such a concept.

Are drums and hardware a lot better than back them?
Well it was Tama that started that. When I got my first Tama kit, back in the Curved Air days, I was reviewing equipment for Sounds Magazine. That's how I made a living. And one day Sounds sent me this Tama drum kit. Japanese! In those days "Japanese" meant "tinny, cheap copy". Nowadays "Japanese" means "the latest innovative Hi-Tech", in those days it had a very different image, had a real stigma attached. In those days the brands were Rogers, Ludwig, Slingerland, and Premier was the one English brand. And if you weren''t playing one of those brands, you weren't a real musician. So then Tama came out, with cymbal stands THAT wide across. Before then, the best stands were made by Ludwig, these leedle teeeny stands made for jazz drummers, and now Tama were making these amazing stands that - you could climb around on this stuff. The drum shells were nine plies thick! Hit them and BOOM! The response just exploded in your face, the drums were just clearly superior in every single way, on every level. I mean these were drums who would survive...me!

So I gave them a great review in Sounds magazine, then called the distributor, told them I was a big pop star, I played with Curved Air. I sent them all these press clippings of the band, and somehow managed to fudge the dates on these articles, and fudged the fact that I wasn't in Curved Air when they had their hits, and that actually I joined at the very tail end dregs of the Curved Air period, so I hornswoggled a set of drums out of the guys who imported Tama, and I've been playing them ever since. Would I still play them if I didn't have an endorsement deal? I guess I might experiment with DW. But I don't need to, because I see other people's kits and no one else makes Gong Drums, no one else makes Octabans. Tama are still right out in front in terms of innovation and new designs, and they take good care of me. If I need a drum set anywhere in the world, there it is. I don''t carry my drums anywhere, wherever I go, there''s a Tama drumset for me.

Same with Paiste. Except Paiste were there before I was, they've been there for a long, long time. The reason I don't switch to Zildjian - there's only two people that make cymbals, Zildjian and Paiste – and Paiste doesn’t make a ride cymbal as good as Zildjian, I'm tempted to break and get myself one of those great Zildjian ride cymbals, but Paiste are good enough and they make all these other things that Zildjian don't make. So I''ll probably stick with Paiste. For another thirty years.

How do you tune your drums?
Until the thing's about ready to pop. Because I discovered two things - first, the response is much better. And also, when you have the drums tuned to a high pitch, there's still in that sound a lot of low end. Your ear responds to the high end, but the low end is still in there, and since it still exists, through equalisation of the PA you can can roll off a lot of the high end and roll on a lot of bass, and you can get that thick boom, but still have that attack, that cut. You know, the classic scene of the soundcheck where you get the drummer checking each drum separately, with nothing else playing - Booom! Booom! Booom! - sounds great, and then as soon as the rest of the band kicks in, you can''t hear them. But tune them high, and they'll cut through anything.

I guess it's the same for the whole band: nothing happens unless it gets through the PA. The classic scenario is that while you’re playing the gig you have no idea if the PA mixer is doing his job or not, you only find out when your friends come backstage, you don't know at the time. The monitor guy better have his shit together, because you sure as hell know how well he's doing his job. I tried using in-ear on the last tour and I hated it, would never do it again. Everything sounds small and undramatic and I like to feel it. I actually just use stage monitors and wear earplugs that just reduce all the volumes of all the frequencies down, but I can still feel it. The in-ear monitors, well, you''re right there, it's clear but you just don''t have the feeling of magnificence, it doesn't have the power.

Of course, you have to be careful. I've got slight hearing loss, I've got a notch at around 4KHz, probably right about where my snare drum is. Of course, my snare drum is tightened so tight, it's tuned to bring a bird down from the sky. I always dread every soundcheck, the moment when I get up on the drum riser and...CRACK! Owwww! and eventually the mucous on the hair follicles on the audio membrane in my ears begins to freeze up. So now I wear these very fancy ear plugs. They're custom-moulded to my ear canals and give an even attenuation of all the frequencies so I still hear everything, just not as loud. In fact, sometimes I'll come off stage at a gig and pull my earplugs out, the audience are still making a noise "OK, let''s give them one more" and I'll forget to put them back in and count it off, one, two, three, four, CRACK! OWWWWW! And there's blood gushing from my ear. But I''m very fortunate. Andy Summers has tinnitus, Jeff Beck has it, Pete Townsend has it, it really is a problem. Fortunately I don't have it: I got away with it. Andy didn't. But then his ****ing amplifiers were so loud…

Is even that minor hearing loss a problem scoring film soundtracks?
It didn't stop Beethoven.

Yes, but what films has he scored?
Yeah, good point, what films has he scored? What was his last hit? Where is he now? He's nowhere!

Thanks for you time
My pleasure.

Edward Stern
April 2007