According to the most recent ranking of ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine, Andrew James Summers (Blackpool, England, December 31, 1942) occupies the ranked 85th among the best guitarists in the history of rockbut, as everyone knows, there are no 84 most influential guitarists than Andy Summers in rock history. This blonde, petite man with an air of Harpo Marx blows out candles on the last day of the year and this time, it’s hard to believe, the 80’s fallhappy reason to celebrate the musician who with the six strings (and their technological accessories) created the sound of The Policeone of the most important, characteristic and popular groups of its time, and up to today.
Summers, born in the middle of the World War to a father stationed in the RAF and a mother who worked in a bomb factory, was the eldest brother of the trio who, although they conquered sales and charts, never enjoyed the thumbs up from criticism. Sure, they were fakers who took advantage of the riot of punk and the subsequent ‘new wave’ to dye their hair platinum blonde, cram a few songs under two minutes and ride the crest.
The conflict with Padovani
They lacked a certain pedigree that the times demanded: you had to be authentic and play badly, this last circumstance that did not occur in any of the three members of the band. Sting (bass, vocals) came from jazz, Stewart Copeland (drums) had musical studies and a past to renounce in hippie groups, and the rambling Summers (a decade older than the other two) had trained in classical guitar and , the ultimate anathema, he played five-minute solos with Eric Burdon’s Animals.
At a time when a hundred groups were forming in London every week and it was hard to break through, The Police did not have it easy: concerts in front of four cats in stinking clubs where spit reigned and, of course, zero record sales. In case there was a hair missing in that soup of misery and doubts, the guitarist in the pioneer lineup was another, Henri Padovani, a Corsican who went too far as a punk. Namely, he had plenty of attitude, but he played too badlyAnd so they were going nowhere. Sting treasured compositions full of potential that needed skillful hands, enriching notes, sparks that stood out. Hello Andy.
Strictly speaking, Summers was responsible for Padovani’s departure, but as he rhetorically asks in his memoirs (‘The Train I Didn’t Miss’, Global Rhythm editorial, 2006), where exactly did the Corsican have to go? from a group that was absolutely nothing? “Sting and Stewart are on the battlefield with a guy whose sword isn’t as sharp as they need it to be.”Summers writes. Everyone saw what was the weak flank of that project and, over the years, everyone accepted that with that man on guitar The Police would have strictly complied with one of the slogans of the time: “No future”.
The chords with capo
Summers, who had rubbed shoulders with Eric Clapton and even Jimi Hendrix, with whom he exchanged a few guitar slams in a studio meeting, took the job because he was a musician with a direct idea that married like a glove with what Sting was up to. “The typical barre chords that are used in pop or rock –he says in his book– seem dead to me, devoid of the slightest trace of ambiguity: the barre chord is the sound of a room with all the doors and windows closed” .
There are debates about the use of the capo, but the fact is that Sting went with the robust bodywork of ‘Roxanne’, ‘So Lonely’, ‘Message in a Bottle’ or ‘Walking on the Moon’ and Summers gave them a grace that it turned them into winning tricks. He improved them in a style that was later widely imitated. He created – and therein lies the key to his relevance in history – a sound. And that he landed suspicious both in the band and in the punk cyclone, something that he initially saw as another eruption of hooligans with excess of amphetamines from which an abyss separated him musically: “I proceed from another era and I still stupidly cling to bourgeois values like wanting to master my fucking instrument.”
Of course, he had skill, forged from the guitar with which he got the first calluses on his fingers, a Spanish one that his uncle gave him at the age of 10, to the one that consecrated him with The Police, an old 1961 Fender Telecaster modified with a Gibson double-coil pickup, which is decisive in the resulting sound, is not created. He bought it for $200 in Los Angeles from a financially strapped kid when he himself was barely getting by, permanently technically bankrupt, teaching classes at such an hour. “I could say that today it is worth a million dollars, but it would be like giving away my soul. That guitar changed my life”. No less capital was the incorporation of an Echoplex pedal that provided the echoes and reverberations that finished off the ‘Police seal’, and later he hung a red Stratocaster with which he ended his days on the road.
The triumph, with astonishing amounts of records sold and hundreds of concerts in places that rock did not come close to then (Egypt, India, Hong Kong), as well as a huge crowd at Shea Stadium in New York unprecedented since the Beatles, It cost “millions of kilometers and three marriages.” Those were the times when almost everyone laughed thanking themto the point that a thing called ‘Behind my camel’ that Summers inconceivably managed to sneak into the album ‘Zenyatta Mondatta’ was awarded the Grammy for best rock instrumental piece.
El origen de ‘Every breath you take’
But magma was conducive to jealousy and fights not only married, but within the trio, with Sting leading a little more every day. They ended up separating in 1984 after five superb albums and countless hits, especially the ineffable ‘Every breath you take’, which although it bears the singer’s signature, we know it as we know it thanks to the inspiration of Summers. Sting had recorded the demo with a Hammond organ that had little to do with the group’s label. They gave it a lot of thought in the studio, not without heated arguments because they were going through a high peak of crossed grudgesuntil Summers took the bull by the horns and recorded the track that would make the song the monster hit it still is.
Their resentments buried by time, in 2007 The Police returned with a 150-concert world tour that milked nostalgia and earned them a million dollars every night. “But a million for each one,” Summers has specified on occasion. The Olympic stadium in Barcelona was the only Spanish stopover on that ‘tour’.
After the adventure of his life, Summers turned to recordings alone or with old cronies, such as Robert Fripp, and also to photography, with which he has published several books and mounted exhibitions. He remarried Kate, the woman he had divorced in full drunken success, and resides in California, although for a little while at home, in view of his active social networks that locate him here and there permanently. A few weeks ago he passed through Cáceres and borrowed a street musician’s guitar for a few bars, and now he’s tangled up with some Italians, 40 Fingers, to record a version of ‘Bring on the night’. Still going at 80, always in tune. Until the last note.