Police Stories #4—Stewart, Andy and Sting: Finding Roxanne

Putting together each tribute, I come across more stories than I can possibly tell in a single concert. Thank goodness someone invented the internet so that I have a place to share them. There'll be plenty more tales to tell when we take the stage at SPACE in Evanston on August 7th.

—bandleader William Lindsey Cochran

I'm the chief mercenary behind that fake punk band The Police, and while the musicians here [in Britain] generally respect our chops, the rock press has already written us off as not cool.  The Police is actually kind of dead in the water right now—which is going to change because Stingo, out of nowhere, has started writing some pretty incredible songs.  Andy's joining the band has really woken him up.  There's this one new song that we should record called "Roxanne."

—Stewart Copeland from Strange Things Happen

In the middle of [an] intensive practice period Sting gets left on his own for a few days when his wife goes home to Ireland.  My wife and I offer to let him stay with us in the interim and make sure he gets fed.  Sting sleeps in the living room, and one night as Kate and I are finally disappearing off to bed we hear a softly strummed nylon-string guitar and a song about a girl named Roxanne.  It's pretty and I like the chord sequence, but my wife immediately picks up on it and, turning to me in bed, says, "This is great, this is really interesting."

A few days later Sting, Stewart, and I are in the half-constructed basement of a gay hairdresser's flat up on Finchley Road in North London morosely banging about and not really having a good time.  We are about to chuck it in when either Sting or I suggests that maybe we try out his new song.  At the moment it's a bossa nova, which is a problem—not because it doesn't work that way but because in the prevailing climate, it would be suicidal to go Brazilian, and we already have enough problems.

So, how should we play it?

We have to heavy it up and give it an edge.  We decide to try it with a reggae rhythm, at which point Stewart starts to play a sort of backward hi-hat and tells Sting where to put the bass hits.  Once the bass and drums are in place, the right counterpoint for me to play is the four in the bar rhythm part.  Now we have three separate parts, and with the vocal line over the top, it starts to sound like music.  We are all pleased with it, but have no idea just how important this will become for us.

—Andy Summers from One Train Later

I wrote "Roxanne" in Paris in 1977.  The band was staying in a seedy hotel near the Gare St.-Lazare.  I had a set of descending chords starting on G minor and a melancholy frame of mind.  Inspired by the romance and sadness of Edmond Rostand's great play Cyrano de Bergerac and the prostitutes on the street below my window, "Roxanne" came to life.

I've sung this song on most of the nights of my life since then, and it's my job to sing it with the same freshness and enthusiasm as if I'd written it that afternoon and not thirty years previously.  I always manage to find something new in it and I'm still grateful.

—Sting from Lyrics