Hunched over a Wes Montgomery vinyl, a young Andy Summers learnt how to play jazz in the only way that was available to him. Today music and learning resources are so easily accessible that beginner guitarists might struggle to know where to begin. Not so much a problem in England in the mid-20th century: even if the electric guitar was a formidable instrument, it largely belonged to America — the saturated land of highways, miniskirts, and rock ‘n roll. It’s strange to think of things this way in retrospect. The British Invasion of the mid-60s saw British artists repurposing American styles of music — Blues, Soul and R&B — and posting it back to them.
Summers, who grew up in Bournemouth and Hampshire, was caught up in this wave — a period of increasingly liberalised attitudes associated with the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson. During this time the young guitarist played everything from blues to jazz to psychedelic to acid rock, and became renowned as a session musician, briefly touring with bands such as The Animals and Soft Machine.
In the mid-1970s, singer Gordon Summer (Sting) and American drummer Stewart Copeland had been developing the first iteration of The Police with a predominately punk sound, after departing from prog and jazz fusion groups. Summers was brought on board because of his experience and versatility but he would end up supplanting the original guitarist, Henry Padovani — whose playing was, ironically, too punk for them. The band members have talked about how they were not so well-suited to the sound that pulled them together. Nonetheless, they kept their bleach hair (apparently done for a toothpaste advert).
As a progressive and jazz styled guitarist, Summers had been playing exotic open string chords — punk barely got past root and fifth chord arrangements, power chords that were less blocks of musical potential than blunt tools of rebellion. For Summers, rhythm and texture came first. In their early songs, he used his knowledge of chord voicings to devise groovy but tasteful figures in the verses, while leaving the choruses for rousing punk riffs. He gradually refined his style, without narrowing it.
Although their early single Roxanne did not immediately land them success, it signalled what would become the band’s recognisable sound, and convinced Miles Copeland, Stewart’s brother, to become their manager. Summers’ use of accented 7th chords of Roxanne makes the progression a lot brighter than its minor key would suggest.
By the band’s second album, Regatta de Blanc, they grew more assured in this style. The title is a sly nod to ‘white reggae’, a label the band embraced. Though some songs are still very much new wave, singles like Walking on the Moon and the title track have an undeniable West Indies flavour. Shaped by chorus, reverb and delay, Summer’s tone is clean and occasionally rhythmic.
But he shows his range with tracks like Bring on the Night, with its a sliding chord figure. The result is both romantic and mournful. Yet the quintessential Police riff is in the opening track, their breakthrough single Message in a Bottle. Message is iconic for its extended chord movement, which adds a colourful ninth note onto standard power chords. Summers has claimed it is his favourite Police song and it’s not hard to see why — this might be their most fun song to play on guitar, even if a pinky-killer.
Even with their increased reliance on synths in 1981’s Ghost in the Machine the core elements of the band — their sense of rhythm and detail; Sting’s literary lyricism — remained intact. Maybe this was a result of having three band members who each had a distinct musicianship. There are bands who operate democratically, and then there are bands like The Police. While conflicting egos would break them up in 1986, they harnessed their volatility to produce five albums that gradually shifted from their punk and reggae roots to a more jazz and prog influenced sound by 1983’s Synchronicity
But just as the band’s tolerance for each other degraded, so did their musical complacency. Summers wrote a song about a blow-up doll, Be My Girl — Sally, that landed on their first album, and it is to the credit of the other band members that they were democratic enough not to stop him. Their last album Synchronicity contains a truly jarring, Freudian track written and sung by the guitarist. Mother sounds like a piece of therapy poetry by a man to whom ‘every girl I take home becomes my mother in the end.’ The guitars are suitably jarring and dissonant. It’s surprising that the same album would contain some of the band’s boldest material (Synchronicity II, King of Pain) and their biggest hit — Every Breath You Take, which was nearly scrapped until Summers decided to extend and arpeggiate his chords, rather than strum them. The use of delay reharmonises the notes, giving them a shimmery quality.
Even though he popularised the holy trinity of delay, chorus and reverb, Summers never needed to rely on effects. In his post-Police career, the guitarist continued to find experimental sounds and textures on a series of solo instrumental albums, before returning to a jazz vocabulary. His ability to embrace different, idealogically-opposed styles of playing while never embracing the pomposity characteristic of the 80s, makes him less of a guitar hero than a guitar scholar. Despite this, there’s nothing heady about his playing with The Police — it’s a pop and rock band in the end, and he fits the bill with style.
