One Train Later: A Memoir (39 page)

In the cosseted security of the Taj Mahal Intercontinental we pop stars lark about for the movie cameras, camping it up in Indian costumes and fighting with swords. We sit around the tearoom and play sitar, tamboura, and tablas, coming up with a warped raga version of "Walking on the Moon." The English press have come out for this show, including Paul Morley, a cuttingedge pop music journalist and arbiter of taste for New Musical Express. At twenty-three years old, he is a star writer for NME and writes well although mostly with a morbid narcissism. As he is notorious for cutting musicians to pieces, we imagine that he must hate us and our music, so we are not sure what to make of his appearance other than the fact that if he has been flown at great expense to India, he will be nice to us if he wants to live. There is no place for stars in the Paul Morley universe, but when he returns to England he writes a self-obsessed piece about his love of Sting, how Sting is a supercool star, and how stars like him are necessary. This happens because Sting deliberately sets out to get him, make the kid fall in love with him. "Love is the ultimate cruelty," Sting says later.

The concert at the Rang Bhavan auditorium is sold out, with a crowd of 3,500. We turn up late in the afternoon to sound check in a scene of mild chaos. This is India and nothing really works. All things eventually succumb to the heat and rot. We have anxieties about the electrical power: Will we get electrocuted? Will we play in darkness? Should we go acoustic? But after lots of shouting, hand waving, and invocations of various Hindu deities, everything comes to life as if waking from the afternoon slumber. I am excited; to be playing music in India seems like the achievement of at least one life ambition, and I gaze out over the rows of folding metal chairs, smiling on the inside. The night arrives with its mosquitoes, arc lights, and soft greenness, and we wait in the wings to go onstage. Before we go on, an excruciatingly long speech is made about politics, the Time and Talents Club, the officials themselves, what a historic occasion this is, and the hopes and dreams of India. This takes so long that, decimated by the heat, we are almost ready to call it a night and go back to the hotel. Finally the colonial tones of the Time and Talent president announces, "And now without further ado, the Police," and we charge (or rather, exhausted by humidity and lassitude, flop like fish) onto the stage. The entire audience explodes to surge forward like a herd of wildebeests and presses up against the stage in crazed abandon, with rolling eyeballs and upward thrusting arms.

Unfortunately, the first two or three rows, which have been carefully roped off for the city's elderly officials and a night of genteel entertainment, are now totally annihilated by the seething mob and we never see them again. We hear later that one of them ended up in the hospital, and we send along flowers and a letter of regretful condolences. The concert is mayhem from beginning to end, with clouds of insects swarming against the glare of light, heat bursting through the floorboards, and a wall of screaming faces a few feet away. It's hard not to laugh out loud because you feel as though you're surfing a giant wave or in the middle of a riot in the madhouse. We finish with possibly the best live "Can't Stand Losing You" that we ever perform, and it feels more like an uprising than a concert of pop music.

Afterward we are taken along with two of Bombay's top models, Indian beauties hovering around the six-foot-one mark, to a small room above a record store in the center of the city. This is the Police party, and in the suffocating heat of a fifteen-by-twenty oven one flight up from the pustulating street we mill about with the buzz from the concert and the smell of rice and chapati fusing with the glasses of vodka that are rapidly placed in our hands. Indian gentlemen in dhotis and turbans come up to us one after another to pronounce that "we are going to play the bloody hell out of your record." One kind soul by the name of Raji Singh tells me that we will sell fifty thousand records in India and that we have a great future on the subcontinent. I swallow a piece of chapati and tell him that I have always loved the place. Through a haze of Smirnoff and curry, I stare out across the room and think of the Four Noble Truths, suffering, attachment, liberation, the Eightfold Path-just like being in this band-and then sign another album with a Bic.

Two days after Bombay we arrive in blast-furnace heat at the Holiday Inn in Giza, Egypt. The only hotel of its kind in the world, with a view of the Great Pyramid, it is slightly unnerving to gaze out of a bedroom window and there, like a relic from an old Peter O'Toole film, is the four-sided triangular tomb erected by a million slaves, or possibly extraterrestrials. The restaurant, with its potted palms and slow-moving ceiling fans, needs only Sydney Greenstreet to complete the picture. We order lunch: eesh baladi, to iniyya, babagahannuugh. We have no idea what we will get but offer up a prayer. The service moves at about the speed of building a pyramid. We wonder if it wouldn't be quicker to nip back to England for lunch, and when it does arrive, it is terrible as if it has been pulled out of the refrigerator where it has been sitting since the time of the pharaohs, mostly just small brown things sitting on a white plate like camel dung.

We are in Egypt to play at the University of Cairo as part of our around-theworld jaunt. But already we have a problem. We have sent our gear by freight because it is considerably cheaper than excess baggage. But because it arrives on Friday, which is the Arab Sabbath, no one is on duty in the air freight section. Our gear is locked up and cannot leave the airport. This is a disaster because we have a concert on Saturday, and lockup is until the following Monday. At first there is a great deal of arguing with upraised chests and waving arms in the volcanic heat of the Cairo airport. Miles and Ian Copeland, who has joined us for the Egyptian gig, seem to be in their natural element as they go at it with the airport officials, the main theme of the dialogue being "I am fuck off, no you are fuck off." This deep command of language and culture gets us nowhere until Miles finally cuts the Gordian knot by making a call to a high-up government official, Colonel Hasan Tuhani, the deputy prime minister of Egypt, and a special government agent turns to open the doors on a holy day and retrieve our gear.

The afternoon before the concert is spent filming, with the three of us galloping through the sand past the Pyramids on horseback, doing our best Lawrence of Arabia imitations. With the sun drifting below the Pyramids, we return to the hotel and as I enter the lobby a small smiling Egyptian in a red fez, white dinner jacket, and bow tie presses a silver tray toward me. On the glinting surface is a small cream-colored envelope with a small ibis embossed in the upper-left-hand corner. Inside on a single ivory sheet are a few freshly typed lines-"Mrs. Summers and your daughter are in room 137. Cordially"-and a flourish of fountain pen signifying the hotel manager's name. I open the door and see Layla lying on the bed asleep and Kate standing there smiling; she raises a finger to her lips and points at the small sleeping form on the bed: don't wake her. I point to the bathroom-let's go in there. We go into the bathroom to kiss and reunite with passion, and as we do so, the entire ceiling in a great cloud of cement and plaster falls in on us, leaving a gaping hole through to the room above. We fall in convulsions on the floor-either it is the power of love or the skills that once engineered the Pyramids have grown rusty. Either way, the baby does not wake up.

The University of Cairo has been thrown into chaos by our arrival; a large group has already filled the hall, and the electrical power that runs all the way from the Aswan Darn underneath date palms, camel arses, screaming children, women in burkas, the Great Pyramid, the kharnsin sandstorm, circumcision ceremonies, and the tomb of Nefertiti is not reaching the stage. We are without juice, powerless.

"I hope abortions are legal in this country, because you are about to witness one tonight," says Danny Quatrochi as he struggles with the PA, which has been flown in from Greece but turns out not to possess enough power to get our sound past the edge of the stage. Along with this mess, the Egyptians have scrounged around and come up with six spotlights for the stage, but with only one bulb-clearly this is not the time of the pharaohs. Sting, Stewart, and I sit backstage with our families and wait, slightly relishing the situation with useful remarks like "I want my mummy," "I think they're in de-Nile," "Fez up, it's a fuckup," and helpfully whistle "The Sheik of Araby." Eventually we get out onto the stage with a barely adequate situation of half lighting and intermittent power, but Ramses III smiles down upon us and we get through the whole show without anyone getting electrocuted, although it occurs to me that if one were to die on a Egyptian stage, would you get mummified?

Somewhere in the middle of the show Sting sees what he thinks is a cop having a go at a kid in the front and tells him to fuck off. It turns out that the bouncer is in fact the chief of police, and a difficult situation arises later with Sting refusing to apologize. We all risk incarceration until Miles finally manages to calm the chief down by apologizing on Sting's behalf: honor is served and Anglo-Egyptian relations remain intact.

A day later we arrive in the cool Hellenic air of Athens, and it suddenly feels a relief to be back in the West. We are the first rock group to play here since the Stones in 1969, when the military took over the country and rock concerts in Greece came to an end. When we arrive in our large blue bus there is a huge crowd already surrounding the building and a phalanx of the police trying to control things. There are so many kids on the street that we can't get through, and with its engine running, the bus comes to a stop in the middle of the crowd. Knowing we are inside, they surround the bus and begin banging on its sides. The situation becomes impossible and frightening-clearly Socratic discourse isn't going to work this time; emotions are running high. But the real police get to the bus and make a pretty little corridor of truncheons, through which we are able to exit the bus and get successfully into the stadium. I carry Layla in my arms underneath the raised batons and sing to her, "We're off to see the wizard...."

We leave Athens and tour on through the rest of Europe; the shows become marked more by chaos, disorder, and uproar. In Italy we end the night trapped in the dressing room with a riot-police, tear gas, and burning cars-outside. This is the rock circus supreme. Like a force of nature, we whirl through each port, leaving emotional and physical wreckage in our wake. The three of us sit in the eye of the maelstrom, with a half awareness of what is happening on the outer fringes, the things that are kept from us, lies, collusion, emotional agendas. Distortion is creeping in, and we can regard it only with a sorry shrug, see it as theater. If we try to fix every little hurt, every little wound, we will get sucked into our own whirlpool. In the middle of this inferno we are the still point and in some ways the least damaged, but sitting backstage with my guitar and friends and inhaling the golden poppy of success, it's a drag to know that for some, the Police experience is less than life-affirming.

We perform and make the records, but already it's turned from a trio of unknown hopefuls into a machine that impassively chews people up and spits them back out. We hear reports of people who have been hired. They come into the operation of touring and running a successful band with smiling faces and then later-emotionally wrecked-leave sobbing and vowing never to do anything like that again. Beneath the crowing voice of triumph there is a shadow of power plays, hierarchy, and machismo; as we march forward, the operation balloons into a swollen monster-a queen bee surrounded by workers guarding the source of the eggs-and in a dreamlike moment, with a few songs giving the power to destroy, create, get you anything and with our faces staring out from lurid posters above teenage beds, we grow to an entourage of seventy-five.

Nineteen

In June our accountant, whose every word we now abide by but who will sadly go to prison in a few short years, tells us that we must get out of the country, must become tax exiles. We take him at his word. Sting and I search around, wondering where to go, as if we don't already have enough to deal with. Stewart, being an American, can stay in England. A few weeks later we both move to Ireland, Sting to the northwest and I with my family to a dot on the map called Aughavanah.

There is no telephone in the house and to make a call I have to walk a mile up the road to a box that sits at the junction of two country lanes. You pick up the phone and the local operator comes on to ask you if your havin' a nice day so far and you reply with something like "ay, a grand day, alright. So, what'll you be wantin then, Mr. Summers," for she knows-as they all know around here-who the new people up the road are. "It'll be a call to London, here's the number." "That's going to be expensive-are you sure now?" "Sure enough," I reply, staring at the blackberries that are just coming to fruit. There is a whirling and dialing somewhere down the line and eventually the call goes through to the twentieth century. I know that the operator listens to the whole thing and makes a formal report to the village. This new life stands in stark contrast to the life I thought I was in, and now I wonder if I have hallucinated the whole thing.

After a few weeks of this, Kate and I decide to try our luck farther south and end up buying an old Georgian house overlooking the harbor at Kinsale, a village south of Cork. It is romantic but drafty, damp, and too big. Living in rural Ireland is a serious change of pace after the action we are used to in London. There is literally nothing to do except walk along the cliffs and gaze at the wild beauty of Ireland, exchange pleasantries with the horsey farming set, and discuss the weather. I'm not really ready for this yet, and despite the warmth and closeness of family, without the band and the rush of touring, I'm left like a junkie going through cold turkey.

I stand with Kate in the McLaughlins' store in Kinsale and stare at the shrunken row of brown things that pass for vegetables in Ireland. It is becoming an act of vivid imagination to come up with a decent dinner every night. In the mornings, with the biting wind cutting through my clothes, I remove the nails that have been placed under my car tires and wash the graffiti off our wall, with its taunts about the Police and being British. I am uncomfortable and it will not be long before Sting actually gets death threats; eventually we both have to leave Ireland.