The surprise is that, in certain countries, Steven Spielberg gets mobbed whenever he’s spotted stepping out of a car or emerging from a hotel. Hair ruffled matily, congratulatory pats on back, autograph books thrust under nose. Not in Britain, obviously.  Because we’re a dignified and reserved people. But in certain countries. Mobbed.
Now, as Spielberg is the most successful film-maker in history – name credit on eight of the 15 biggest blockbusters – mobbing might be precisely what you would expect. Crowds do tend to behave embarrassingly when a celebrity is in their midst. But what this fails to take into account is the strange truth that 51-year-old Steven Spielberg is almost completely anonymous to behold.
I spent an hour studying him at close quarters as we talked about anti-Semitism and his childhood neuroses. He struck me as likeable man, unassuming and thoughtful. But at the end of that time I came away with only vague impressions of what he actually looked like. An Open University lecturer in physics, circa 1981, is about the best comparison I can offer. I’m confident there was a greying, neatly clipped beard involved. Oval-shaped, metal-framed glasses almost certainly came into it. And – I’m really just guessing about this – jeans and trainers may have been worn. But beyond that? Thomas Keneally once described him as having a face like a map of Poland, with stuck-on lips. And Martin Amis once mistook him for a Coke-machine fixer.
As to height, I’d say not especially tall. But this may just be because I’ve read somewhere that he is 5ft 8in. His body language is a bit defensive maybe, hunched shoulders, hands clasped between knees. And voice? I’ve no recollection whatsoever of what he sounded like. Even playing back my interview tape doesn’t really help. Perhaps it’s just that other famous directors contrive somehow to stand out from the crowd – Alfred Hitchcock had his droopy face and signature tune, Orson Welles his chipmunk cheeks, cloak and fedora, Woody Allen his thick glasses and adopted step-daughter – but with Spielberg you just look right past him.
When I arrive on a drizzling February morning at the log-cabin-effect Hollywood building where Spielberg works, I am led along corridors lined with the milestones of his career – a Jurassic Park dinosaur here, Jaws and Indiana Jones memorabilia there – and am left to wait in a room around which I immediately begin to snoop. A wooden beam. The thick impasto of a landscape painting. A russet-coloured kilim. A Steven Spielberg. A black upright piano. A framed ET storyboard. . . See? Rewind. Fourth item. While my back has been turned, Spielberg has insinuated himself into the room and is standing in the corner as unobtrusively as it is possible for a person to stand, short of not actually being in the room at all. ‘Ah,’ I say. Closely followed by a more reflective ‘Oh.’
The conversation picks up a bit after this and it soon emerges that Spielberg extends his views on the importance of being ordinary and anonymous in appearance to the details of his domestic life. It’s 10am and he has been up since six. ‘I have two school drops,’ he says. ‘The first is at seven, then I make breakfast for everyone and take the other three kids at eight. Life is not worth living if you can’t do car pool.’
Steven Spielberg and his second wife, actress Kate Capshaw, have seven children, of various provenance, who scamper about their light and airy $12-million second home in Pacific Palisades, California. Max, Spielberg’s oldest ‘biological’ child – as they say on the West Coast – was born in 1985. Two more recent additions to the family are adopted African-Americans – Theo, nine, and Mikaela George, two – and their father has just arranged a special screening for them of his latest film, Amistad, which is about the slave trade. ‘I really wanted my children to know about this story,’ the director says. ‘I was with them when they saw the film and my nine-year-old, Theo, who is black, felt a lot of compassion for Cinqué [the leader of the African captives] and really wanted to see him get back to Africa, to his wife. It made him appreciate the impact that slavery had on this country and on Africa as well.  But the other kids thought there wasn’t enough action in the film. Too much talk!’
The intention, he adds, is for the overall composition of the film to resemble a still-life tableau, so that nothing distracts from the power of the set speeches. There are, however, some shocking and dramatic scenes woven in as well – notably when we see the Africans being whipped, starved and chained together in the cargo hold of the slave ship. As with the more graphic scenes in the multi-Oscar-winning Schindler’s List, the modest idea behind this, according to the director, is to force vast audiences to confront the full horror of the crimes of history in order to avoid repeating them.
The film has been criticised for presenting the history of the abolitionist movement from a rather self-congratulatory white perspective. ‘I don’t see it that way,’ Spielberg says after a pause. ‘I felt everyone had to share in the pride of an American Supreme Court which, except for one dissenting vote, turned these Africans back to the freedom they were born with. I felt a wave of patriotism at that. Amistad is really about the beginning of the moral conscience of America.’
Spielberg does not conclude that there is a natural condition in man that inclines him toward the exploitation of others. ‘I’m a bit more optimistic than that,’ he says. ‘I always look on the bright side. I wasn’t being cynical when I made Amistad. I just feel man hasn’t evolved far enough. I mean, the Holocaust was only 54 years ago.’
Spielberg has a benign image. On the one hand, thanks to films like ET, he represents wholesome all-American family values. On the other, with films such as The Color Purple and Schindler’s List, he is seen as a liberal-minded humanitarian. When it became known that he was planning a film about the Holocaust the intelligentsia in America was appalled. They assumed that the archetypal Hollywood populist would be far too shallow to do justice to the subject. Taking a similar view, the World Jewish Congress objected to him filming on the site of Auschwitz – eventually he was allowed to film outside the gates.
He had, of course, set himself a seemingly impossible task and, in choosing to give an account of the Holocaust through a story which had a positive ending, he knew he was leaving himself open to charges of trivialisation. ‘I was aware of that,’ he now says. ‘And I was nervous about it. It did take me ten years to start work on Schindler’s List and part of that was due to my fear that I wasn’t going to be able to acquit myself in a manner that would bring anything less than shame to the memory of the Holocaust. I didn’t want to belittle or trivialise it. I worked hard not to soften it or make it easy to watch.  The film doesn’t have a positive ending. You know the victims will be ravaged with nightmares for the rest of their lives.’
‘For many survivors the nightmare began with liberation,’ Spielberg explains. ‘Because that was when they had a chance to assess their losses. When they were in Auschwitz or Treblinka they didn’t know for sure whether the rest of their families were dead.’ Twenty members of Spielberg’s family were murdered in the concentration camps. Both his parents’ parents were European Jews; his father’s side of the family coming from an area of Austria which is now a part of Poland, and his mother’s side from Odessa in the Ukraine. Spielberg thinks of himself as Jewish-American, he says.  But his Jewish identity was not really something that concerned him until he made Schindler’s List. Perhaps there was an element of denial in this. After all, as a child growing up in an affluent white neighbourhood of Cincinnati, he says, he encountered a lot of anti-Semitism. A gang of school-children once gathered outside his family home chanting, ‘The Spielbergs are dirty Jews.’ Classmates would cough the word Jew into their hands when they passed by him. One day he retaliated against his Jew-hating neighbours by smearing peanut butter on their windows.
His father, Arnold Spielberg, was a pioneering computer engineer and was always having to move house because of his work – from Ohio to New Jersey, then to Arizona and finally northern California. Wherever the family went they met racism, sometimes violent. At one point, the young Steven would have to be picked up from school by his parents every day, even though he was walking distance from home. At another, following regular anti-Semitic remarks about the size of his nose, he would attempt to stop it growing downward by tying it back with tape. ‘The nature of the anti-Semitism was always lack of education,’ he now reflects. ‘Not understanding what a Jew is. Anti-Semites invest a lot of ethnic, cultural stereotype and evil to something that scares them. Fear of my unknown. The effect it had on me was to turn me into a loner. It made me withdrawn and self-conscious and even turned me away from my family, who I was angry at for making me a Jew… I think I would have been a social reject anyway, even if I had been Protestant or Lutheran or Episcopalian. I would still have been introverted.’
For all his introversion, Steven Spielberg managed to be assertive at home. He has three younger sisters and, he admits, he would bully them, in part as a form of compensation for being bullied himself at school. After leaving school, he turned to films as a way of expressing himself and also as a form of escapism. Aged 21, he started loitering around the Universal Pictures lot and even squatted in an empty office until he got his amateur home movies seen by someone. They were deemed impressive enough for him to be offered a television contract – which meant him having to drop out of a degree in English at California State College. Folklore has it that he didn’t even stop to clean out his locker. He made Duel in 1971, and four years later made Jaws, the highest-grossing film of its time.
The chutzpah does not seem consistent with lack of self-esteem. Even so, to this day, Spielberg protests that he is basically very shy. ‘I work overtime to put up a faade to persuade people that I am not shy,’ he says. ‘I know how to break the ice better than I used to – but I still have a shaky stomach before I go to a party, even before I sit down for dinner with close friends. I’m always tongue-tied for the first ten minutes. Now, if I meet people for the first time who feel intimidated by me – and so don’t make eye contact – that makes me feel uncomfortable. Two people standing there who don’t know what to say to each other. That happens a lot.’
More incongruous still is the reputation shy Steven Spielberg has acquired for being ruthless with people who cross him – a producer who tried to take more credit that she deserved was summarily dropped, for instance. There were occasions, too, when in a fit of pique, the introverted director would storm off a film set. Perhaps it is more a matter of his overcompensating for what he perceives as being his social shortcomings. Then again, before he made Schindler’s List, Spielberg was often dismissed as an arch-manipulator of audience emotion, one who merely wallowed in maudlin sentimentality. He used never to read reviews of his work but claims now not to care unduly about what critics say of him. And while he believes part of his new found interest in history comes from an increasing awareness of his own mortality, paradoxically he says he is not concerned about his place in the history books. This doesn’t quite square with the liberal image-consciousness that inclines him to keep very quiet about the fact he has amassed a fine gun collection of old and new weapons. Nor does it explain the rumour that he has been buying up all the homes he lived in as a child with a view to turning them into Spielberg shrines, in the manner of Shakespeare’s birthplace.
‘I’m not that concerned about being remembered about my place in history,’ he says. ‘I don’t write my own epitaph every day. I was really satisfied with ET. It’s the most personal movie I ever made. The story of my childhood. I knew that even if I just carried on making sequels to Indiana Jones I would always have ET.’ ET, he points out, is less about a cute extraterrestrial coming to Earth, more about the nature of divorce in America. In the film, the boy’s parents are divorced and his father is always away from home. ET is his way of filling the void. For his part, Spielberg found his parents’ constant rowing and eventual divorce traumatic. He would stuff towels under the door to keep out the noise of their bickering. The house, he says, was pervaded with a sense of unhappiness.
His parents are still alive: his mother, Leah, remarried and now, aged 78, runs a kosher restaurant; his father married again last year, at the age of 80. Wearily Spielberg says that he didn’t really learn from his parents’ marital mistakes. His first marriage, to actress Amy Irving, ended in divorce, with Irving walking off with a $100-million settlement.  ‘My divorce?’ he says. ‘Yeah, I don’t really want to talk about that. It’s personal. But I think that, even though it sometimes strengthens the character, children from a divorced home are always damaged.’ According to Spielberg’s biographer Andrew Yule, the damage in the director’s case may have taken the form of a whole basket of neuroses – from nail-biting to phobias about insects, flying, the ocean, the dark, lifts, even of furniture with feet. ‘I’m no longer afraid of the dark,’ Spielberg now says. ‘Because that is where I screen my movies. But I’m still afraid of lifts. It’s a runaround sometimes.’ He emits a short laugh. ‘I have to go through so much hassle to take the stairs. I have to get people to unlock stairwells. Especially in Paris, where the lifts are so small. I walk ten floors to avoid them. Don’t know why it is. I’m not in analysis. Not an analysis kind of guy. I just have a fear of small spaces.’ He doesn’t think it’s to do with a fear of losing control, though, because he says he doesn’t mind driving in traffic where the actions of on-coming cars are unpredictable.
In terms of his career, though, whether it is because he is adept at controlling events or not, Spielberg has barely put a foot wrong. Will Amistad mark a departure from this phenomenal record? Spielberg claims to be concerned only that its message is put across, not that it makes a lot of money. But he doesn’t deny that much is riding on the film in terms of reputation: not least because it is the first Spielberg-directed production for Dreamworks, the Hollywood studio that he set up two years ago in partnership with music potentate David Geffen and former Disney chief Jeffrey Katzenberg. Some $2.7 billion has been invested in the company and it has been hailed as the first major studio to be founded in Hollywood since Charlie Chaplin helped set up United Artists in 1919. Its first feature – The Peacemaker – didn’t exactly break box-office records when it was released last autumn.
Richard Dreyfuss, star of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, once described Spielberg as a kid of 12 who decided to make movies – and is still 12. Spielberg is prescient enough to agree that he didn’t really mature as a film-maker until he made Schindler’s List. Whether he has retained any vestiges of childish self-aggrandising, shallowness and manipulation, though, is a matter for future historians to debate. After all, Spielberg is only 51.
This appeared in February 1998. Stephen Spielberg and Dreamworks went on to make the multi-Oscar-award-winning Saving Private Ryan, American Beauty and Gladiator. Spielberg was awarded a knighthood in 2000 and ran into trouble from LA planners after trying to built a five-storey stable for his wife’s horses.

The people of Argentina haven’t yet erected a statue in honour of Andy Summers, but it can only be a matter of time. The lad’s a folk hero to them; Eva Peron with an electric guitar and a broken nose. Indeed, he has just returned home after playing a string of concerts down there and still hasn’t quite got over the number of Argentinean men who came up wanting to touch him, kiss him on both cheeks and, curiously enough, stroke his jacket. Never women, just middle-aged men; with big moustaches.

Home for Lancashire-born Andy Summers is a spacious, orange- and-green coloured open-plan house in Santa Monica, California. He shares it with Kate, the woman he married (twice), their two young twins, Maurice and Anton, and their Chihuahua, Ren. It’s a two-minute walk from the beach and, though the sky is overcast on the morning of my visit, the breeze coming in off the Pacific is gentle and warm. Not that you’d know it from the way that Summers hunches his shoulders, turns up the collar on his black leather jacket and cups his hands around a steaming mug of Starbucks coffee as he sits out on his terrace.
Here, with a mock rueful shake of his head, he recalls the incident which made him a hero in Argentina. It was in 1981, just before the Falklands War. The Police, then the most commercially successful rock band in the world, were playing a concert in a theatre which looked more like a maximum security prison. Armed policemen were patrolling the aisles, tapping their batons into the palms of their hands and making sure that none of the fans in the audience got out of their seats. A young girl suddenly rushed toward the stage, only to be grabbed and beaten up by a hefty, moustachioed policeman. When Summers saw this, he crossed to the front of the stage and kicked the policeman square in the face. ‘I did this,’ he now says, standing up and miming playing a guitar while delivering a kick, ‘completely spontaneous and completely foolish. The crowd went wild. Rose as one. And Sting sidled over and said to me [he adopts a husky Sting voice]: ‘Er, I think they’re going to arrest you, Andy.’
Backstage, five plainclothes policemen came to see Summers. One grabbed him by the throat, pulled him off the ground and threw him against the lockers. The quivering Summers apologised, agreed to have his photograph taken for the local papers shaking hands with the injured policeman, and was released with a caution. His act of violence seems to have been wholly out of character  — to meet him, you can’t imagine a more equable, amiable fellow. But to the wildly romantic, oppressed youth of Argentina — mostly men who’re now middle-aged and wearing moustaches — Summers became an unlikely symbol of fortitude, rebellion and hope in the face of tyranny.
On the false idol front, it probably helps that Summers appears not to have aged a day since the mid-Eighties, when the Police broke up and the fickle spotlight of fame suddenly dimmed on him. At 55 (Heavens! And him a one-time punk, too!) he looks healthy and permatanned, with scarcely a wrinkle around his heavily lidded eyes. His mousy-coloured hair is no longer dyed blond, the trademark of his former band, but it’s still pretty spiky. Always looked young for his age, though, has Andy Summers.
He grew up in Bournemouth — where his late father ran a café  — and his first job after leaving school there was playing guitar during the intervals at the town’s jazz club. He was 17 but everyone thought he was 12. Perhaps it was something to do with his having inherited the genes that determine height from his mother. (She still lives in Bournemouth and has a phone call from her son most mornings — today she had been complaining about her brevity of stature and how, with each passing day, she seems to be shrinking ever more.) Then again, when the three members of the Police — Sting, Summers and the drummer Stewart Copeland — reformed briefly in 1992 for an impromptu version of ‘Message in a Bottle’ at Sting’s wedding, guests were astonished that the 50-year-old Summers still only looked about 30. Light-hearted speculation among guests about Summers having had a face-lift was inevitable — although, given Sting’s sensitivity at the time on the subject of plastic surgery, it’s doubtful whether anyone speculated in front of the host.
Perhaps guests expected Andy Summers to look more like the grey-faced but elegantly wasted Keith Richards.  After all, in the Sixties he did do his fair share of substance abuse  — when, that is, he wasn’t busy being a leading exponent of the creed of free love. This may come as a shock to those who equate their youth with the punk era, but snarling Andy Summers was in fact a hippie interloper who, in an earlier incarnation, was guilty of possessing shoulder-length hair and a purple cloak, experimenting with LSD after an encounter with the Animals, and jamming with Jimi Hendrix. Summers played lead; Hendrix, improbable though it may seem, played bass. ‘Can you believe it?’ Summers now says with another shake of his head. ‘Weird.’
Summers had made the move from genteel Bournemouth to Swinging London with his musician friend Zoot Money and together, in 1964, they formed the modestly successful Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band and soon replaced Georgie Fame as the resident group at the Flamingo Club in Soho. Summers has vague memories of knife fights next to the stage and crowds composed mostly of prostitutes and drug-dealers. The band eventually split up and the two friends left to form the psychedelic rock group Dantalian’s Chariot. Summers’s only reliable memory of this period was that he broke his nose in a car crash while touring in Yorkshire. In 1968 he left to join Soft Machine, a Dadaist band notorious for playing one riff called ‘We did it again’, which they did again and again for 30 minutes until the audience went into a trance, or the band was booed off stage. Later that year he joined Eric Burdon of the Animals to form the New Animals. This lasted for nine months — on the most memorable day of which Eric Burdon seduced Summers’s girlfriend, a model, while Summers was out of it, man, on acid.  One legacy of this period is the flower-power vocabulary that Summers is wont to slip into. He still calls money ‘bread’. He still says things like ‘this scene’ and, ‘I was really getting into a moment’ and ‘It was, like, really really heavy.’ At least when he catches himself he has the decency to look embarrassed and add, ‘That sounds American, doesn’t it?’
We have now moved through the main reception area, decked with canvases of colourful abstracts painted by Summers, to his study, the walls of which are lined with books, the surfaces scattered with records and CDs. But there are no glass cabinets in the house displaying what would now surely be an historically edifying collection of Summers’s hippie trouserings and shirtings. ‘I did keep one coat which was like a wizard’s outfit,’ he reflects, a Dorset inflection still discernible in his voice. ‘Velvet and gold. But I don’t know where it is now.’ His voice trails off.  Then, recovering his thoughts on the theme: ‘I think, yeah, there was a more reckless spirit then.’
Like Sir Paul McCartney and George Harrison, Summers is pretty scathing about the Beatles tribute band Oasis — dismissing Noel Gallagher as ‘George Formby with an electric guitar’. But, a fading rock star’s prerogative, he is equally unimpressed by the Sixties counter-culture today’s bands aspire to. ‘Now if you are a young musician starting out, it’s all been done. Everyone knows which drug has which effect. Whereas when we started out it was genuine experimentation.  Those that survived all have children and they’re warning, “Don’t mix this with that.” You know, a lot wiser.’
Summers has kept diary jottings all his adult life, which he thinks would be fun to turn into a book one day. The entries for the New Wave period are interesting, he says, but the real colour is from the Sixties. If ever he writes the book, one of the more colourful chapters will concern his experiences with groupies. Summers admits to sleeping with dozens of them — and one, Jenny Fabian, even wrote a bestselling book, Groupie, in which she records some of his exploits. He laughs when I ask why he thinks women fell for him in such profusion. ‘Well, when you’re debonair and handsome it helps,’ he says, framing his face with his hands. He bumped into Fabian again after a Police concert near Dublin. She was breeding greyhounds for a living.
Chance encounters happen to Andy Summers quite a lot.  And it’s not surprising really given that, like Woody Allen’s human chameleon character, Zelig, he appears to have insinuated himself into almost every pop tableau. Indeed, hours of harmless amusement could be harvested from playing the game Six Degrees of Separation with Summers’s musical career. He’s connected to just about every rock star you can think of, even if, in some cases, it’s three or four stages removed. He would get to Ringo Starr in two stages: Ringo co-starred with David Essex in That’ll Be the Day. Summers played guitar in David Essex’s band briefly in the mid-Seventies. David Soul? Two stages again. In the early Seventies, Summers shared a flat in California with Paul Michael Glaser, Soul’s co-star in Starsky and Hutch. Dana? Too easy. He once appeared as the Eurovision Song Contest winner’s backing musician on a television programme.
Understandably, the Museum of Rock which Bill Gates is founding will have a special section devoted to Andy Summers. He is, after all, an influential guitarist, with a sophisticated signature style which other musicians say they find almost impossible to copy. And yet, until the Police, Summers had never really made his mark. ‘My peers had been Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck,’ he says with a shrug. ‘That was the period I came from and I thought I was as good as everyone else but, for some reason, it had never really happened for me. I hadn’t been in the right band at the right time. So at the start of the Seventies I came to the States and dropped out.’
With five dollars in his pocket, he claims, he married an American singer, Robin Lane and, for three years, studied classical guitar at Northridge University in California. His marriage broke up and, in despond, he spent weeks at a time rarely bothering to get out of bed. He returned to England in 1973 and found work as guitarist for, yes, you haven’t guessed it, Neil Sedaka. In 1974, when Mick Taylor left the Rolling Stones, Summers was tipped by the music press for the job — along with Ron Wood (who got it).  Finally, in 1977, fate gave Summers a soothing neck massage when he joined the Police.
‘Before I joined I went to see Sting and Stewart play and they were patently not a punk band,’ he says. ‘They sort of looked the part, but they weren’t coming off as authentic at all. But it didn’t matter because people gobbed on them anyway. I’ve probably got a picture of us backstage at the Marquee covered in spit.’ He leans back on his chair as he rummages around in the bookshelves behind him looking for the photograph. He can’t find it. For a year, he says, things were desperate. ‘We were putting up our own posters and spraying our own graffiti. So many times we ended up pushing the van because we ran out of petrol.’
Finally, one night in 1978, when the Police were supporting the comedy rock band Albertos y los Trios Paranoias at a concert in Bath, about a thousand punks turned up to see them. ‘The place erupted,’ Summers recalls. ‘Total mayhem. Girls throwing their knickers on stage. The poor Albertos were standing on the side of the stage with white faces muttering “Bastards!” That’s when we knew something was happening. I remember going home and telling Kate, ‘You wouldn’t believe it. A total riot.”’
Summers had married his second wife, Kate, an American psychology graduate, in 1973. They had their first baby, Layla, in 1978, were divorced in 1981, then remarried in 1985 and had the twins. Summers believed at the time that when you are on the road for a three-month stretch and women were throwing themselves at you, promiscuity was inevitable. Thus he had an unspoken agreement with his wife. ‘Pressures on marriage?’ Summers says. ‘Yeah, it was very difficult to hold all that together with Kate. We were never off the road. It had a happy ending though.  We remarried in LA. A fancy Buddhist wedding on our lawn. Sounds very Californian, doesn’t it?’ (Not the way he says it. ‘Boodist’. Then again, he’s not really a practising one.) ‘We just sort of knew this Boodist guy who did Boodist weddings,’ he adds.
A pergola of electric orange and red flowers runs from the front door of the house, alongside the lawn — where the family stand during LA earth-tremors — to the main reception area. Summers’s blond twins now walk up it with Jane, their nose-studded English nanny. They have been at a ‘sleepover’, and one of them, Anton Y, has somehow managed to rip his trousers from waistband to ankle. Summers’s children have a single initial instead of a middle name — Maurice X, Anton Y, and Layla Z — because he liked the idea of them being called XYZ, but couldn’t find names to fit.  Since the Police broke up, Summers has made eight solo albums, mostly mellow jazz and what music critics would call ‘ambient, textural rock’. One was titled XYZ, after his children’s middle initials.
With shy giggles and strong Californian accents, Beavis and Butthead, as their father now calls the twins, ask if they’re allowed to go on their bikes to get a pizza. When their father asks if they’ve ever been allowed to go on their own, they chorus, ‘Mommy lets us go. We’ve done it a million times.’ Summers calls their bluff and, after asking the nanny to prepare lunch for them, suggests we go to his favourite bar-and-grill on Venice Beach. It’s just around the corner from his studio — and he needs to pop in there afterwards to check on a leaky roof he’s having repaired. In his purring saloon car, a black Toyota Infiniti, Summers slips his sunglasses on and chuckles about how in his Police days he would travel everywhere by limo and the band even had its own plane. ‘In the end we were going around with 75 people on the tour — riggers, lighters, electricians — you become like the calm spot at the centre of the hurricane. There was a party every night after the gig. It was relentless. We decided we were either going to have to get fit or take more drugs to keep alive. We were on a downward cycle. Touring is killing.’
At the restaurant he bumps into a few of his friends, has a chat and orders steak and fries and a glass of red wine. He recalls further anecdotes from his touring days. At a Glasgow concert, police charged fans three times to prevent a riot. And Summers heard of one fan who tried to slash her wrists because she couldn’t get to meet the band. ‘Girls used to camp outside our houses,’ he says, adding with a philosophical grin, ‘actually, come to think of it, it was mostly Sting that got all that.’
Off-stage, the tension between Sting and Copeland became difficult to disguise. They regularly had fist fights, some of which Andy Summers would film on Copeland’s home movie camera. There was rivalry between all three band members, though, about things as petty as who should have the most prominent position in publicity photographs. That Summers and Copeland were receiving the same percentage of the royalties as Sting, who wrote all the songs, didn’t help matters. There were many reasons for the band to split, but it has entered pop folklore that it really happened because Summers, the peacemaker, could no longer keep the two huge, warring egos of Copeland and Sting apart.
The now clean-living, yoga-practising Sting says that, at the time, his personality was changed by the amount of cocaine he was taking. In his own words, he became depressed, paranoid and a complete bastard to be around. ‘Yeah,’ Summers says with a smile. ‘He always likes to paint that picture. I take it with a pinch of salt. He is who he is. Very talented, a brilliant musician, but, you know, he is Machiavellian. He calculates everything and is decisive, so I think he says and does what he needs to, to get to the next stage.’
When the Police disbanded, Sting threw himself into his solo career and environmental campaigning, Copeland wrote film scores and played polo, and Summers took up photography and painting. ‘I ended up back in London and it was like, “Now what?”’ he says. ‘It was a bit like walking off a cliff. Took me a while to take in the whole experience and process it, as Americans say. It was a couple of years before I could stand up and walk again.’
He and Sting still see each other every few months and, in recent years, each has guested on the other’s solo albums and turned up to perform the odd song at each other’s concerts. Copeland lives in LA, and he and Summers talk every week, especially since a rap reworking of ‘Every Breath You Take’ got to number one recently and the ‘Greatest Hits of Sting and the Police’ album came out in December. ‘The Police as a business goes on for ever,’ Summers says. ‘We quit while we were ahead. Then again I think there was still a lot of juice left in the band. I think what we should have done is gone out every three years and done gigs together but still had solo records. But that wasn’t to be. Trouble is, that’s all you’re ever known for. It’s hard to get beyond that — which is sort of what has happened to me,’ he laughs the mirthless laugh. ‘It’s a blessing and a curse.’
Summers’s new contemporary jazz album, ‘The Last Dance of Mr X’, is about to be released in Britain. It features his own compositions alongside a few covers including Charlie Mingus’s ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ and Thelonius Monk’s ‘We See’. It’s pretty subtle stuff and it’s had good reviews in America — but when he played tracks from it on tour there recently he found audiences still wanted him to include Police songs. He expects the same will happen when he tours Europe this spring. ‘When I play a Police song, the crowd goes wild,’ he says. ‘It’s a gesture. But you don’t have to spend a whole night doing it.’ Sting finds he has to do the same at his concerts. Inevitably, then, there is speculation that the band will get back together. ‘This seems a particularly hot moment to re-form,’ Summers says with as nonchalant a shrug as he can muster. ‘It would be great fun. It would have to be. We couldn’t go out there and be at each other’s throats again. So who knows? For Sting I think it would be a very good career move because he has nothing to prove now as a solo performer. Everyone knows he can do it. I think it would be a good healing process all round — that sounds very American, doesn’t it?’
Myth or not, it’s easy to believe that Summers was the one to patch things up in the band. He has an easy laugh and an affable, unassuming manner. Later, at his studio, he picks up one of the 90 guitars stacked around the soundproofed walls, sits down on a long sofa beside me and, eyes closed, plays — quite beautifully — a couple of the more wistful compositions from his new album. It’s an acoustic guitar and, from this close, I can hear that as he plays he emits a tiny snuffling sound to himself, a sort of involuntary sighing noise that comes from the back of his throat. Perhaps it’s a veteran’s trick, but he seems to get so absorbed in his playing that, when he stops, he looks slightly disoriented.
We walk up to the roof terrace of the studio, and Summers shows me where he has had to have leaks sealed. Rainwater had run right through to the recording equipment, two floors down. In the fading afternoon light we stand in companionable silence surveying the palm trees along Venice Beach. Stars and Stripes flap from flagpoles on the surrounding rooftops. ‘That’s Dudley Moore’s restaurant down there,’ Summers says, in a distant sort of way, pointing at a faded looking building across the street below us. ‘It’s funny, you know,’ he adds. ‘I’ve been introduced to him three times but he never seems to remember me.’ We fall into silent reverie again, our thoughts lost in contemplation of this strangely melancholic observation.