The Earlies Days Of Police


The early days of the Police After Christmas I decided to go for an audition. Just like that. I wasn’t even sure whether or not I was going to stay in London, I was just rolling along, going with the flow. I often played with Steward and Ian, and we got on well. We’d go out together to see bands. Stewart often talked about the band that he wanted to start. We’d see Miles organizing gigs – I remember watching Squeeze, his latest signing, supporting Generation X at some college gig, the audience seated behind the lecterns. And then, maybe just to prove something to myself, I decided to reply to a small ad. I was flicking through Melody Maker and I noticed a classified: London, punk group is looking for a guitarist. Why not? I gave them a call, and they asked me to come and see them in North London. Paul dropped me off. I met two guys: a singer, Riff Regan, and a drummer, John Moss, who later formed Culture Club with Boy George. Very cool. They handed me a guitar and I played some rock, a ‘twelve bars’ whilst Riff sang. - “Do you want to join our band?” Straight to the point. I said I’d think about it and call them, and I left, over the moon. It was my first audition and they’d accepted me. I had been a bit stressed. It is not easy to sell yourself so quickly. I went back to Paul’s, and that evening I called Stewart. I told him all about the audition. He seemed a bit surprised that I had done it. He asked me: - “But, are you planning to stay in London, then?” - “Maybe… Anyway, I said I’d think about it” - “So you’re ready to stay?” - “Yeah…” I replied, a bit lost. “I don’t know… I don’t really feel like going back just yet. Why?” - “Look, if you’re going to stay in London, why don’t you join my band?” - “You never asked me.” - “I thought you understood. Anyway, the bass player I told you about is coming down from Newcastle”. - “Oh yeah? The Sting or whatever his name is?” - “Yeah, him!… What are you doing right now?” - “Not a lot, I’ve just got back at Paul’s” - “Why don’t you come round? We can have a chat about it” I was thinking. He continued: - “And I’ve just written a new song” - “I’ll be right over!” Stewart seemed to be a bit worried that I might join another group. I was surprised. I was pleased. I don’t know. It was simple and I liked that. Like always, I didn’t question myself too much, everything just fell into place, quietly and simply. All my life I haven’t asked myself too many questions. I tend to trundle along on instinct, and either I’ve had a lot of luck or maybe that’s just the best way to make choices. So far, I think I have been right to work in that way. And when people ask, I reply that I don’t have many regrets, that I sleep well and dream a lot, and not always while sleeping either. Like most people, I also have some pretty mad ideas sometimes, but ‘I’m not making any plans about the comet???’. ( wild dreams.. when the comet was first seen, people would have all kinds of ideas about it.. an English expression here?) I’d been in London for about a month. I wanted to be a musician. I was one. I wanted to be a guitarist in a band. I’d been offered two options in one day and I had chosen. Everything was going well. When the band that I was about to join eventually became very famous – and I wasn’t part of it anymore – many people in France did asked me if I wasn’t disgusted, jealous, bitter or even sour. Never once have I ever felt anything other than joy for my friends, for their well deserved success. Maybe if I had gone through the same thing in France, I might have felt that way, but in England, we all pulled together in the same direction, and if one group became successful, then we all had a chance to also become so one day. I have never made music thinking that I wanted to become number one, and neither have any of the groups I have played with in the UK. Obviously we wanted our music to be heard, we wanted to be successful, wanted to play in front of larger and larger crowds. And, even though there was so much competition, we knew that we could all have our chance, and we all did everything we could to have it. In England, no one has ever asked me whether I was jealous of The Police’s success. My friends are proud to know that I, along with two mates, started a group that became one of the biggest pop group in the world. The bassist he’d mentioned was about to visit him. He was from from Newcastle. Stewart had discovered him playing in a jazz-rock band. After a Curved Air gig, Phil Sutcliffe, a journalist had taken him to see the pride of Newcastle: Last Exit. He didn’t much like the band, but the bassist impressed him. He had ‘it’. He could sing and play bass at the same time, which was perfect because Stewart wanted to start a three-piece. Jimi Hendrix was his model. It’s true that being just three in a band has many advantages. It works out cheaper, it’s easier to get around, you can work just about anywhere and you don’t need so much gear. The idea was first to be able to survive and earn a living, and when you are three it would be that much easier. Whenever I see bands with six, seven or even more members, I worry for them. It will be hard, they won’t earn much money, they’ll have trouble lasting it out and will quickly give up, unless success knocks at the door very quickly. For example, when I started The Flying Padovani’s after having played with The Police and The Electric Chairs, we were just three. And it’s true that we had our moments of glory, we held out, and we made a lot of noise… just the three of us. - “He’s in London” announced Stewart - “That’s it, he’s here?” - “He arrived the other day and we had a bit of a jam together”. - “And, so?” - “Yeah, he plays well!” He smiled, as if to say “He’s a killer” He added: - “Tall, good looking… You’ll see. OK, he’s a bit provincial, and he was playing jazz-rock before… You know those guys, not really into ‘look’ , but we can soon fix that! He’ll be here at 3 o’clock. We’ll play it cool!” He went off to get changed and when he came back down, he was wearing his American police officer’s jacket and dark glasses. - “What do you think?” - “Not bad at all” I understood that he wanted to put on a bit of a show for him. We got ready. I also put on my dark glasses, and when Sting arrived with his baby in a travel cot, we’d adopted the pose of dangerous rockers. I was wearing the black leather drainpipes that I had been practically living in since I’d moved to London, and I stayed silent and moody. Sting was wearing dungarees. He must have really thought we looked like a bunch of idiots. But we got going and soon after played a few of Stewart’s numbers. It went well and Sting joined the band. It was January 12th 1977. So, now the band did truly exist. .If Stewart and I went out all the time, it was obvious that Sting had other priorities. He’d come on his great adventure to London with his wife, Frances Tomelty, and their baby, Joe. They were really broke, and lived at a friend of Frances in Bayswater. The flat was nice, but at the end of the day, they were camping in one room. With the baby, it wasn’t easy! All the time I knew Sting in London, he was always freaked out with the question of money. It was a major worry for him, so he hardly went out. And the concerts Stewart and me wanted to take him to, he didn’t like. He said it clearly: - “This is a load of shit!” He did try to get us to listen to some of the songs that he had written, but Stewart stopped him each time: - “Sting, we can’t sing a song called ‘Don’t Give Up Your daytime Job!’. You still don’t get it, do you? Write us something along the lines of ‘My job is a heap of shit and I’m going to smash everything up!’ That, we can play.” And he’d look to me for back up. Sting would look at us both and I could see that he was seething inside. Then, usually he’d pick up his bass and since the little confrontation he just had with Stewart would fire him up, he’d start playing at three times his normal speed. He ‘d come up to me, who was struggling on my guitar and would have a go, pushing me around. Stewart loved it. He knew that by rejecting Sting each time he came up with an idea he’d wind him up so much that he’d end up stronger. Behind his enormous drum kit, the Tama, Stewart would beat faster and faster whilst sticking out his tongue, and the numbers ended up better and better. We’d finish the sessions drenched in sweat, washed out. We’d somehow managed to drag Sting off to see Generation X at the Roxy, and I think he thought he was hallucinating. It was three days after our first rehearsal. Ian came with us and Miles had put us on the guest list, not without moaning. Sting, who was always looking to improve musically and who had worked hard to better his bass playing technique, and who with his last group had been looking for reckognition by proposing more and more sophisticated numbers, just didn’t get it. All that hard work, just to end up here. He must have been asking himself how he was going to explain it to the mates he’d left behind in Newcastle. He was ashamed and we knew it. But, at the end of the day, he wanted to work and earn a living. He wasn’t stupid, far from it in fact. He understood that something important was going on in London, something bigger than him and his jazz-rocker mates in ‘Last Exit’. The Roxy was full and Miles was beaming. Shortly after, I smashed up my car. I was going to see some French girls who were living in North London. I was driving on the left, obviously, and on arrival at their street I had to turn right, crossing the road. A car just came out of nowhere, smashing straight into me. I didn’t have time to react. I should have veered off to the left, but my instincts told me to turn the steering wheel to the right. Inevitable crash. The driver who hit me was a rabbi. He had been drinking, he was in the wrong, but he was a rabbi. When the police turned up, the punk rocker I was didn’t stand a chance. I lost the car. It was my first real nightmare in London. But I remained Zen. Not long after, a musician friend from Aix-en-Provence, Fred, came to spend the weekend with me. I’d got hold of some tickets to see Dexter Gordon, the saxophonist, at Ronnie Scott’s. It was awesome. I too had felt the need to listen to something sophisticated. We’d taken a table near the stage and had downed quite a few pints while listening to Gordon’s two sets. After the concert, I’d driven Paul’s mini towards the Caledonian road to get home, but on the way, just before King’s cross on Marylebone, I took a right to show my friend the red light district. Obviously, this wasn’t very smart of me and I was quite spaced out. We stopped to stare at a couple of the girls, when someone knocked on the rear window. I thought it was someone mucking about and I took off sharpishly. At the next crossroads, two police cars were blocking our route and another came up behind us. An officer dragged me out of the car and forced me over the bonnet. Something crazy … It was 1977, there was much talk about the IRA and the terrorist incidents all over London. But I only understood this afterwards. The cops had pulled me over, maybe because they were on heightened vigilance, or maybe simply because the car was being driven erratically. As I’d driven up through Marylebone, the police had followed me, and it had been them who had knocked on the mini’s rear window. So when I’d driven off, they’d simply thought that I was trying to evade them and had radioed for backup – these were the two who had set up the roadblock ahead. This could have ended up very badly, but luckily they soon understood that we were just two young French guys out on the town. They took me to the station where I spent a night in the cells. Paul came over the following morning and I was taken straight to the magistrates. I had the choice between prison and probation. I had rehearsals booked with the band, so I chose probation. For one month, I had to go to Clerkenwell Police Station every day to sign the register. Maybe this was another sign, because while the Police were rehearsing and preparing to record their first single, I would go off every evening at about 8pm to meet some real police officers. I explained the situation to them and they thought it was hilarious. In fact, they were really cool about it, and with their permission, I was allowed to turn up later to sign the register, on the day when, with the Police, we recorded ‘Fall Out’ and ‘Nothing Achieving’, On Sunday 23rd January, after we’d been rehearsing for just ten days, Stewart invited us over to his flat so that we could take some photos on he roof with one of his mates, Lawrence Impey. It was a beautiful day, but I had a major toothache and a massive hangover… But it had to be done. We’d dressed up for the occasion. Stewart tried a number of different poses with his guitar, a gun, a police hat, all sorts of things… Sting had on his grey pinstriped jacket. And me, I had toothache! I was pulling a hell of face but the session went well and I looked OK. We carried on rehearsing and, three weeks later, we were ready to record. At the time, the best tracks, or rather the ones most suitable for the punk scene that we were hoping to break into, were ‘Fall Out’ and ‘Nothing Achieving’. Paul Mulligan lent us some money and we had booked a session at Bazza’s 8 track studio at Pathway Recording Studios. Bazza was a guy with long frizzy hair and looked like a hippy. The studio was small but with a good playing room, just large enough to fit in the drum kit. On 12th February we had our first single. Stewart played a number of rhythmic guitar passages on his SG and I played the solos on the Jacobacci. I was really pleased with the session, and on the record Sting can be heard bellowing ‘Henrrrryyyy!’ just before the one on ‘Fall Out’, rolling his R’s like a true Frenchman. For our promo, despite some pretty pathetic reviews, Stewart and I spent many nights pasting up posters and tagging the walls of London. It has to be said that we had a brilliant logo, which my brother Patrick had designed during one of his visits. It was based on the NYPD badge that Steward used to wear. It was so well done that the band kept it. My English was beginning to improve. I realized that, even though at school I had been a good student, the day I arrived in London I didn’t know enough to do any more than just get by. Only with daily practice did I begin to speak more fluently. But even so, I still managed to come out with some major clangers that would make Steward and Sting crease up laughing during rehearsals.

The early days of the Police

After Christmas I decided to go for an audition. Just like that. I wasn’t even sure whether or not I was going to stay in London, I was just rolling along, going with the flow.

I often played with Steward and Ian, and we got on well. We’d go out together to see bands. Stewart often talked about the band that he wanted to start. We’d see Miles organizing gigs – I remember watching Squeeze, his latest signing, supporting Generation X at some college gig, the audience seated behind the lecterns.
And then, maybe just to prove something to myself, I decided to reply to a small ad.
I was flicking through Melody Maker and I noticed a classified: London, punk group is looking for a guitarist. Why not? I gave them a call, and they asked me to come and see them in North London. Paul dropped me off. I met two guys: a singer, Riff Regan, and a drummer, John Moss, who later formed Culture Club with Boy George. Very cool. They handed me a guitar and I played some rock, a ‘twelve bars’ whilst Riff sang.
- “Do you want to join our band?”
Straight to the point.
I said I’d think about it and call them, and I left, over the moon. It was my first audition and they’d accepted me. I had been a bit stressed. It is not easy to sell yourself so quickly.

I went back to Paul’s, and that evening I called Stewart. I told him all about the audition. He seemed a bit surprised that I had done it. He asked me:
- “But, are you planning to stay in London, then?”
- “Maybe… Anyway, I said I’d think about it”
- “So you’re ready to stay?”
- “Yeah…” I replied, a bit lost. “I don’t know… I don’t really feel like going back just yet. Why?”
- “Look, if you’re going to stay in London, why don’t you join my band?”
- “You never asked me.”
- “I thought you understood. Anyway, the bass player I told you about is coming down from Newcastle”.
- “Oh yeah? The Sting or whatever his name is?”
- “Yeah, him!… What are you doing right now?”
- “Not a lot, I’ve just got back at Paul’s”
- “Why don’t you come round? We can have a chat about it”
I was thinking. He continued:
- “And I’ve just written a new song”
- “I’ll be right over!”
Stewart seemed to be a bit worried that I might join another group. I was surprised. I was pleased. I don’t know. It was simple and I liked that. Like always, I didn’t question myself too much, everything just fell into place, quietly and simply.

All my life I haven’t asked myself too many questions. I tend to trundle along on instinct, and either I’ve had a lot of luck or maybe that’s just the best way to make choices. So far, I think I have been right to work in that way. And when people ask, I reply that I don’t have many regrets, that I sleep well and dream a lot, and not always while sleeping either.
Like most people, I also have some pretty mad ideas sometimes, but ‘I’m not making any plans about the comet???’. ( wild dreams.. when the comet was first seen, people would have all kinds of ideas about it.. an English expression here?)

I’d been in London for about a month. I wanted to be a musician. I was one. I wanted to be a guitarist in a band. I’d been offered two options in one day and I had chosen. Everything was going well.

When the band that I was about to join eventually became very famous – and I wasn’t part of it anymore – many people in France did asked me if I wasn’t disgusted, jealous, bitter or even sour. Never once have I ever felt anything other than joy for my friends, for their well deserved success. Maybe if I had gone through the same thing in France, I might have felt that way, but in England, we all pulled together in the same direction, and if one group became successful, then we all had a chance to also become so one day. I have never made music thinking that I wanted to become number one, and neither have any of the groups I have played with in the UK. Obviously we wanted our music to be heard, we wanted to be successful, wanted to play in front of larger and larger crowds. And, even though there was so much competition, we knew that we could all have our chance, and we all did everything we could to have it. In England, no one has ever asked me whether I was jealous of The Police’s success. My friends are proud to know that I, along with two mates, started a group that became one of the biggest pop group in the world.

The bassist he’d mentioned was about to visit him.
He was from from Newcastle. Stewart had discovered him playing in a jazz-rock band.
After a Curved Air gig, Phil Sutcliffe, a journalist had taken him to see the pride of Newcastle: Last Exit. He didn’t much like the band, but the bassist impressed him. He had ‘it’. He could sing and play bass at the same time, which was perfect because Stewart wanted to start a three-piece. Jimi Hendrix was his model. It’s true that being just three in a band has many advantages. It works out cheaper, it’s easier to get around, you can work just about anywhere and you don’t need so much gear. The idea was first to be able to survive and earn a living, and when you are three it would be that much easier. Whenever I see bands with six, seven or even more members, I worry for them. It will be hard, they won’t earn much money, they’ll have trouble lasting it out and will quickly give up, unless success knocks at the door very quickly. For example, when I started The Flying Padovani’s after having played with The Police and The Electric Chairs, we were just three. And it’s true that we had our moments of glory, we held out, and we made a lot of noise… just the three of us.

-   “He’s in London” announced Stewart
-   “That’s it, he’s here?”
-    “He arrived the other day and we had a bit of a jam together”.
-    “And, so?”
-     “Yeah, he plays well!”
He smiled, as if to say “He’s a killer”
He added:
-     “Tall, good looking… You’ll see. OK, he’s a bit provincial, and he was playing jazz-rock before… You know those guys, not really into ‘look’ , but we can soon fix that! He’ll be here at 3 o’clock. We’ll play it cool!”
He went off to get changed and when he came back down, he was wearing his American police officer’s jacket and dark glasses.
-    “What do you think?”
-    “Not bad at all”

I understood that he wanted to put on a bit of a show for him. We got ready. I also put on my dark glasses, and when Sting arrived with his baby in a travel cot, we’d adopted the pose of dangerous rockers. I was wearing the black leather drainpipes that I had been practically living in since I’d moved to London, and I stayed silent and moody. Sting was wearing dungarees. He must have really thought we looked like a bunch of idiots.

But we got going and soon after played a few of Stewart’s numbers. It went well and Sting joined the band. It was January 12th 1977.

So, now the band did truly exist. .If Stewart and I went out all the time, it was obvious that Sting had other priorities. He’d come on his great adventure to London with his wife, Frances Tomelty, and their baby, Joe. They were really broke, and lived at a friend of Frances in Bayswater. The flat was nice, but at the end of the day, they were camping in one room. With the baby, it wasn’t easy!
All the time I knew Sting in London, he was always freaked out with the question of money. It was a major worry for him, so he hardly went out. And the concerts Stewart and me wanted to take him to, he didn’t like. He said it clearly:
- “This is a load of shit!”
He did try to get us to listen to some of the songs that he had written, but Stewart stopped him each time:
- “Sting, we can’t sing a song called ‘Don’t Give Up Your daytime Job!’. You still don’t get it, do you? Write us something along the lines of ‘My job is a heap of shit and I’m going to smash everything up!’ That, we can play.”
And he’d look to me for back up.
Sting would look at us both and I could see that he was seething inside. Then, usually he’d pick up his bass and since the little confrontation he just had with Stewart would fire him up, he’d start playing at three times his normal speed. He ‘d come up to me, who was struggling on my guitar and would have a go, pushing me around. Stewart loved it. He knew that by rejecting Sting each time he came up with an idea he’d wind him up so much that he’d end up stronger. Behind his enormous drum kit, the Tama, Stewart would beat faster and faster whilst sticking out his tongue, and the numbers ended up better and better. We’d finish the sessions drenched in sweat, washed out.

We’d somehow managed to drag Sting off to see Generation X at the Roxy, and I think he thought he was hallucinating. It was three days after our first rehearsal. Ian came with us and Miles had put us on the guest list, not without moaning. Sting, who was always looking to improve musically and who had worked hard to better his bass playing technique, and who with his last group had been looking for reckognition by proposing more and more sophisticated numbers, just didn’t get it.
All that hard work, just to end up here. He must have been asking himself how he was going to explain it to the mates he’d left behind in Newcastle. He was ashamed and we knew it. But, at the end of the day, he wanted to work and earn a living. He wasn’t stupid, far from it in fact. He understood that something important was going on in London, something bigger than him and his jazz-rocker mates in ‘Last Exit’. The Roxy was full and Miles was beaming.

Shortly after, I smashed up my car. I was going to see some French girls who were living in North London. I was driving on the left, obviously, and on arrival at their street I had to turn right, crossing the road. A car just came out of nowhere, smashing straight into me. I didn’t have time to react. I should have veered off to the left, but my instincts told me to turn the steering wheel to the right. Inevitable crash. The driver who hit me was a rabbi. He had been drinking, he was in the wrong, but he was a rabbi. When the police turned up, the punk rocker I was didn’t stand a chance. I lost the car. It was my first real nightmare in London.
But I remained Zen.

Not long after, a musician friend from Aix-en-Provence, Fred, came to spend the weekend with me. I’d got hold of some tickets to see Dexter Gordon, the saxophonist, at Ronnie Scott’s.
It was awesome. I too had felt the need to listen to something sophisticated. We’d taken a table near the stage and had downed quite a few pints while listening to Gordon’s two sets. After the concert, I’d driven Paul’s mini towards the Caledonian road to get home, but on the way, just before King’s cross on Marylebone, I took a right to show my friend the red light district. Obviously, this wasn’t very smart of me and I was quite spaced out. We stopped to stare at a couple of the girls, when someone knocked on the rear window. I thought it was someone mucking about and I took off sharpishly. At the next crossroads, two police cars were blocking our route and another came up behind us. An officer dragged me out of the car and forced me over the bonnet.
Something crazy … It was 1977, there was much talk about the IRA and the terrorist incidents all over London. But I only understood this afterwards. The cops had pulled me over, maybe because they were on heightened vigilance, or maybe simply because the car was being driven erratically. As I’d driven up through Marylebone, the police had followed me, and it had been them who had knocked on the mini’s rear window. So when I’d driven off, they’d simply thought that I was trying to evade them and had radioed for backup – these were the two who had set up the roadblock ahead. This could have ended up very badly, but luckily they soon understood that we were just two young French guys out on the town. They took me to the station where I spent a night in the cells. Paul came over the following morning and I was taken straight to the magistrates. I had the choice between prison and probation. I had rehearsals booked with the band, so I chose probation. For one month, I had to go to Clerkenwell Police Station every day to sign the register.
Maybe this was another sign, because while the Police were rehearsing and preparing to record their first single, I would go off every evening at about 8pm to meet some real police officers. I explained the situation to them and they thought it was hilarious.
In fact, they were really cool about it, and with their permission, I was allowed to turn up later to sign the register, on the day when, with the Police, we recorded ‘Fall Out’ and ‘Nothing Achieving’,

On Sunday 23rd January, after we’d been rehearsing for just ten days, Stewart invited us over to his flat so that we could take some photos on he roof with one of his mates, Lawrence Impey. It was a beautiful day, but I had a major toothache and a massive hangover… But it had to be done.
We’d dressed up for the occasion. Stewart tried a number of different poses with his guitar, a gun, a police hat, all sorts of things… Sting had on his grey pinstriped jacket. And me, I had toothache! I was pulling a hell of face but the session went well and I looked OK.

We carried on rehearsing and, three weeks later, we were ready to record. At the time, the best tracks, or rather the ones most suitable for the punk scene that we were hoping to break into, were ‘Fall Out’ and ‘Nothing Achieving’. Paul Mulligan lent us some money and we had booked a session at Bazza’s 8 track studio at Pathway Recording Studios. Bazza was a guy with long frizzy hair and looked like a hippy. The studio was small but with a good playing room, just large enough to fit in the drum kit.
On 12th February we had our first single. Stewart played a number of rhythmic guitar passages on his SG and I played the solos on the Jacobacci. I was really pleased with the session, and on the record Sting can be heard bellowing ‘Henrrrryyyy!’ just before the one on ‘Fall Out’, rolling his R’s like a true Frenchman.

For our promo, despite some pretty pathetic reviews, Stewart and I spent many nights pasting up posters and tagging the walls of London. It has to be said that we had a brilliant logo, which my brother Patrick had designed during one of his visits. It was based on the NYPD badge that Steward used to wear. It was so well done that the band kept it.

My English was beginning to improve. I realized that, even though at school I had been a good student, the day I arrived in London I didn’t know enough to do any more than just get by. Only with daily practice did I begin to speak more fluently. But even so, I still managed to come out with some major clangers that would make Steward and Sting crease up laughing during rehearsals.