Sting Utterly HATED This ‘The Police’ Band Member… He Revealed Why

The Police sold more than 75 million records, won multiple Grammys, and packed stadiums worldwide. But behind the music and fame, there was a war brewing—not between rival bands or industry executives, but between the three men on stage. The hatred between them became so intense that they needed counselors just to be in the same room. The band did not start as the polished, chart-topping powerhouse they would eventually become.

In January 1977, a trio of musicians came together in London with shared ambition and very little else. The permanent classic lineup would eventually consist of Gordon “Sting” Sumner on lead vocals and bass, Stewart Copeland on drums, and Andy Summers on guitar. But at the very beginning, there was another name in the mix—a French guitarist who would be forgotten by history. Copeland had initially formed the band with Sting and guitarist Henry Padovani, a Corsican musician who had shaved off his hippie-length hair to join the punk movement.

Padovani knew only a few chords but was genuinely enthusiastic. However, the chemistry between the three was not working, and it became clear a change needed to be made. Everything shifted in July 1977 when Andy Summers joined after a chance meeting with Sting and Copeland. Summers had already seen the trio perform live and was immediately impressed by their raw potential.

The band briefly became a four-piece, but it did not last long. Summers wanted to be the sole guitarist, and Padovani was uncomfortable playing alongside someone whose skills outmatched his own. By August 1977, Padovani was officially phased out, and the classic Police lineup was born. In their early days, the Police intentionally presented themselves as part of the explosive UK punk rock movement—a strategic decision designed to secure club bookings in a competitive scene.

Despite their punk camouflage, all three members were highly trained musicians with deep backgrounds in jazz, progressive rock, and classical music. Their debut single, “Fall Out,” was recorded on a tiny budget of £150 and released on Copeland’s independent label, Illegal Records. The band members were so broke they had to manually handpack the single records into their sleeves and carry them to local record shops on the subway. Their debut album, Outlandos d’Amour, was recorded at Surrey Sound Studios using cheap used magnetic tape.

To afford the sessions, they recorded during off-peak overnight hours when studio rates were at their lowest. Their breakthrough single “Roxanne” faced an immediate obstacle when BBC radio banned it due to its lyrical subject matter, forcing the band to look overseas for a breakthrough. Their manager, Miles Copeland—Stewart’s brother—booked a low-cost tour of the United States in 1979, where the band traveled in a rented Ford Econoline van, carrying their own equipment and playing tiny clubs. The grind worked.

Their sophomore album, Reggatta de Blanc, instantly hit number one in the UK, propelled by “Message in a Bottle” and “Walking on the Moon. ” Their final album, Synchronicity, spent 17 weeks at number one on the US Billboard charts, famously dethroning Michael Jackson’s Thriller. In August 1983, they played a monumental sold-out show to 70,000 fans at Shea Stadium in New York, cementing them as the biggest band in the world. The Police accumulated six Grammy Awards, two Brit Awards, and an MTV Video Music Award before being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003.

But behind the success lay simmering tensions that would eventually define the band’s internal dynamic as much as their music. The Police had always been a band defined by tension. From the very beginning, the three members were a volatile combination of formidable egos, competing visions, and contrasting musical backgrounds. What made their music so electrifying was also what made their working relationships so explosive.

The shift in creative equity was the first major fracture. Copeland initially wrote the band’s earliest material and viewed himself as the leader. He had formed the group, named it, and developed the concept. However, by 1978, Sting’s vastly superior pop songwriting capability became obvious.

Copeland later admitted that early on, “it was all his songs, which were not very good, but Sting’s amazing lyrics put the band on a different trajectory. ” The shift in power was gradual but undeniable, leaving Copeland feeling sidelined and undervalued. As the primary songwriter, Sting established what one might describe as an absolute dictatorship over what music was recorded. If he did not like a song written by Copeland or Summers, he flatly refused to perform it, effectively killing his bandmates’ financial publishing opportunities.

The most famous example was Andy Summers’s instrumental “Behind My Camel. ” Sting hated the track so much that he refused to play bass on it, leaving Summers to play the bass parts himself. In a fit of frustration, Sting confessed to finding the master tape and burying it in the garden of the studio. The track eventually won a Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance in 1982—an ironic victory that highlighted the depth of Sting’s disdain.

The clash between jazz and punk ideas made the tension even stronger. Copeland preferred the fast, wild energy of punk with quick beats that pushed songs forward. Sting, strongly influenced by his time in jazz fusion bands such as Last Exit, wanted more space, slower and more controlled moments, pauses influenced by reggae. They were constantly pulled in different directions, with almost every song turning into a struggle over whose musical idea would win.

During the recording of their third album, Zenyatta Mondatta, Sting started asking Copeland to remove many of his complicated drum fills and fast hi-hat patterns, wanting simple, steady beats that would keep the focus on vocals and melodies. The album had to be recorded in only four weeks at Wisseloord Studios in the Netherlands due to serious tax problems and a demanding management schedule. The members argued so often that the album was eventually mixed in separate rooms. The conflict over synthesizers became even worse during the making of Ghost in the Machine in 1981.

Sting brought large amounts of keyboard synthesizers and horn arrangements into the studio without first discussing the changes. The band began moving away from being a guitar-focused three-piece rock band and started sounding more like a pop group built around synthesizers. Summers later said that as the horns and synthesizers became more important, the powerful natural sound of the three musicians playing together was disappearing—he felt they were slowly becoming a backing band for Sting’s pop songs. By the time the band returned to AIR Studios in Montserrat to record Synchronicity, tensions had escalated to the point of physical confrontations.

Personal struggles compounded the creative tension. Sting’s first marriage to actress Frances Tomelty collapsed during the intense rise to global fame between 1981 and 1982. The emotional trauma, guilt, and bitter public divorce heavily fueled the dark, obsessive lyrical themes of loneliness and isolation on their final records. Sting had been married to Tomelty since 1976, and they had two children together.

The guilt was compounded by the fact that his new relationship with Trudie Styler had begun while he was still married. Sting wrote “Every Breath You Take” during the aftermath of his marital breakdown while staying at the GoldenEye estate in Jamaica. He was suffering from severe mental exhaustion and paranoia, later describing the period as a nervous breakdown. The song was about sinister surveillance, jealousy, and control—far from the gentle love song the public misconstrued it to be.

It became one of the biggest hits of his career and is still played at weddings, completely misunderstood by millions of listeners. The non-stop touring schedule severely fractured Summers’s personal life. He divorced his wife, Robin Lane, in 1981 due to the psychological strain of the band’s global isolation. They remarkably remarried years later in 1985 after the band split.

In 1980, Sting and Summers became legal tax exiles from the United Kingdom to protect their sudden millions from high tax brackets. The British government had imposed a 98% top tax rate on high earners, and the band’s accountants advised them to leave the country. Sting moved to a house in Roundstone, Galway, while Summers purchased a similar house in Kinsale. The forced nomadic lifestyle cut them off from their home country and familiar support systems.

By 1982, all three members suffered from acute physical and mental exhaustion. They were trapped in a relentless loop of album-tour-album cycles engineered by management. Copeland later recalled that the band had become a machine, with each member performing their function but with no joy left in the process. The hatred between Sting and Copeland reached its breaking point during the recording of Synchronicity in 1983.

Producer Hugh Padgham had to intervene to prevent physical confrontations. He placed Copeland’s drum kit in the main live room and Sting’s bass rig in the control room, separating them by thick acoustic glass so they could not hurt each other. The animosity reached a new low just minutes before the band walked on stage to play their largest career show at Shea Stadium in August 1983. A massive physical argument erupted in the dressing room over a newspaper.

Copeland got into a physical wrestling match with Sting, resulting in a hairline fracture to Sting’s rib. Sting performed the entire historic concert in intense physical agony, smiling through the pain as 70,000 fans cheered. Copeland’s aggression was not limited to physical confrontations. He routinely used a black marker to write Sting’s name across his drum heads before studio sessions, admitting this was a visceral psychological tool so he could channel his genuine anger and physically smash Sting’s name with his drumsticks all day.

The power struggles extended to the band’s creative output. During the Ghost in the Machine sessions, Summers wrote a track titled “Omega Man” that record executives wanted to release as the album’s lead single. Sting threw a massive tantrum and flatly refused to allow it, threatening to walk out of the band entirely if a song he did not write was given top billing. There was never an official press release announcing the end of the Police.

At the final show of the Synchronicity tour on March 4th, 1984, in Melbourne, Australia, Sting looked at his bandmates on stage and mentally resolved that he would never perform a studio album with them again. The band simply drifted into an indefinite hiatus that became permanent. Sting’s decision was quiet and private, a resolution he made without sharing it with his bandmates. In July 1986, the band attempted to reconvene in the studio to record a new album.

The tension returned instantly. Sting refused to offer any new songs, forcing them to re-record old hits. The sessions completely collapsed when Copeland fell off a horse, breaking his collarbone and rendering him unable to drum, permanently killing the reunion. When the Police reunited for a 30th anniversary world tour in 2007, the interpersonal relationships had not healed.

Copeland publicly stated that they had to hire professional relationship mediators—essentially marriage counselors—just to navigate the backstage areas without shouting matches. Despite the massive financial success of the reunion tour, which grossed over $160 million, the emotional wounds remained as raw as ever. During the final months of the 2007-2008 tour, Copeland revealed that he and Sting had completely stopped socializing offstage. They would look at each other while performing live and mouth the countdown of how many minutes and gigs were left until they could legally escape each other forever.

Sting has consistently maintained that a rock band is an inherently juvenile construct for an adult man. He stated that the Police was “a brilliant exercise in democratic tyranny,” but a band is a multi-headed monster where everyone has to be consulted. He preferred the total freedom of a solo career. The simmering financial resentment erupted into the public eye when Summers and Copeland officially filed a lawsuit against Sting and his company Magnetic Publishing in London’s High Court.

The legal battle claimed substantial damages over unpaid royalties. The core mechanics of the lawsuit centered on the transition from physical records to digital streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. Summers and Copeland argued that under a verbal agreement made in 1977 and formalized in 1981, they were legally entitled to a 15% arranger’s fee from the publishing income of the songs. The legal claim heavily relied on songs like “Every Breath You Take.

” While Sting is listed as the sole composer, earning him an estimated $2,000 per day in royalties, the iconic guitar arpeggio was created by Summers in the studio. Summers repeatedly insisted that his guitar contribution was crucial to the track’s success. The song has been streamed over 1 billion times on Spotify alone. Sting’s legal defense argued that his former bandmates were fundamentally ineligible for digital streaming revenues.

His lawyers claimed that a 2016 modification to their contracts specified that royalty payments to Summers and Copeland were strictly derived from the manufacture of physical records and did not apply to digital or performance streaming fees. In court documents made public during a High Court preliminary hearing, it was officially revealed that Sting’s legal team quietly paid over $800,000 (approximately £595,000) to Copeland and Summers to cover historical underpayments of specific royalties. However, the wider multi-million dollar streaming dispute remained fiercely contested. Summers and Copeland claimed that the total value was not less than $8 million and would be considerably larger if their amended case proceeded.

As the legal proceedings dragged on, fans and industry observers alike wondered whether the three musicians would ever find a way to resolve their differences.