Broken Music: A Memoir (37 page)

“Goddamn it, I just signed Squeeze to A&M. When they hear this, lemme tell ya, they’re gonna flip.” His reaction to this song is so powerful that it renders his previous enthusiasm lukewarm by comparison. He is fizzing with excitement, and leaves the studio clutching the tape and crooning the chorus in a faux southern twang. The other songs are left on the tape machine, like the ugly sisters after a prince’s ball.

We leave the studio in high spirits, well aware that A&M is one of the most respected and successful companies on either side of the Atlantic. Whereas before we’d been perfectly happy to release the record independently on Illegal, we were now, with Miles’s blessing,
setting our sights higher than we’d ever thought possible, on an international record company.

Miles calls his brother next day, “drooling,” as Stewart describes it. Yes, the company loved the song too, and the executives there think it can be a hit, and if that turns out to be so we’ll have our album released not on the tiny Illegal label but on the mighty A&M. Our excitement and anticipation are somewhat tempered that evening at the studio when Miles tells us he is not going to negotiate a large advance for us.

“Listen, a large advance is just a bank loan. What I want to sign is a single deal on this one song. If it’s a hit, then I’ll be able to negotiate a much better album deal and a higher royalty. If you can manage the way you have for the last year, without an advance, you’ll reap the benefit in the long run.”

This, again, was a shining example of Miles’s legendary shrewdness. In contrast to the feudal relationship that most bands normally fall into when seduced by large advances, this was the beginning of a genuine partnership between the Police and the record company. We would benefit from more artistic freedom, and whatever we earned would be ours. I would subsequently be able to describe the Police as “a nice little business,” but it was Miles who was the architect of this and we would reap the rewards for our patience in spades. Another benefit that “Roxanne” would grant us was to divert Miles 180 degrees from his ridiculous Police Brutality idea and more toward the romantic idealism that would increasingly inform the songs. He would now officially become our manager.

It is January 26, 1978. Miles Axe Copeland III walks triumphantly into the studio with the bare outlines of a contract with A&M for our new single “Roxanne,” as well as a new idea for the album title.
Outlandos D’Amour
is a strange concoction of Esperanto and gobbledegook which Miles savors luxuriously in his mouth in a
parody of a French accent that owes more to his alma mater in Birmingham, Alabama, than it does to the Sorbonne. Posing as a kind of hick Tom Parker will become a recognizable Miles strategy whenever he ventures a creative suggestion and he wants to laugh us out of any serious doubts.
Outlandos D’Amour
is certainly an odd title, but it appeals to our shared sense of the absurd, and as no one else has a better idea,
Outlandos D’Amour
it is.

By March the contract with A&M is ready for signing. All the A&M executives and company accountants supposedly have copies of “Roxanne” in their tape decks, and we are told it is the first record in a long time that the promotion staff have asked to hear more than once. Stewart, Andy, and I go to the plush company offices off the Fulham Road, where the president, Derek Green, greets us like long-lost sons, and “Roxanne” is playing triumphantly on the sound system throughout the entire building.

There we are, lounging on the cane furniture and the deep pile carpets of the presidential office, initialing each page of the white contract with a Parker pen of solid silver. After this formality, as a gesture of welcome, they let us loose on their catalog downstairs in the basement where we take about two hundred pounds’ worth of albums. I get the entire collection of Quincy Jones and Antonio Carlos Jobim, although my haul is modest compared to the other two because I still don’t own a record player. I walk into the house feeling like a man who just successfully robbed the store, when Frances has her turn to tell me some news. She’s just been offered a series for Granada TV, playing an undercover cop. “That makes two of us,” I say. The series will be filmed up in Manchester, which means long periods of separation for us, but our mutual ambition as well as the need to pay the bills will see us through the difficult times. The two of us dance around the front room with Joe between
us and Buttons the dog, as usual, looking on bewildered and disapproving.

    My youngest sister, Anita, will tell me that her strongest memory of the day was a tobacco-brown car reversing carefully into the short driveway in front of the open garage doors of the family home in Tynemouth.

It is 10:30 on a fine Saturday morning with a clear blue sky and a southerly breeze, as my mother throws her suitcases into the back of the car. She is accompanied by Anita, who looks fretful and uncertain as she climbs into the backseat. My mother has been planning this for months, siphoning her clothes secretly into bags and cases so that her escape can be as brief and efficient as possible. My father will return from work at eleven-thirty; everything seems to have been planned with a cold military precision.

My sister is deeply unhappy and afraid, she doesn’t want to leave, but crouched in the backseat and clutching the birdcage with her pet budgie on her knee, she tries to reassure the little bird and herself that everything will be okay, everything will be okay.

My mother has that wild, hunted look in her eyes while the man in the front seat, who has left his own family, is silent and anxiously checking his watch and the street as the bags are piled higher and higher. They will spend the rest of the day driving south to a little town near Manchester and the dream of a new life.

My father returns to an empty house, scrupulously clean, like a prepared corpse or a mausoleum. There is no note.

I react badly to the news of my mother’s elopement. I called my dad, who was, as expected, devastated and confused. I will send an angry letter to my mother, telling her she was out of order and basically disowning her. The letter was unforgiving, ill-considered, and
rash, but I was in a blind fury of righteous anger. I felt I should somehow avenge my father’s humiliation, but I wasn’t smart or mature enough to seek balance in any other way.

With the wisdom of hindsight, I have to question whether my own life had been any less reckless. Long periods of separation in my own little family may have been the price of ambition, but they were equally destructive in the long term. I may have wanted to escape the consequences of my parents’ dysfunction by living a life on the run, as dramatically different and removed from them as was possible, but unconsciously I carried the seed of their unhappiness with me wherever I went. My mother had always looked longingly away from home for her salvation—and I had internalized this in the compulsive aspects of what would become twenty-five years “on the road.”

    In the same month as my mother’s elopement to Manchester, Miles will bring Randy California’s Spirit to the UK, and they need another support act.

The tour begins at Essex University, followed by a sold-out show at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park. Spirit, the seminal West Coast psychedelic band from the sixties, are still playing the same brand of woozy, trippy rock and roll that made them famous. The Police and Mark P.’s ATV are booked as support, Spirit being Mark’s favorite band and the tour being partly his idea. We are still bottom of the bill. Despite the promising reaction to “Roxanne” at the record company, we are still regarded as poor relations at Dryden Chambers, but we don’t mind. Mark’s band has improved a great deal since the last time we saw them, but we don’t imagine we’ll have much trouble blowing them off the bandstand. And I’ve forgiven them for demolishing my car, aided by Miles footing the bill for repairs to the front end.

The audiences that turn up every night are almost exclusively
made up of people who look as if they’ve stepped out of some kind of decade-long time warp, with shoulder-length hair, beads and bell bottoms, sandals and dirty toenails. I don’t get the impression that they’ve dressed up in honor of Randy and the trio—this is how they always look. I hadn’t realized that there were so many hippies left. As we are a band called the Police, with cropped platinum hair and tight trousers, the audience is initially and quite understandably hostile to our collective gestalt, but by the first number our raucous little combo has managed to win them over, and if my arrogant stage persona comes off as alienating, then it is backed up by the inarguable fact that we can play We are fearless, unapologetic, and cocksure of ourselves, and are rewarded with a rousing ovation at the end of our half-hour spot. Miles hugs me and tells me that I’m going to be a big star. This time I don’t recoil.

Mark’s band does fine and will glean a polite if sparse response, while Spirit tear the place apart, Randy California giving a more plausible impression of Jimi Hendrix than I would have thought possible. I find his rendition of “Hey Joe” very moving and heavily nostalgic, especially since Hendrix had died so tragically almost eight years before.

    When the letter postmarked from Manchester comes, I first assume it’s from Frances and Joe, but I’m wrong.

I am seven years old again.

There is no way that my mother could have known she had less than a decade to live, but she must have heard a clock ticking. She saw a patch of blue sky and she bolted. I had followed my dream and she had to follow hers, but part of me couldn’t let her go with my blessing. My response to her, while as tender as I could make it, was nonetheless unrelenting. I would have to take sides with my father, fatuously assuming that life was some kind of emotional football game that could be won or lost by force of numbers. I think I ended the letter with some kind of self-serving explanation that I had to stick by my dad, that I could no longer maintain a relationship with her, and that “even this letter seems like a small betrayal.” It hurt me to write that but it must have hurt her terribly. It hurts me now, and I realize what a pompous little fool I was, because it wasn’t much later that I too would fall hopelessly in love with someone else, break the wedding vows I was so sure I could keep, and be swept up in a tidal wave of emotion and longing that none of us could stop….

In mid-April, while Frances and Joe are still up in Manchester, I walk to the Virgin Record Store on Bayswater Road and buy the single of “Roxanne.” There is a photo of me on the back, in full flight at the Mont de Marsan Festival, and inside, underneath the title, is my name as the composer of the song. Published by Virgin Music Ltd. I am so proud. We are record of the week in
Record Mirror
, “best of the rest” in
Sounds
;
Melody Maker
says that it could be a minor hit, and
NME
pointedly ignore it.

Gerry calls to ask if I’ll put him on the guest list for our gig that night at the Nashville Rooms. He’s seen our good reviews. (Though
Time Out
warn their readers we’re boring and we’re damned before we play a note. Such things by now only fire me up.) I know Gerry’s happy for me, but I also know part of him wants to see that the gig’s not too good. Though I’m still seeking his approval, he’s been my sparring partner for too long. The gig turns out to be great. Even Gerry gives us a thumbs-up.

At the end I see Miles and Carol Wilson having a flaming standup row about my publishing. Miles feels that they haven’t done enough for me—they could, for instance, have given us some financial tour support. He wants me out of my contract, but Carol is now a friend and Miles as always has his own agenda. I’ve written most of the material on the album, and as my publishing deal was signed long before the Police, Miles has no legal claim to whatever publishing royalties accrue. This will be a bone of contention for years to come and even at this date there is clearly trouble brewing.

Few feelings compare to the euphoria of hearing your record on the radio for the first time, a song you’ve worked and slaved on suddenly released onto the airwaves. It’s like watching one of your children successfully ride a bike for the first time. There is the child, undeniably part of you but no longer physically connected, spreading her wings and taking to the air.

I am balanced like a surfer on a plank in the kitchen, painting the ceiling when I hear the staccato chop of the G minor chord and then my long first syllable hanging in the air and swooping down like a question mark. I almost fall off my perch, dripping white emulsion all over the floor, desperately trying to get to the phone.

“Stew, we’re on Capital Radio, listen!”

“You’re damn right we are.” I can hear the song through the earpiece, halfway across London.

“And that was the Police with ‘Roxanne,’ one of this week’s Capital climbers.”

“Wow, did you hear that?”

I sit on the floor, my heart racing, a little shell-shocked. Part of me can’t quite believe it, like a long-held dream that suddenly solidifies into tangible reality.

Alas, despite the encouraging start and the early confidence of the record company, “Roxanne” will not be a hit, at least this time around. The BBC don’t play the song, citing the subject matter as a reason for their reticence, but they are always looking for an excuse to exclude a record from their oversubscribed playlist. The BBC are the most important station in the country, and all the others follow suit.

Despite the failure of “Roxanne” to set the charts alight, A&M are still willing to give us another try, although they don’t want to release the album until we’ve had some kind of chart hit. And so “Can’t Stand Losing You” is slated for release later in the year. It’s not as unusual as “Roxanne” but may be more palatable for commercial radio. This will be our second bite of the cherry and we are still optimistic.