74 Years Ago Today: The Police's Stewart Copeland Is Born

Stewart Armstrong Copeland was born July 16, 1952, in Alexandria, Virginia, the youngest of four children of British archaeologist Lorraine Copeland and American intelligence officer Miles Copeland Jr., a founding CIA member, per Wikipedia's account of his life. The family moved to Cairo within months of his birth, then to Beirut when he was five. He started drum lessons at 12 and was playing school dances within a year, a rhythmic education that ran through Middle Eastern and reggae vocabulary well before he ever heard a rock backbeat.

He returned to England as a young adult, worked as Curved Air's road manager, then became the prog-rock band's drummer through 1975 and 1976. In early 1977 he founded The Police with singer-bassist Sting and guitarist Henry Padovani, soon replaced by Andy Summers. Across five studio albums, Outlandos d'Amour (1978) through Synchronicity (1983), Copeland's playing became the band's most identifiable ingredient next to Sting's voice.

Standard rock drumming treats the hi-hat as a metronome. Copeland treated it as a third melodic voice, splashing it open on off-beats and layering ghost notes underneath Sting's bass and Andy Summers' chorus-heavy guitar. That vocabulary, along with reggae-displaced backbeats on songs like "Roxanne" and "So Lonely," is why The Police never quite sounded like their new-wave and punk contemporaries. A MusicRadar assessment cited on his Wikipedia page credits Copeland's "distinctive drum sound and uniqueness of style" for making him "one of the most popular drummers to ever get behind a drumset." Peter Gabriel hired him to play on "Red Rain" and "Big Time" from 1986's So for his "hi-hat mastery," and Rolling Stone ranked him the 10th-best drummer of all time in 2016.

His Police-era recognition compounded for decades afterward: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the band in 2003, the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2005, and the Classic Drummer Hall of Fame in 2013.

Copeland's post-Police career runs nearly as long as his time in the band. His score for 1983's Rumble Fish, Francis Ford Coppola's film of the S.E. Hinton novel, earned him a Golden Globe nomination, and he went on to compose for Wall Street (1987), Talk Radio (1988), and the TV series Dead Like Me, plus the soundtracks for Insomniac Games' Spyro the Dragon series starting in 1998. He'd also recorded under the pseudonym Klark Kent in 1978, releasing UK singles including "Don't Care," which peaked at No. 48 that August, months before The Police's own first chart hit.

In 2007, Copeland, Sting, and Andy Summers reunited to perform "Roxanne" at the Grammy Awards, their first public performance since the band's 2003 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. One day later they announced a 30th-anniversary reunion tour: 151 dates across five continents, closing with a final show at Madison Square Garden in August 2008.

Copeland's documented snare batter through the Police catalog is Remo's Coated Ambassador, the workhorse head behind the dry, focused tom-and-snare voice on records like Synchronicity. It's a well-sourced specific from his CYS gear profile, not a guess.