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CNN WorldBeat's Serena Yang talks to Stewart Copeland
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Web posted on: Tuesday, March 09, 1999 2:20:40 PM EST

(CNN) -- For a few brief years in the early 1980s, Stewart Copeland and his bandmates in The Police were perched at the top of the music world.

At the time, however, Copeland said the trio found their success an unhappy experience.

"It's a strange kind of anomaly, because everything was happening for us," he said. "We were conquering the world, but we were miserable. And I think it's because there's an imbalance that you get if you have too less or too much of anything, it's a bad thing."

These days, Copeland says, he has more of the balance he was missing then. As a successful composer, he has placed his musical stamp on nearly 40 films, as well as creating works for the opera, ballet, and symphony.

Drummer Copeland and bassist Sting formed The Police back in 1977 with guitarist Andy Summers. Their arresting style blended New Wave with reggae and sold more than 60 million albums before the band broke up nearly a decade later.

Since then, Copeland has done it all, composing for the opera, ballet, and symphony, crossing back over into rock, experimenting with music from other cultures, and composing for film and television.

Copeland has scored music for movies, including the recent hit film "She's All That"

'Beautiful, surging orchestral music'

"Classical music has always had a pull for me because I was raised on it. My daddy raised me to be a jazz musician. Meanwhile, my mother was listening to Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, and so on," he said.

"The latter is actually what made an impression on me. And so much of the time, when I'm walking down the road, I don't have raging rock riffs or even drum patterns in my head. I have beautiful, surging orchestral music."

Copeland said orchestras can evoke certain emotions that guitars can't.

"And so when I was first invited to write a symphonic piece, which was actually a ballet for the San Francisco Ballet, I leapt on it," he said.

Copeland's orchestral work complements his talents as a film composer, which he began with the score to "Rumble Fish" in 1983.

"You get to play in all kinds of different musical worlds," he said. "One minute you'll be on a sci-fi thriller involving strange instruments that have never been heard before, that you construct in a synthesizer or by beating up your guitar or something. And then next minute you're doing a romantic period piece involving a symphonic orchestra."

The former Police-men aren't standing close enough for a reunion ... yet

Police reunion?

Despite the breakup of The Police and their widely varied career paths since then, Copeland said he still keeps in touch with his old mates.

"Andy lives just around the corner. We actually see quite a bit of each other, more, socially, than we ever did in the group," Copeland said. "And whenever Sting is through town, or whenever I'm passing through Wiltshire, where he is, we hook up and we have a lot of laughs."

In recent weeks, some of Copeland's contemporaries -- most notably Blondie and The Eurythmics -- have reunited to tour again. As for The Police, they appeared onstage together in Los Angeles in October 1998 for the first time in more than a decade, playing three songs.

Copeland said he would like to see the Police ride again, perhaps for charity, but notes, "I'm the one member of the group who is the biggest fan of the group."

"'Let's just do the show,' is the argument that I'm making to my two colleagues, so far without much success," he said.

WorldBeat Correspondent Serena Yang contributed to this report.