Over the course of about four and a half years between the release of their debut album Outlandos d’Amour in November of 1978 and their studio swan song Synchronicity in June 1983, The Police carved out a remarkable path – quick.
Surrounded by photographers in the group’s earliest days, guitarist Andy Summers began gravitating to the camera, with a Nikon FE and lens setting him off on a four decade journey which would capture his increasingly expansive travels.
During the shows that make up his current “The Cracked Lens + A Missing String” tour, Summers ties all of his worlds together. A large video screen flanks the guitarist on stage, displaying a carefully-curated array of Summers-shot photographs as he performs.
“When you hear what I play in this show, it can be pretty out there. I’m not trying to play sweet, little melodies. It’s sort of like watching a movie. And you’ve got a sonic soundscape that goes with it. That’s what I’m doing on stage,” said Summers of the new show during a recent phone conversation. “I play ‘Tea in the Sahara’ and it’s beautiful on the guitar. It’s very lush. I actually have been to the Sahara Desert – shot a lot of pictures. But why did I go to the Sahara and shoot all of these photographs?” explained the guitarist of an evening where the stories are equally important as the photographs and the music. “So, I’ve got all the things you need. And people are very accepting of it.”
While the show is carefully built to capture the relationship between imagery, words and sounds, each performance is nevertheless unique, driven by Summers’ appreciation for improvisation and the give-and-take between audience and performer demanded by each intimate venue.
“The theaters we’ve chosen to play in are not so vast that I can’t communicate with the audience. And I like that aspect,” said Summers. “It’s great for the audience because they can see me and they’re close to it. They can see the screen. And we’re all in contact,” explained the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. “It gives me a chance not to be completely intimidated by some vast space but to connect with the audience and get used to it. I think we’re doing it right.”
I spoke with Andy Summers about arranging his current “The Cracked Lens + A Missing String” tour (a lengthy outing set to wrap up December 10 in Clearwater, Florida), his latest book of photography A Series of Glances (ACC Art Books), finding new ways to push his music forward and the brisk ascent of The Police. A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows below…
Jim Ryan: Music, photography, spoken word – how did you go about curating “The Cracked Lens + A Missing String” show?
Andy Summers: Well, I spent 40 years traveling around the world. I’ve practiced photography for a long time. Obviously, I’ve always been a guitar player. It’s sort of surprising that I didn’t do something before like this. But I am doing it now.
It’s going down very well. I guess you’d call it multimedia. It’s all visual – all of these sequences of photography, some of it quite exotic that I’ve shot all over the world. And I play to that – basically improvising.
And I do quite a lot of chat now. To a degree, I’m dipping people into something that you might say is a bit avant-garde. But talking to the audience and sort of giving them an idea of why you’re doing it helps.
These are all worked out quite carefully but I think we’ve really got a very nice show now.
Ryan: Even with the Police material, you’re finding new ways to present it. How important is it to continually find new ways to push everything forward?
Summers: Oh yeah. I’m a creative musician if I dare to say so. So, every night the show is a little bit different. Because I am basically improvising. You’ve got set pieces – but I don’t stick to any absolute plan with it. I’m hoping the muse will strike every night.
I play a piece called “The Last Dance of Mr. X.” Well, that’s a set melody – and it’s quite tricky and complicated. So, I play that and then I improvise in the middle of it. And I have certain settings that I use to improvise against that particular piece. I have a Brazilian section. I play some beautiful Brazilian melodies and I talk about where that came from in my life, the inspiration for all of these things.
And then, of course, I play a couple of Police hits to keep everybody happy. They’re reworked with photography so that they become like a new context in which you’re seeing and hearing them.
Ryan: I was looking through some of the photographs in A Series of Glances. As the title would imply, you are capturing a lot of facial expressions – you’re capturing different moods. How did you go about choosing the photos for this particular collection and what were you sort of hoping to convey?
Summers: I’m very familiar with all of my work. And we have a very good guy that works with me and we have a very good system of cataloging the photography. I like to hope it’s beautiful.
I have a section called “The Bones of Twang Zu,” which is all shot in China. I went to China personally eight times. I traveled all over including Tibet and the far west. So, I think that people see the imagery and think it’s fantastic stuff. Because it is pretty exotic. We’re not down on the high street shooting the grocery store. This is pretty wild stuff some of it.
And that’s the appeal I suppose. You’ve got an exotic guitar playing along with these beautiful photographs from other places.
Ryan: You’ve had the luxury of traveling (I’m sure for better or for worse at times). But, under optimal circumstances, how does traveling and encountering these different cultures impact your worldview and ultimately your work?
Summers: The simple answer to that is that people are the same everywhere. You can go to the far west of China or to Morocco or wherever. You basically find that cultures can be different with religious aspects or the way people go about their lives – but people are pretty much all the same.
I’ve never run into any real problems. And I’ve gone into some pretty strange places for photographic reasons – the back alleys of Hanoi and stuff like that. I’ve done all of that stuff. And I enjoy it. Because it’s not that I’m an insane person that wants to risk his life or that I’m a daredevil – but because in doing photography, and getting into these very real situations, you push yourself.
It’s all part of the thrill. And, hopefully what you get out of that is something that’s pretty interesting that you wouldn’t get if you didn’t have the courage to do it.
Ryan: How has the shift to digital impacted you? Do you still shoot film?
Summers: I feel like a gigantic guilt trip. We all feel like we should still be shooting in film. But it’s become kind of unwieldy.
My last great film thing was actually when I went with a friend all over Asia for about three weeks – nonstop traveling. I shot 90 rolls of film. And I was carrying this big sack of film. Once or twice, it went through an airport thing and I went, “Oh my god, all of my work is gone.” I only lost a couple. But, right around that time, which was I think about 2012, Leica came out with a digital. That was my last great adventure with film and then I went digital. And it’s hard to go back.
Ultimately, I wish we were still using film. But it’s become impractical. It’s also extremely expensive. It’s difficult to do and not so many labs to do it in. It’s become specialized.
Ryan: I’ve read that your encounter hitchhiking across Spain was an inspiration on A Series of Glances. How so?
Summers: When I was a kid, I did go to Spain and, as a 16 year old, hitchhiked there. I don’t think in today’s world that you’d be advised to do that.
But, around that same period, in my hometown in England, I was going to this cinema all of the time that specialized in only showing European art house movies, mostly in black and white – Bergman, Truffaut, Fellini and all of that kind of stuff. I was absolutely gaga for that. It was sort of like an education as I watched these movies and started to find out about other countries and other languages and situations and so on. It had a deep emotional impact on me. I was a completely obsessed guitar player at that age – but I was very taken with this stuff. I thought, “Oh, I should be a film director.” I had no idea how you’d possibly go about that. But that seed was sown.
I think it sort of reemerged years later. Suddenly, I’m in a band called The Police. And we’re in New York and we’ve got so much time on our hands. And I thought, “Hmmm…” I was surrounded by photographers – the band was, for obvious reasons. Mostly girls. And I started to get really interested in what they were doing with the cameras. So, I decided that I would get a really good camera. I bought a Nikon FE and a lens and decided, “I’m going to be a very good photographer.” Just a formal declaration to myself – probably to the mirror.
I had no idea if I had any real thing for it. But, once I got started, it was the same thing as the guitar – I was very obsessive with it. That has continued to this day and I’ve never stopped. After many years of doing photography and organizing, I’ve made five books and am working on another one.
Ryan: One thing I think people lose sight of today with The Police is how quickly everything happened. It’s about four and a half years from the release of Outlandos to Synchronicity. Were you even able to process that in real time?
Summers: It was a total kind of rush, the whole thing. We were so fantastically popular worldwide that there was basically not a moment to breathe. We never stopped! We just went and went and went. That time we spent together was about 30 years in any other band’s career. We had endless number ones in every country in the world all of the time. We were just basically number one for the whole existence of the band. Pretty incredible – an incredible one-off situation. It was just a phenomenal time.
Ryan: By the time you joined The Police, you were already steeped in jazz guitar, in classical guitar and had done all sorts of session work. And here they are doing Stewart’s punk songs. As the band moves forward, and Sting starts to evolve as a songwriter, do you feel like your playing helped enable that collective progression?
Summers: [The punk stuff] lasted about three minutes and then the real stuff happened. Trying to analyze the music of The Police, it was the work of three individuals that could never be made by anybody else. And it was the fact that I had all of this guitar stuff.
In fact, Sting was coming out of a jazz rock group called Last Exit and he was basically a jazz guy. And he had the voice of course. But we grew up with the same stuff. We both grew up with the Stones, The Beatles, rock music, the blues, jazz, Bossa Nova. He had a classical guitar at home. I had gone to college in California and played nothing but classical guitar for about six years and then came back to playing the electric. But my chops were high, you know? And so we got together. We had a real connection. That’s how it started.
So, we were very lucky, to me. Because we were guys in the rock scene and a raging punk scene at the time. Stewart was sort of very raw, a young and not very experienced drummer – but with ferocious energy. And he was very keen to have his own distinctive voice as a drummer – which he found, particularly in his use of the hi-hat. And off we went.
We had to sort of take all of our influences and bring them into something that we could present as rock music to The Police as a rock band. And that’s sort of the reason that it came out the way that it did.
Because I could play things that a lot of so-called rock guitarists wouldn’t play – or couldn’t play. And Sting has got the great ears. He totally could dig what I was doing and then go, “Oh yeah, don’t put that minor 9th in there, it’s too jazzy.” He was with it.
Of course, I’d be playing these more sophisticated chords with shimmering echo and a chorus and make it really sound like something. And when you run that out through big speakers and stereo, you’ve got something. And that’s sort of the way that we progressed into it until people started pointing out to us, “Wow, you guys sound really different. What is that style?” And we didn’t even sort of realize it ourselves.
We were just acting naturally, doing what we liked and trying to make something out of these diverse influences. And it sort of came about and connected with the world and became our own very individual style I think. We didn’t sound like anybody else.
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