"Being in a band is like living in a submarine."
From the book "I'll Be Watching You: Inside The Police, 1980-83". By Andy Summers
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Kyoto and the zen rock garden, flat-raked sand, ponderous stone, and the attendant's face wet with rain. A fat girl in Arizona offers herself to me as a birthday present. I take her picture and she tells me her brother is a guitar player.We pass a shark in the back of a truck on Route 66 and arrive in Arizona where we are accused of playing the music of Satan.
Somewhere in the Midwest we come to the bottom of a hill, turn the engine off, and laugh in amazement as the car rolls back up the slope - this is the meaning of success.
It takes longer every night to lose the sound of the sea, the crowd in your head, the incessantly repeating lyrics, the pumping bass line, the faces wreathed in anguish when you don't get close enough.
I shoot the photographers as they shoot us. Silver bullets of emulsion cross the room like the gunfight at the OK Corral.We study each other's weapons and grunt about film, auto focus, lenses, motor drives - never about art.
Mexico City and I creep through the hotel kitchen wearing sunglasses. They have been waiting for three days now - a tight mob pressed against the brick of the hotel ...scarves pens T-shirts hearts teeth ready. I move past the cook, he smiles, and I snap him and the vat of green stuff he's boiling up. Outside of my room, on the 20th floor, a toilet roll unfurls down the corridor, the word help scrawled on it.
People, walls, hotels, corridors, ashtrays, food, fans, airports, moving mouths, reaching hands and arms, raised cameras, neon, cowgirls, cowboys, cops, freaks of San Francisco, vampires, flamenco dancers, and a dead mosquito smashed into Caribbean mesh.
My role in the unfolding play? I get it with a remote. I attach my narcissistic little toy to the board on the stage below me along with the devices that colour the sound of the guitar. But I press too hard and it shoots the whole roll. I return to the music, which is where I am supposed to be. A photograph is a chord is a photograph.
The dynamics change, the cluster begins to separate out. I sit in a diner in Cleveland,"Roxanne" comes on the jukebox, an ant crawls across the hash browns, and USA Today blows past the window. There's a kid in the street with a mohawk - punk London a thousand years ago, the Kings Road, Chelsea and staring at black-graffitied walls. The Vortex, the Marquee, flying spit, black leather, and the road to CBGB's, Detroit, Atlanta, and gigs with The B-52's. I pull the stained lace back - the camera is an island. The world presses in and the camera sucks it up. Someone calls my name - it's time for the sound check. The sky is clouding over. It looks like rain.
Page [1] [2]
Page [1] [2]
Kyoto and the zen rock garden, flat-raked sand, ponderous stone, and the attendant's face wet with rain. A fat girl in Arizona offers herself to me as a birthday present. I take her picture and she tells me her brother is a guitar player.We pass a shark in the back of a truck on Route 66 and arrive in Arizona where we are accused of playing the music of Satan.
Somewhere in the Midwest we come to the bottom of a hill, turn the engine off, and laugh in amazement as the car rolls back up the slope - this is the meaning of success.
It takes longer every night to lose the sound of the sea, the crowd in your head, the incessantly repeating lyrics, the pumping bass line, the faces wreathed in anguish when you don't get close enough.
I shoot the photographers as they shoot us. Silver bullets of emulsion cross the room like the gunfight at the OK Corral.We study each other's weapons and grunt about film, auto focus, lenses, motor drives - never about art.
Mexico City and I creep through the hotel kitchen wearing sunglasses. They have been waiting for three days now - a tight mob pressed against the brick of the hotel ...scarves pens T-shirts hearts teeth ready. I move past the cook, he smiles, and I snap him and the vat of green stuff he's boiling up. Outside of my room, on the 20th floor, a toilet roll unfurls down the corridor, the word help scrawled on it.
People, walls, hotels, corridors, ashtrays, food, fans, airports, moving mouths, reaching hands and arms, raised cameras, neon, cowgirls, cowboys, cops, freaks of San Francisco, vampires, flamenco dancers, and a dead mosquito smashed into Caribbean mesh.
My role in the unfolding play? I get it with a remote. I attach my narcissistic little toy to the board on the stage below me along with the devices that colour the sound of the guitar. But I press too hard and it shoots the whole roll. I return to the music, which is where I am supposed to be. A photograph is a chord is a photograph.
The dynamics change, the cluster begins to separate out. I sit in a diner in Cleveland,"Roxanne" comes on the jukebox, an ant crawls across the hash browns, and USA Today blows past the window. There's a kid in the street with a mohawk - punk London a thousand years ago, the Kings Road, Chelsea and staring at black-graffitied walls. The Vortex, the Marquee, flying spit, black leather, and the road to CBGB's, Detroit, Atlanta, and gigs with The B-52's. I pull the stained lace back - the camera is an island. The world presses in and the camera sucks it up. Someone calls my name - it's time for the sound check. The sky is clouding over. It looks like rain.
Page [1] [2]
I'll Be Watching You: Inside The Police, 1980-83
Hardcover + Box, 27 x 34 cm (10.6 x 13.4 in.), 378 pages
$ 700.00
$ 700.00
The insider: The Police on tour photographed by guitarist Andy Summers. Limited to 1,500 copies, each numbered and signed by the artist.
Stewart Copeland, Sting, and Andy Summers with a Japanese roshi, train station, Kyoto, 1980. (c) Andy Summers
Hotel room, Nashville, Tennessee, 1982. (c) Andy Summers