Add Stewart Copeland’s years of success as songwriter and drummer with The Police and his experience writing music and orchestral arrangements for hit movies such as “Wall Street” with his creative spirit, and the result is “Police Deranged.”
Copeland has rearranged The Police hits for full symphony orchestra and three singers and called it “Police Deranged,” which will be performed at 8 p.m. May 19 at the Genesee Theatre in Waukegan.
Copeland, praised by Music Radar for his “distinctive drum sound and uniqueness of style,” rehearses with different orchestras that perform near where he takes his show.
“The cool thing about orchestras is that you put the music in front of them and they will play it,” often the very same day they rehearsed it, Copeland said. “Their whole vocation is to do what’s on the page. If you play exactly as it says, you can be confident your colleagues will be obeying the page, together you will be one thing, of great power and beauty.
“With a rock band, it takes six weeks of a lot of arguing … about the meaning of existence and why we should be playing an A major choir,” he joked.
Don’t get Copeland wrong though. He loves the time he spent with The Police, which he founded in 1977, and appreciates the songwriting skills of Sting and guitar acumen of Andy Summers. In fact, he said changing up much of “Message in a Bottle,” a Police song written by Sting, was “less de-range-able than the others. It has a form that can’t be messed with. It’s like a diamond.”
In many of The Police hits, Copeland said he’s taken Summers’ guitar figures and orchestrated them in new interesting ways, for example rewriting the passages for strings or woodwinds.
Police hit “Roxanne” got carved up a bit more with his musical scalpel, he said. At one point in the song, the musicians improvise.
His three singers are background session singers.
“I pushed them to step forward, to be a star, and they are unbounded. They are leaping from the sky,” Copeland said.
Copeland, whose musical influences range from Jimi Hendrix to 20th century classical composer Igor Stravinsky, was inspired to create “Police Deranged” after spending 20 years as what he calls “a hired gun film composer.”
“Just before the end of The Police, I got a call from (film director) Francis (Ford) Coppola,” he recalled. Coppola asked Copeland to write the orchestral score for the movie “Rumble Fish.”
“I hadn’t thought about it as a career path,” Copeland said. “But I discovered I really like this big picture” of writing film music.
“One of the byproducts was an involuntary education in orchestra,” Copeland said. “At first, I would write the music on computer and have people translate it to orchestra parts. But the music wasn’t breathing. I had to add articulations and accents.
“I gradually started to pencil up my scores more and more. I hired a music teacher who taught me orchestration on how to put the music on the page so the orchestra will read it and play what you intended.”
Copeland also wrote the documentary film, “Everyone Stares: The Police Inside and Out” that premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.
“Of course the music had to be The Police. But I wanted an alternate The Police,” he said. “I started carving up these new songs and finding new ways” to present them, he said.
That all led to “Police Deranged,” said Copeland, who was named to the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2005 and the Classic Drummer Hall of Fame in 2013. He sent the entire score to Sting, who seemed happy to receive it, he said.
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“The shows are quite emotional,” Copeland said. “People grew up, got married and got divorced listening to The Police. The songs do rock. They’re exciting. My mission is to turn the symphony orchestra into a raging rock band.”
Police Deranged
When: 8 p.m. May 19
Where: Genesee Theatre, 203 N. Genesee St., Waukegan
Tickets: $39-$89, plus fees
Information: 847-263-6300; geneseetheatre.com
Sheryl DeVore is a freelance reporter for the News-Sun.