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Police Tour will end in Vancuver |
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Monday, 07 May 2007 |
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 Music News: The Police convene in Vancouver this week to begin final preparations
for their slavishly anticipated reunion tour, which begins there on May
28 -- preceded by a special fan club show the night before.
"It's feeling really good," guitarist Andy Summers
tells Billboard.com. "It should take a slightly different shape now
because in a couple weeks the stage arrives and the lighting and
everything and we have to kind of choreograph the show with that. We've
all been playing for another 20 years, so I think we're actually much
better players than we were even in the Police in the early days."
Summers says the trio has mostly settled on a set list that, not
surprisingly, hews towards the familiar. "There's so many hit songs
that we sort of have to do all of those," he says. "We're not doing too
many things off the wall. We've got about a two-hour show lined up of
famous songs, basically."
He did say that the group had worked up the relatively
rare "Truth Hits Everybody" from the first Police album, 1978's
"Outlandos d'Amour," while the band is also considering playing
acoustic arrangements of some songs. And, Summers adds, everything is
subject to change "from seeing how it goes with the audiences."
Summers says he's also enjoying a series of "fantastic
coincidences" that are occurring alongside the Police tour. He'll be
publishing a paperback version of his well-reviewed 2006 memoir, "One
Train Later," and reissuing his collaborations with Robert Fripp. He
also has a photo book, "I'll Be Watching You: Inside the Police
1980-83," culled from 25,000 photos he shot in the early days of the
band; a Taschen Artists Edition of 1,500 copies will be published in
June, with a more affordable edition coming later this year.
And Summers has recorded a new instrumental album, "At First You Build
a Cloud," with Yale classical guitar professor Ben Verdery.
But the most exciting of his extra-band projects may
be Fender's Andy Summers Tribute Telecaster, which recreates his main
Police guitar right down to the nicks and scratches featured on the
original. Summers, who's also had tribute guitars issued by Gibson and
Martin, says the 250-copy issue is already sold out.
"It's amazing ... a handmade, exact copy of every
nick, dent and scratch on the original guitar, with sort of hybrid
electronics," says Summers, who will be playing the replicas on the
Police tour. "The Telecaster is such an important instrument in my own
life, so seeing this (tribute) happen is kind of phenomenal."
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