Bands like to end on a high, but few did it with as much panache as the Police. Having amassed increasing success since they formed in 1977, in 1983 the band issued their final album, Synchronicity – which was their biggest and, many would argue, best. It topped the charts in the UK and US, as did the single Every Breath You Take, and as well as being named one of the 500 greatest albums of all time by Rolling Stone, Synchronicity was selected last year by the US Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
On 26 July it will be reissued in multiple formats with varying degrees of lavishness, most notably a six-CD box with 55 previously unreleased tracks including demos, alternate mixes and unheard originals, and a live album recorded in Oakland in 1983.
To mark the release, the band’s drummer Stewart Copeland is joining us to answer your questions.
Schooled in the prog rock band Curved Air – whose singer Sonja Kristina became his first wife – he brought a multi-genre mastery to the punk-grounded Police, helping them become a versatile unit appealing to a huge variety of fans. He synthesised those years in a book last year, Police Diaries, which imaginatively annotated his diary entries from his time with the band.
But he has also had an astonishing life outside the Police, from a childhood spent between Virginia, Beirut, Cairo and California as the son of a US spy, to his immersion in the wildness of the UK’s 1970s rock scene, to a successful career as a composer after the Police disbanded. He was nominated for a Golden Globe for his debut score, for Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish, and went on to write music for directors as varied as Oliver Stone, Ken Loach, John Waters and Peter Berg, plus the Spyro the Dragon video game franchise.
Along the way he has played with the likes of Peter Gabriel, Tom Waits and Adam Ant, and had a solo career under the pseudonym Klark Kent concurrently with the early years of the Police. There is a huge amount to ask him about, so post your questions below before 5pm BST on Tuesday 9 July. His answers will be published in the 12 July edition of the Guardian’s Film & Music section, and online.