Police Story – a tale of true love PART:3

Kurt Cobain has a lot to answer for. In 1991 he destroyed the hair bands and knocked dinosaurs like Dire Straits, Springsteen and Mike Jackson off the throne. He told us geeks that we didn’t have to be as talented as Eddie Van Halen or as cool as David Lee Roth. We could just rock up to a mic in our dirty jeans, play a few chords and sing about our depression. He is the reason I formed my first band, Alice Dali. And my third band Independent Square. He is the reason I grew my hair, smoked pot and never practiced. He is also the reason I stopped listening to The Police. The early 90s were a great time to be at university. Our generation discovered grunge, gangster rap, electronica, Britpop and independent cinema. Asvajit’s generation discovered Limp Bizkit. And in this climate of Tarantino, Public Enemy, Seinfeld, Chemical Brothers, Pavement, Jesus Lizard, Miramax and of course Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains et al, there was no room for Sting’s old band. CDs had long replaced cassettes, but I was still being a laggard. I am writing this in 2007 and am yet to contemplate purchasing an ipod. I put my Police tapes in a box with my old Debbie Gibson and Richard Marx albums. Sting was starting to flirt with Puff Daddy and do duets with Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart. While 1993’s Ten Summoner’s Tales was a serviceable pop album, 1996’s Mercury Falling was a piece of shit. I purchased Message in a Box, the 4 CD box set featuring everything The Police ever recorded, but it failed to excite me like Radiohead or Soundgarden or the Wu-Tang Clan.  The thing is this. Pop music is not the collected works of Shakespeare. Some of it may be called art, but it is designed to be disposable. And it is possible to wear out a song, an artist or an album by overexposure. A fact that commercial radio appears oblivious to.  By the mid 90s I had outgrown The Police. And while I was still into rock and roll, I wanted to listen to music cloaked in noise and offensive to the mainstream. Puff Daddy’s version of Every Breath You Take was not the final nail in the coffin, it was the last bit of soil thrown on the grave.  

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I am with my friend, Ravin, perhaps the most generous person I know. He’s the one who got me the tickets and lent me his spare room. We are in a bar in South London watching a band called The Undercover Police. The band is pretty awful, but it’s nice to hear Spirits in the Material World live. The real Police hardly ever play it on tour. England is playing cricket, rugby and football that day, but no one in Twickenham gives a toss. (a) Because The Police are coming to town. (b) Because England are shit at all three. We down a couple of stouts, smoke up and enter the arena two hours early. The opening band is Fiction Plane. It is a 3-piece fronted by Joe Sumner, son of a certain Gordon M. Sumner. It must be hard for the poor lad. But I don’t pity him. If you want to get into music and your father is a famous front-man bass player, perhaps you should play heavy metal, trance or hip-hop. Jakob Dylan played radio-friendly rock with a band and enjoyed a few albums worth of success. Had he picked up an acoustic and written protest songs, he may not have been so lucky. Ziggy Marley may be a melody maker, but he will never eclipse father Bob.  Young Joe plays bass, sings and sports long blonde hair like his old man circa 1987. He has a nice voice and a few decent tunes, but I don’t hear a Roxanne. I also don’t like his belligerent banter or his jumping in the air at the end of every song. I predict depression, followed by drugs, followed by rehab, followed by an autobiography titled Invisible Son. The crowd is full of body piercings, tattoos and orange hair. I lie. The crowd is middle-aged and white. What did I expect? The band is middle-aged and white. Despite my lifelong adulation, I have to admit that The Police were never cool in the same way The Doors, The Strokes or System of a Down are. There will be no moshpit or crowd surfing or drug dealers. Shame.  Maximo Park are up next. The singer has charisma and informs the crowd that if anyone is wondering about the cricket, the rugby or the football, that England won all three. The stadium is uninterested. Maybe because aside from the 2-0 Euro qualification triumph over Israel, the series win over a malnourished India and the thrashing a US rugby team are insignificant achievements. I’m unable to form an opinion of the band, because while the sound reaches my ears, it fails to touch my insides. It’s a known fact that support bands get the worst of the sound. Many suspect that it happens in Colombo on a regular basis.  I hope it does not rain. I hope no one notices when I spark up. I hope the sound fills the arena. Above all, I hope this gig will justify and not vindicate the depths of my obsession. 

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Fast forward to September 2005. I’m returning to Sri Lanka after 3 years in Europe. I have gotten over Kurt Cobain and a few of my hangups. I have travelled, held down a job, had a few girlfriends, been in a band, tried writing a novel, had shit thrown at me and stopped blaming my parents. In other words, I was a regular, garden variety 30 year old. My family had sold up in New Zealand and my brother had returned from his travels in China. We were once again a happy family, living together in Colpetty for the 1^st time since… well, JVP 1989. I have learned to play the bass over the last few years, though my idol is no longer Gordon Sumner a.k.a. Sting but Micheal Balzary a.k.a Flea. My old friend Dhinesh, former drummer in Independent Square, is also returning to Lanka after a hiatus and we are thinking of hooking up for a jam. The house is full of boxes. Stuff from New Zealand, stuff from Sri Lanka. Stuff from other lifetimes. I spend my first month eating Ammi’s home cooking and tearing cardboard. I find old love letters, photographs of old hairstyles (before I settled on the hippie look I was bald, bleached, spiked, permed and mulletted) and I find VHS tapes with green fungus growing on them. One of them is titled Brit Awards 1984, the other Grammy Awards 1985. If I had a VCR player, which I don’t, I doubt any of them would be playable. Me and Dhinesh begin jamming. I am trying to get over Independent Square and am attempting to emulate the bands I saw in England like Bloc Party, The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand and Cake. Groove-based melodic rock as opposed to angsty distortion drenched grunge. The jams are interesting. We have a nice little drum and bass track titled Craig David’s Arsehole (Which would later become Red Spit) and a straight rock song called One Man Army. (A reserve in our current set) At home I keep opening boxes and find a box within a box. It contains 4 CDs and over 60 tracks recorded between 1978 and 1983 when I was busy wetting beds. And it blows my mind. To hear Message in a Box, 15 years after I put it away, is a revelation. And this time I can deconstruct it as a musician. The sparse grooves, the offbeat basslines, the interplay of hi-hat and foot, the soaring vocals, the elegant songs.  I suddenly realize what kind of band I would like to form. A guitarist with a silken touch. A singer with a voice that can cut through glass. I talk to Dhinesh and we immediately set about finding them.

 to be continued….