In the second summer of punk, Andy Summers, guitarist with The Police, had a houseguest. In the night’s small hours, downstairs in the living room, he could hear his bandmate, Gordon Sumner – nickname, ‘Sting’ – strumming the chords and singing the melody to a composition that would soon be known the world over as Roxanne.
In the tumultuous days of the Sex Pistols and The Clash, it was a brave move to title a song after a girl’s name. But emboldened by Elvis Costello’s pivotal 1977 single Alison, Sumner decided to press ahead. Hearing the music drifting up the stairs to the bedroom, Summers’ wife told her husband that their guest was onto something.
This reassurance may have come at a good time, because in the immediate aftermath of linking up with Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland in August 1977, the former Soft Machine/Animals guitarist might have been forgiven for harbouring a doubt or two about his decision. Management made a lot of promises to the trio before they embarked upon European shows in the autumn of 1977, none of which, the trio discovered to their immense irritation, were actually honoured.
"They'd done nothing," Copeland told Melody Maker. "They hadn't accomplished a thing, and we rehearsed in their studio for a month, maybe two months, waiting for them to get something together. There were no gigs, the group just disappeared off the scene. People were saying, 'What happened to the Police? Are you still together?' We'd blown all the momentum that we had and all the credibility that we did have was all gone, though at least by this time Andy had been worked into the group, because we'd had all that rehearsal. We were in a pit and one day we just decided, 'Fuck these guys!' and we loaded our equipment into our cars and just pissed off."
