Andy Summers’ guitar talents shone so brightly in the Police because they were given so much room. Between Sting’s bass and Stewart Copeland’s drums, Summers had plenty of space to work his magic, and he did so with electric guitar lines that in many case defined the songs.
“Message in a Bottle” is just one example. The hit song is distinguished by a finger-wrenching arpeggiated riff that Summers’ considers one of the most difficult to perform. Even John Mayer had difficulty with it when he attempted to teach him.
“It’s a famous riff, and I have to admit, it’s hard to play,” Summers told Guitar Player in 2019. “People want to play it, but a lot of them can’t — the stretches are too big. You have to be a real guitarist to do it well."
And then there’s his chiming riff from “Every Breath You Take,” which outlines the chords simply but memorably.
“I just went into the studio and I heard the chord sequence for it, and it immediately came to me to play the riff I came up with,” Summers told us. It was very much in the Police guitar style, if you like.”
When you consider that “Every Breath You Take” has more than 2.6 billion plays on Spotify as of this writing, Summers’ effort is arguably the most streamed guitar riff in all of rock.
Despite his success writing riffs for Sting’s songs, Summers left the bassist cold when it came to his lone entry on the group’s 1980 studio album, Zenyatta Mondatta: the instrumental “Behind My Camel.”
Clocking in at 2:53, the song features an ominous eight-bar guitar riff that repeats continuously over a bed of synthesizer strings.
Sting hated it and refused to record his bass for the track, leaving Summers to do it for himself. While there was no shortage of ego conflicts among the trio, Sting’s rejection seems an extreme response.
Summers puts it down to “typical band stuff.”
“I liked it,” he says of the song. “I was always much more interested in weirder stuff, and the commercial hit songs always seemed to come out of Sting anyway.”
Summers recalled in Guitar Player’s September 1982 issue that he wrote the song in Ireland about three months before work began on Zenyatta Mondatta.
“I worked out the melody on an organ,” he explained. “It might have come out of my playing to a drum box. I got this machine that was set to bossa nova plus rock and tango rhythms.”
As tracking for Zenyatta Mondatta was wrapping up in August 1980, it became clear that they were short one song.
“We didn’t have enough songs to fill the album, and I had this ‘Behind My Camel’ thing,” Summer says. “I said, “How about doing this, then?” And Sting said, 'I’m not playing on that!'
“Stewart was actually up for working on it, so I just played the bass.
As Summers recalls, he plays Sting’s bass through the bassist’s rig. His guitar was either his 1963 Fender Telecaster Custom, which featured an onboard preamp and a Gibson PAF in the neck position or one of his Strats — either his 1954 or the red-finished 1961 model that his second most-used guitar with the Police after the Tele.
“Everything was moving so fast in the studio that I doubt I had time to think about it very much," Summers says. "I probably just got the bass in there with the kick drum.”
While the guitarist has never suggested it, Zenyatta Mondatta producer Nigel Gray believes the tune was meant as a joke. He points to its title for support.
"He didn't tell me this himself,” Gray says, “but I'm 98 percent sure the reason is this: What would you find behind a camel? A monumental pile of shit.”
Having failed to stop the song from being recorded, Sting says he attempted to fertilize the studio’s garden with the tape.
“I hated that song so much that, one day when I was in the studio, I found the tape lying on the table,” he told Revolver magazine in 2000. “So I took it around the back of the studio and actually buried it in the garden."
Though Sting was likely exaggerating, Summers has his doubts.
“I actually believe he did bury the tape in the garden,” he says with a laugh.
Despite Sting’s dislike for it, “Behind My Camel” made the cut. Better still, it earned the group the 1982 Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, the band's second win in that category.
“Well, obviously, I loved the irony,” Summers recalls. “I’m sure there was some smug self-satisfaction: ‘See? I fucking told you!’”
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