Out today (May 20th) is The Police: Around The World – Restored & Expanded on DVD/CD, Blu-ray/CD, and DVD/LP — pressed on silver vinyl. The legendary 1982 live travelogue was originally available on VHS and laserdisc, with the film now seeing release on DVD and Blu-ray for the first time, with restored picture and remastered audio, as well as complete performances of four bonus songs featured in the documentary.
The Police: Around The World – Restored & Expanded includes never-before-released live audio on CD and LP. Boasting songs from their first two albums recorded in Japan, Hong Kong, and England.
As guitarist Andy Summers wrote in the collections' liner notes, “Like Napoleon, we wanted the world. Out of the messy and fervent atmosphere in London at that time we conceived the idea to go all around the world and film the whole adventure. As far as we knew no rock band, at least, had ever done that. We had just about enough popularity to get booked around the globe. Plans were made.”
We spoke to drummer Stewart Copeland and he revealed that growing up trotting the globe as the son of a CIA agent, he and his brothers understood there was a bright and rich world beyond Europe and America — which led directly to the Around The World doc: “I think Miles (Copeland), my brother and the Police's manager and creator of I.R.S. Records, he had that vision, which came from his upbringing — and all of our upbringing — in the weird places in the world where we actually realized that there is a world beyond Minneapolis. And it's very colorful and exciting and actually — darn photogenic. So, let's get the band out in front of all these incredible scenarios around the world. I can say it's a consciousness that it's out there, it's cool lookin', let's put the band in front of it — or in the middle of it.”
When we last caught up with Sting, we asked him about how he rates the influence of the Police on the music that came after them: “Y'know, people say to me, 'That sounds like the Police, or it sounds like you' — I don't hear that. Y'know, I really don't. Everybody sounds like them, to me.”
Guitarist Andy Summers felt that the band's musicality, coupled with a sixth sense when creating new sounds, was the secret weapon of the Police: “Being in that setting, y'know, I come from a lot of different places harmonically — as had Sting. We were, y'know, we were a bit more than, like, three-chord folk musicians. Y'know, we we're pretty sophisticated with what we knew. But, again, we were in a rock context and so, y'know, whatever we were doing, we were going to make it rock.”
