Playboy interview

[HalcyonLisa]

seriously!

http://www.playboy.com/articles/playboy ... index.html

[Throb]

I only read it for the articles

[samburusunset]

[quote="Throb"]I only read it for the articles [/quote]


Yeah, I've heard that one before!



I think the ladies should have equal time with an article in Playgirl.
I can understand why Fiona wouldn't like that, though. Shameless floozies might want a pictorial to go with the article. For shaaaaame floozies! For shaaaaame!!!!

[smax]

[quote="Throb"]I only read it for the articles [/quote]




although i'm sure i can remember a similiar thing years ago when gordo or maybe andy were in playboy and my mum found it in my room etc etc ...

[English-lion]

Oh my God it's a very in-depth article ...........no pun intended

I think the ladies should have equal time with an article in Playgirl.
I can understand why Fiona wouldn't like that, though. Shameless floozies might want a pictorial to go with the article. For shaaaaame floozies! For shaaaaame!!!!

What's an article without pictures

[TheEqualizer]

For those who can't log into Playboy.com at work:

Spend enough time with a skilled raconteur and he or she is likely to boast of having enough stories to fill a book. As drummer for the Police, Stewart Copeland could fill volumes on the band's years as global superstars whose success depended as much on their talent as it did the conflict that arose through their creative pursuits. Yet Copeland’s new memoir, Strange Things Happen, is notable for what it has to say about his life before and after his spotlight years.

After the Police broke up in the mid-1980s, Copeland worked on several projects: scoring Francis Ford Coppola’s film Rumble Fish, co-starring in a movie with African pygmies and indulging a childhood love of polo. In the years that followed, he built up solid cred as a composer of music for film, television, opera and ballet and continued to perform live with everyone from Italian folk musicians to the Foo Fighters. Though Copeland's post-Police stories make up the bulk of the book, he also spends several pages detailing the band's recent worldwide reunion tour and his childhood spent living in Lebanon while his father worked for the CIA.

Playboy caught up with Copeland by phone during a break from recording and rehearsing music for his biggest project to date: Ben-Hur Live, a European touring production with an emphasis on spectacle—complete with a live chariot race. We talked with him about how he approaches composing for projects big and small, why working with the Police is so tough, and how a rock star is just a “figment of imagination.”

PLAYBOY: You’ve composed operas and performed other large-scale projects, but is Ben-Hur the biggest project you’ve ever tackled?
COPELAND: Yes. Composing for opera involves moving a tenor and a soprano around the stage, with supernumeraries doing a bit of a battle here and there. In this we have horses, hundreds of crew and cast, all kinds of animals, extremely challenging special effects and stunts. The scale of the production is so enormous that the music has to encompass a lot of very complicated elements.

PLAYBOY: As a drummer, do you start with rhythm when composing?
COPELAND: The rhythm is the beginning of everything, even on the most basic level.

PLAYBOY: And does your prose style also start with a rhythm?
COPELAND: I discovered there’s a lot of rhythm in writing and in narrating. There’s the length of sentences and the hot words and the cold words. You’re not trying to operate on the basis of conforming to a particular rhythm. You just notice it as you’re working.

PLAYBOY: Which do you think shaped you more, your earlier years growing up in Lebanon or your years in the Police?
COPELAND: I think who I am [is due to] the childhood experience. But what I am derives from the smashing success of the Police.

PLAYBOY: After the Police broke up you went to Africa to film a movie with pygmies and explored polo as a hobby. Were you deliberately trying to subvert expectations?
COPELAND: All those other things were sublimated and just popped to the fore. But, no, it wasn’t like an allergic reaction which directed me away from the Police thing. Polo was a private exercise. It had nothing to do with people’s expectations or image. It was not a marketing move.

PLAYBOY: There are quite a few people who consider their personal lives and their professional lives to be one in the same in terms of how they present themselves.
COPELAND: They’re absolutely not the same. The figure in the public eye is an avatar, a figment of imagination, and not in the imagination of the creator, but in the imagination of the consumer. They impose their own fantasies upon that personage, particularly with music because there is that same strange shamanistic quality in musicians. People attach significance to the deeds of the artist but really they have no meaning. The artist is just a guy who gets up in the morning and puts his trousers on one leg at a time. But the image thing...what people see out there is in their own minds. On very slim evidence.

PLAYBOY: Do you seek out projects that push you outside of your comfort zone?
COPELAND: Art in conflict is a wonderful thing. In the world, of course, one hopes that peace will reign. But in art let’s have conflict.

PLAYBOY: Was that part of what drove you to consider a reunion tour?
COPELAND: No, no! We thought we could do the whole thing without conflict. Turned out not to be so, that conflict is sort of what fuels the Police.

PLAYBOY: That wasn’t something you thought about beforehand?
COPELAND: We all thought it was going to be really easy. I love collaborating, but in music I prefer to collaborate with a non-musician, such as a director. When I work on a film score, I hire composers who do my bidding. So when it comes to music, I’ve sort of been the boss of everything. And the same goes for my two colleagues. When we got in a room together and share musical decisions, it was not so easy.

PLAYBOY: But that was going on before the Police broke up.
COPELAND: We understood the dynamic a lot less, so we felt a lot more pain from it. The reason we’re good at music is because we care a lot about it. But there are these other two guys and it’s a struggle. Each of us may be a bitter pill that the other has to swallow, but that’s the price of playing with our favorite toy.

PLAYBOY: Is there something most people get wrong when they’re writing about the Police?
COPELAND: Yes, that it’s about ego. All three of us are diligently selfless and we care about something that we really do believe is a higher calling, which is that we blow that fucking audience out of their seats. But we have different ideas of what that is and how to achieve it. Sting and I are competitive, of course, but only at a friendly level. The true conception is that there is conflict, but the reasons behind it I have hoped to illuminate with the book.

PLAYBOY: When you’re working on one project do you consider what you’re going to be working on next?
COPELAND: I’m completely immersed. I do have my future mapped out to some extent, but I’m not really thinking about those things yet.

PLAYBOY: So you’re not at this point thinking, “Okay, how do I follow up Ben-Hur?”
COPELAND: No. I’ll worry about that on Monday morning.

[Divemistress of the Dark]

The artist is just a guy who gets up in the morning and puts his trousers on one leg at a time. But the image thing...what people see out there is in their own minds. On very slim evidence.

I get that this is his attempt to come to terms with his hordes of followers, but on the other hand: SC, you really don't think artists go to a lot of time and expense - hiring fancy publicists, in many cases - to create said image? And that it's used in most cases to sell albums by the crapload? Just sayin'.

I just read an interview with Ellen Page in this month's BUST magazine (ordered for me by the lovely Empty and is the gift that keeps on giving)...anyway, Page says that in some ways she feels like she can't live up to the labels bestowed on her and it makes her feel sort of shitty. More food for thought.

And...THANKS LISA! This was a great read, and love the photo up top. Noticed the credit is to Danny Clinch.

[TOWOS]

ROTFLMAO!!!

Lisa, you already made my day. Thanks!!!

[DirtyMartini]

Thanks for the link, Lisa.

I do not understand this question:

After the Police broke up you went to Africa to film a movie with pygmies and explored polo as a hobby. Were you deliberately trying to subvert expectations?

Cuz when a person's feeling subversive, he/she goes and plays polo? What?

Now taking up knitting: that would have been a statement.

The artist is just a guy who gets up in the morning and puts his trousers on one leg at a time. But the image thing...what people see out there is in their own minds. On very slim evidence.

I get that this is his attempt to come to terms with his hordes of followers, but on the other hand: SC, you really don't think artists go to a lot of time and expense - hiring fancy publicists, in many cases - to create said image? And that it's used in most cases to sell albums by the crapload? Just sayin'.

Actually, I'd say there's a good dose of apples and oranges going on here: SC's answer doesn't answer the actual question posed:

PLAYBOY: There are quite a few people who consider their personal lives and their professional lives to be one in the same in terms of how they present themselves.
COPELAND: They’re absolutely not the same. The figure in the public eye is an avatar, a figment of imagination, and not in the imagination of the creator, but in the imagination of the consumer. They impose their own fantasies upon that personage, particularly with music because there is that same strange shamanistic quality in musicians. People attach significance to the deeds of the artist but really they have no meaning. The artist is just a guy who gets up in the morning and puts his trousers on one leg at a time. But the image thing...what people see out there is in their own minds. On very slim evidence.

The question was how the artist presents himself, not how he is perceived by others (which is what the answer is about). There's a difference in angle and agency: the former is what the artist does by choice in public (what he says, how he acts, what he wears, etc) as opposed to in private; the latter is what the audience does (what they see -- or rather, how they see it, what they deduce, etc) based in part on the artist's presentation and in part on their own desires or assumptions. Same person at the center, but different (though related) conversations.

That's not to say that the answer doesn't have weight on its own in terms of perception, but the question was about self-determined public image: not whether or not the artist is or is seen by strangers as a guy who puts his trousers on one leg at a time, but whether or not the artist continues to act/perform/generally be in public as that same guy who gets up in the morning and puts his trousers on one leg at a time. Part of that self-determined image is often built, as you said, Dive, by publicists and stylists and costumers and other people hired to help the artist present in a particular way. But part of that is more universal and less conspicuous: whether the artist (or any other person, for that matter) is his genuine self in public or if he wears a face that he keeps in a jar by the door. --Or, as a third option linking from the previous question, if the artist fashions his private life into something specifically created for public consumption.