http://www.ocregister.com/2017/09/21/ho ... an-piazza/How Gizmodrome, Police drummer Stewart Copeland’s new band with guitarist Adrian Belew, got its start over pasta in an Italian piazza
By PETER LARSEN
For years, Stewart Copeland says, he’d summered in Italy, hanging out with friend Italian keyboardist Vittorio Cosma, noodling around on rock ‘n’ roll – Copeland’s spent the last 15 years or so writing classical music – and enjoying a lot of great food and wine.
“Completely without agenda,” the former drummer for the Police says. “No career move, no product. Just playing under the Italian sky.
“The agenda was pasta,” Copeland says by phone from his home in Los Angeles.
But as songs came together from one summer to the next he and Cosma realized they had something good in hand. Friend and producer Claudio Dentes found a record label willing to invest in some studio time. And Copeland came up with a plan to sneakily recruit Adrian Belew, the longtime singer-guitarist for King Crimson, and singer-bassist Mark King of Level 42, into the fold.
“They couched it in these terms: ‘Would you just come over and spend some time?'” Belew says by phone from London recently. “You can bring your family. Just hang out and play on a few tracks.
“Little did I know, actually they were tricking me,” he says, laughing. “They were afraid to ask me to join a band, especially since I’d just gotten out of King Crimson after 33 years, and I have my own band, the Power Trio, too.”
But join a band he did, one dubbed Gizmodrome, which released its debut album this month.
Belew, who has toured and recorded with everyone from David Bowie and Frank Zappa to Talking Heads and Nine Inch Nails, was the first choice of Copeland and Cosma because of his unique ability to coax fresh and unusual sounds from his guitars.
“Adrian has always been been a very out-of-the-box guitarist,” Copeland says. “One thing in Gizmo you’ll never hear the band say is, ‘We gotta think outside the box!’ Our problem is, ‘Where’s the (bleepin’) box?’ And just when we think we’ve found it Adrian Belew comes in and blows up the box.
“It’s what we were looking for, people to bring on, Mark and Adrian, who would expand it, take it further, help us dig deeper into the material and expand it with really wild talent,” he says.
Belew says he immediately wanted to go to Italy – “Hanging in the sun and eating pasta in Italy? Sounds terrible, doesn’t it?” he says – but it took three summers for his schedule to match up with that of Copeland and Cosma.
When he arrived at Cosma’s studio he was surprised to see all the gear set up as if an actual band was going to play there, able to see each other and talk as they worked on songs.
“I thought I’d just play over tracks they’d already prepared,” he says.
But Copeland says that was always the plan – to record an album like rock bands always did in the days before electronic files made worldwide collaboration as easy as hitting send on an email with a digital track attached.
“It was all recorded old-school, four guys in a room blasting away at each other,” he says. “And I think you can hear it on the the tracks. I think there’s an X factor you get from mutual inspiration.”
It’s very similar to how he, Sting and Andy Summers recorded most of their songs in the Police in the ’70s and ’80s, he says.
“Next time you hear a Police record consider that the drummer only heard that song about 20 minutes before this recording was made,” Copeland says. “In most cases, not every case. And similarly with Gizmodrome, we would take a song that I pulled out of the bag, or that Vittorio and I had been chewing on for years, and we’d spend half an hour with Mark and Adrian: ‘OK, here’s the verse, here’s the chorus,’ the general idea.”
From there, he and Cosma would typically turn to Belew and King and more or less say go do your thing, Belew says.
“Consequently it really was the perfect music for me,” he says. “I mean, I felt like I did with Talking Heads when we made ‘Remain In Light.’ ‘Yeah, I know exactly what I want to do, I’ve got 10 ideas.’ I was really excited.”
Just as the idea of joining a new group wasn’t high on Belew’s to-do list neither was it something Copeland had been burning to do – until it happened.
“I had a whole career arc going absolutely according to plan,” he says. “I’m now the big orchestra composer dude and I play concerts with big, bad orchestras. (His opera, “The Invention of Morel,” was commissioned by the Long Beach Opera and returns there for performances in March.) That’s sort of my day job and that’s what my plan was until I got this call from Italy.”
After spending two weeks and then 10 days in the studio in Italy over two summers most of Gizmodrome’s just-released album was finished, Copeland says.
“After we did the first blast we went, ‘… This is great!'” he says. “But we’re still just a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, and so we resolved to get back in there the following summer.”
While Belew sang lead vocals in King Crimson and on his solo albums, and King sings lead in Level 42, for at least this first Gizmodrome album the main vocalist is Copeland, who outside of the odd Police track and his early solo album under the name Klark Kent, has never been known as a vocalist. But in writing for opera he’s worked on singing and acting out the lyrics of the piece, and through that developed a storyteller kind of vocal that shows up on many of the new album’s tracks.
“These were Stewart’s songs, he’d written them in a certain way,” Belew says. “And we realized, he’s the only one who can do that.”
Copeland says he’s now firmly ensconced as singer he’s loving that role.
“I’m just a singing fool,” he says. “I’m starting to listen to singers – I never listened to them before. I couldn’t sing you a single Beatles’ song but I could definitely sing you every Ringo drum fill.”
The end result on many songs is Copeland on the verses and Belew and King adding more traditional rock vocals and harmonies on the choruses, all of which together created what Copeland colorfully described as “the (messed)-up version of the Everly Brothers.”
He’s also not planning to sing from behind his drums when Gizmodrome eventually plays live.
“People have been asking me whether I’m going to do a Don Henley” – the Eagles’ drummer who stayed behind the kit when he sang – “and my answer is, ‘No, I’m going to do a Dave Grohl,'” Copeland says of the Nirvana drummer turned Foo Fighters’ frontman. “I’m playing guitar and singing. I will do a lot of drums, but for the show we’ll have Level 42’s drummer, Pete Biggin.”
Those live shows haven’t been scheduled yet – Belew and Copeland say they want the album to get out there and hopefully reach fans first – but they’re looking forward to that, as well as a second album, this one written by all four members with more vocals from Belew and King likely too.
“If you get a bite on it you really don’t want to take your foot off the throttle,” Copeland says of the four players’ decision to commit to Gizmodrome as a fully formed band, not just a one-off or a lark.
“As I keep saying, ‘It’s all very serendipitous,'” Belew says. “I had no idea it was going to happen. Now everyone in the band has cleared out their schedules and really made a commitment to say, ‘Let’s do it and go as far as we want to go.'”
There is no bigger gong.
