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When it comes to inventive guitar playing, nobody’s list would be complete without Andy Summers. Summers is well known as the second man to play guitar for British rockers The Police (French-born original guitarist Henry Padovani left the band in 1977) and his style of playing brought a freshness to the band. Summers has had quite the journey along his musical life, starting in the early 1960’s playing R&B in Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band. The psychedelic spin-off from the Big Roll Band was Dantalian’s Chariot which Zoot Money and Summers was both a part of in 1967.
Summers would go on to greener pastures in 1968, joining the Soft Machine and then Eric Burdon & The Animals. Summers moved to America in the early 1970’s and took up classical guitar at Cal State Northridge University in 1973 graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree in Music. After returning to London in the mid 1970’s, Summers played with Kevin Coyne and Kevin Ayers. In 1977, Summers’ joined the band Strontium 90 that featured future Police cohorts Sting and Stewart Copeland.
With Summers’ varied background and knowledge of the instrument, his playing flourishes and subtle touch hardly go unnoticed upon listening to classic Police tracks. Nowhere was this touch more evident on 1979’s “Walking On The Moon” a #1 single from the album “Reggatta de Blanc”. “Walking” contained a single shimmering D minor 11th chord that rang out during the verse. Sting’s bass playing and singing were top rate but it was Summers’ “textural” guitar work getting more and more notoriety in the press.
Summers and The Police shot to stardom in the early 1980’s with more classics like “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” and “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”. One of Summers’ hardest songs to play is “Message In A Bottle” which is often erroneously stated to be played with a capo. In actuality, Summers’ used a method of playing which he took from one of his classical heroes Bela Bartok. Summers’ played the “Message” riff as parallel fifths requiring a very wide stretch of the fretting hand to get all 12 notes in the riff correctly. Summers and fellow Dorset native Robert Fripp made use of Bartok exercises in the 1982 instrumental tour-de-force “I Advance Masked”.
1983 was the year that changed everything for Summers and The Police. They rang the New Year in while recording what would become the “Synchronicity” album. The ensuing tour would take the band around the world in nearly eight months. Three legs and 107 shows later on March 4th, 1984 in Melbourne, Australia, The Police would play their final Synchronicity show. Before the 2007 reunion tour, The Police would only play three more shows together in 1986 during the Conspiracy Of Hope tour.
Sting quietly shuttered the Police down so that he could focus on his solo career. No serious efforts were made to do something concrete until 2007 when all three members did a worldwide reunion tour. Something of which Summers alluded to was the reason for doing it in the first place as there was no closure within the band throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s
To learn guitar, one needs to learn the basics and this is exactly what Summers’ did as a youth. His fanatical approach to Jazz (especially during the 1960’s and 1970’s) and R&B netted him more chords to learn then did some of his other contemporaries.
If you want to learn to play guitar, the best way to do so is to visit The Guitar Classroom and get yourself some online guitar lessons.
