Stewart Copeland Says He and Sting ‘Get Along Fine’ Despite Royalty Dispute

Stewart Copeland and Sting remain on speaking terms, even as their legal teams battle over royalty payments in a London court. “We’re not [in court]. The bean counters are, somewhere over in London,” Copeland told Billboard, describing a friendship that now orbits around “kids, Instagram memes, bullshit” rather than creative collaboration.

The dispute, which began with claims of owed royalties, saw Sting pay Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers £800,000 earlier this year, though the full claim is still being pursued. Copeland seems detached from the courtroom friction: “For me it’s, ‘Lemme know how it works out…’”

The drummer’s nonchalance stems from a long-standing acceptance that he and Sting make music for entirely different reasons. “We get along great as long as we’re not trying to make music together,” he said, a line that underlines the paradox of a band that achieved everything it set out to, yet can’t share a studio. That era is definitively closed for Copeland, who says he has “fully retired” from commercial music. He now records for pleasure, posting work on YouTube without any agenda.

His current creative energy is directed elsewhere: a spoken-word tour titled Have I Said Too Much? The Police, Hollywood and Other Adventures, and a book project that examines the strangeness of rock celebrity. Not a conventional memoir, the book interviews therapists and musicians to make sense of life on a “precarious pedestal.” In one anecdote, Carly Simon told him that while recording her 1971 album Anticipation in London, the intense emotional engagement of the sessions led her to sleep with all the musicians each night. “By day they’re making music, which is very emotionally engaging, very tense, and the natural result of all that manifested itself by night,” Copeland recounted.

The project appears to be a way of processing a career built inside a very weird world, one where, as Copeland notes, people treat musicians nothing like dentists, even if dentists are far more important for their health.