Stewart Copeland has reteamed with his The Police bandmate Sting for a new BBC documentary all about their love of music.
The drummer has travelled the world talking to music lovers and experts as part of the What Is Music and Why? project, which will be released early next year (20), and Sting was one of his big coups.
“It’s about cognition and the evolutionary purpose of music and why it has this profound affect on us,” Copeland tells WENN. “We know we like music but we don’t really appreciate how deeply ingrained this is and how much it controls us.
“In fact music is the only art form that can literally usurp motor control of our bodies and induce us to thrust our pudendum (genitals) in an overt, sexual display in public! Shakespeare and Rembrandt don’t do that. Sting does that! Most hit songs are love songs so beyond sex; it’s also romance and bonding. Beyond that it has a spiritual thing; it’s transcendent.
“I talked to Sting for two hours like we’ve never had before; we would argue about this particular song but not music in general. I’m talking to Patti Smith, Bobby McFerrin, Francis Ford Coppola and how he uses music in film.”
Copeland also chatted to boffins scientists like Steven Pinker at Harvard and spent Easter with the Hillsong Church in Mississippi, while filming the documentary, and he admits he has learned so much about the power of music: “Your eyes give you information but the music tells you how to feel about it… Music has this very important affect on us.”
Meanwhile, Copeland is preparing to release a new DVD, Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out, which features cuts from the hours of home video footage he took on the road and in the studio with the band.
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