What's a little eccentricity between friends?

Copeland, now 57 years old, and I speculate like a pair of schoolkids over how Trudie might usefully occupy her time. Reading War and Peace, perhaps, I suggest to Copeland, whose bottle-blond locks are now a dusty shade of grey, complementing those spectacle frames and giving him the amused air of a hip professor of some “ology” or other.

Despite making his fortune with Sting in the Police, who had their first hit, Roxanne, in 1978, their relationship has long been difficult. The band, influenced by jazz, reggae and punk, sold eight million copies of their 1983 album Synchronicity in the US alone but broke up acrimoniously in 1984.

American-born composer Copeland, the father of seven children whose ages range from 10 to 28, is promoting his beautifully written autobiography, Strange Things Happen, about his life and career and particularly his time with the famously feuding band.

He reveals “the soup of utter misery” that was the band’s hugely lucrative reunion tour in 2007 and 2008, when Sting, Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers -- “three millionaires on a bus” -- tortured one another for months on end.

It’s got the lot, says Copeland -- screaming matches, huffs and moments when Sting looks “like a petulant pansy instead of the god of rock”. He grins and whispers: “All I’ve done is leave out the boring bits.”

The book also tells of his adventures filming with pygmies in the Congo and beating Prince Charles at polo (“profane language has a special panache when issued from royal lips”).

Now an award-winning composer of operas, film scores and soundtracks -- everything from the movies Rumblefish and Wall Street to TV’s Desperate Housewives -- Copeland is in London for the epic recreation in the O2 arena of Ben Hur Live, for which he’s composed an orgiastic, in-your-face score. He’s the English-language narrator of the toga spectacular which is performed in Latin and Aramaic. After a brief digression about Ben Hur, which is in Hamburg this weekend, he rearranges his lean, loose-limbed 6ft 3in frame and returns to Sting.

“His brain chemistry is such that he has to do 10 hours of yoga a day. It’s true. He does 10 hours every f—ing day. That’s life in the magic Stingdom. All the crazy shit you’ve heard about Sting. As his friend I want to categorically state it’s all true, the tantric sex, everything.

“Sting’s childhood nest was not a happy nest. I won’t go into details, but when he was born he entered a world of unhappiness. I think that’s one reason why he’s so mysterious.”

Even unto himself? “Definitely unto himself,” says Copeland.

He’s on a roll about Sting now, whom he loves and respects despite the fact they are both capable of hurting each other. “Which we do as often as we snuggle. But, yeah, Sting’s become the supreme poet of pain, the pain that’s deep within himself,” says Copeland, scissoring his long legs into a more comfortable position.

And, I point out, the erstwhile Newcastle upon Tyne schoolteacher Gordon Sumner aka Sting is a brooding northern man, a Geordie from Wallsend to boot. “Exactly, they’re a breed apart, aren’t they?” he says. “They’re not voluble. Once you get over the border into Scotland that changes. The thing is they’re different in the north of England. Really different, huh?” 

Theoretically Scots

 What could not have been more different is the two musicians’ upbringings. While Sting is a far-left-leaning sometime film star and a would-be saviour of the rain forest with impeccable working-class roots, the floppy-haired right-winger, who used to sit behind him on stage in a constant drum-banging frenzy, was a “diplo-brat”, the youngest of four children from a privileged, intellectual Anglo-American family proud of its Celtic roots.

Indeed, Copeland says the ancestors of his late father, Miles Copeland Jr, were all “theoretically” Scots, despite being from Birmingham, Alabama.

“We’re not exactly Mayflower Americans, but the Copelands have been there for a while. I don’t know where they came from but legend had it that we’re Scots. My mom, of course, is pure Scottish, although she’s now a naturalised American citizen, living in France.”

His mother is the octogenarian archaeologist Lorraine Adie Copeland, the daughter of a Harley Street surgeon, renowned for her work on the Paleolithic period.

“The Adies are from Leith, where she was born, although most of her family emigrated to Australia. She was educated in England [Wycombe Abbey School for girls] and has always sounded quite British rather than Scottish.”

Despite her age, she still writes and researches extensively. Her many books stop her son at the second word. “They start with ‘The’, followed by an unpronounceable 14-syllable word,” he says. “She’s very academic. She draws stones and analyses boxes of dirt sent from digs in the Middle East, which is a very important region for good ole Ma. She seems like she’s going to go on for ever. Her mind’s so active.”

As well as being an expert in her field, Adie worked for British Intelligence during the war. She was a plane spotter, spending her nights looking for enemy aircraft when she met Miles. “An oddly suited pair,” muses Copeland, adding that his bon vivant father was as gregarious as his bookish mother was quiet. While she was with the Special Operations Executive, her future husband was soon spying for the US -- “the Old Glue factory, the CIA,” of which he was one of the founders.

“So, yeah, we [sister Leonora and brothers Ian and Miles] had really cool parents. My ancient mom’s still pretty cool. I was born in Virginia, so ah’m a southerner, honey, but my daddy took us off to Egypt when I was two months old. We lived in the Middle East until I was about 15 when he was unmasked and we had to be evacuated,” says Copeland, who has been prowling around the room making coffee and offering hand-baked cookies. He had no idea how extraordinary his Levantine childhood was. “You have nothing to compare and contrast it with, have you? We thought we were under-privileged because we didn’t have colour TV, all the stuff kids had back home.”

But he assumed that all his schoolfriends’ parents also threw an inordinate number of cocktail parties in their palatial homes. “My daddy used to conduct his nefarious manipulations of local potentates with cocktail parties at our modest Ottoman palace in the hills overlooking Beirut,” he writes in his book. With the city sparkling below, an Armenian jazz band grooving on the terrace, and a briefcase full of CIA dollars in his office, Miles, a friend of George Bush Sr, would cultivate eager dictators-in-training. 

Daddy was a spy

 Copeland remembers his eldest brother coming home from school one day and asking his father: “Is it true, Daddy, that you are a spy?” To which the response was: “Who wants to know?” Meanwhile, one of his best friends at school was Harry Philby, with whom he remembers playing cowboys and Indians among the crusader castles.

Little did the boys know that their parents were spies: Copeland’s father for the CIA, while Philby’s father Kim, a high-ranking British diplomat, was a double agent for the KGB. Copeland remembers his friend’s father as “a kind of boozy old slob”. Eventually, in 1963, “Old Man Philby” and family escaped in the dead of night on a Russian ship after his cover was blown. “They resurfaced years later in Moscow.” Oh, and by the way, adds Copeland, another student at his school was Osama bin Laden. “I didn’t know him. If I had, I’d have kicked his butt.

“My brothers, Miles and Ian, and our sister Lennie and I had an amazing childhood, although we thought Dad was just a businessman. I was the runt of the litter, but because I was the youngest I had a cosy nest.”

Their father played with the Glenn Miller Army Band during the Second World War and music would come to play a big part in the family’s future.

“I was the one who was interested in music, despite the fact my older brother Miles Copeland III is very driven and became a music impresario, founding the BTM record label and later IRS Records. He even helped get the Police signed to a major contract, then managed Sting for many years.

“Ian, who sadly passed away in 2006 at the age of 56 from melanoma, became a talent agent representing some of the biggest bands in rock history, including the B-52s, the Cure, Simple Minds, Nine Inch Nails and REM.

“Any vestige of cool I have I got from Ian, the hippest dude I ever knew. He was the Fonz, the kid who ran with a motorcycle gang in Beirut, then he became the coolest kid on campus. I grew up my whole life trying not to say, ‘Well, my brother Ian says … does … thinks …’ We shared apartments and squats. We were very, very close. I miss him dreadfully. We talked three or four times a week. Now he’s gone and I can’t fix it.”

Were they a political family, arguing around the dinner table? “Nope. My father was bookish, right wing, a social liberal but a foreign policy conservative and I, too, would have described myself as slightly to the right, certainly in London in 1977 when every rock musician was somewhere far to the left of Chairman Mao. I voted for George Bush twice but not for George W. Now, I worship Obama; I hope and pray he succeeds.”

The big political debates were around the Police’s dinner tables, he confesses. “I was a supporter of Ronald Reagan, although now I believe the right-wing rot started with him. Stingo, Andy and I would argue and I’d slash and burn because Sting’s not quick with political discourse. I’d totally win the argument. He’d go up to his room, then he’d come down and say, ‘And the Russians love their children too.’ Blown out of the water! One little couplet destroys all my careful reading of The Economist, Newsweek and Time magazine.

“You cannot argue with a poet because he gets the emotional concept of what it’s all about with a few well-chosen words. But, I guess because I grew up in the Middle East as a ‘diplo-brat’ I remain fascinated by foreign policy.

“Ian I went back there in 2001. I stood there with a tear in my eye. The neighbourhoods where we played had been corroded by warfare, sprayed by automatic rifle fire, or levelled by bombs. Our villa had these five bullet holes. We saw how Lebanon has endured invasion, civil war, occupation, massacre, siege and pretty much every form of human madness since we left 40 years ago.” 

“Snarling punk rocker”

 When Miles Copeland’s CIA cover was blown in 1967, Stewart was packed off to Millfield, the English public school in Somerset, before heading across the Atlantic to the San Diego School of Performing Arts. He then moved to London in 1975 to play drums with the progressive rock band Curved Air (“my dark years”). Describing himself as a “snarling punk rocker”, he formed the Police in 1976.

In 1982, he married Curved Air’s British vocalist, Sonja Kristina, “who moved across the stage like smoke”, and with whom he has three sons, Sven, Jordan and Scott. He has a fourth son, Patrick, with heiress Marina Guinness, or “a lass from Ireland” as he describes her. He and Kristina divorced in the early nineties. “I was a cheating son of a bitch. Calling it an open marriage is a disservice to Sonja and to the marriage,” he admits.

Eighteen years ago he married his second wife, Fiona Dent, a tall, stunning blonde. They have three daughters, Eve, Grace and Celeste, “a future Sarah Palin”. In addition, Copeland, now living in Los Angeles, is grandpa to Sven’s daughter Kaya. “My Copelands, my family, that’s who I am; I’m truly blessed,” he says, draining his coffee cup. “I was blessed with the family I grew up in and now I’ve got seven wonderful kids.” Then he shows me a picture on his phone of his handsome family. “I don’t know who to thank for them because I’m not religious. My life has been so enriched by my children -- they’ve given me so much more than I’ve given them. My gold albums, my trophies, my accomplishments, my money, that’s great, but in the darkest moments of despair I look to my children, seven beautiful individuals I can count on. They’re the most precious things in my life.”

And for his next book? “I’ve got a lot more stories. But I’m thinking of writing The Rock Star’s Handbook to Survival on the Road. There’s one snag: that world has changed so much that a lot of my sage advice to young musicians is irrelevant. But I guess shit still happens to rock stars.”

So he could become the agony uncle of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll?

“The business side of rock ’n’ roll’s certainly changed since the Police, as has the technology. As for drugs, I never really got into them -- my twin addictions are nicotine and caffeine. That’s not to say the occasional waft of marijuana didn’t come my way. Like Al Gore, I never exhaled. But there was a helluva lot of sex back in the day. The temptations! The bacchanalia! Man, the sex!” He flops backwards, exhausted at the memories.

Strange Things Happen: a Life with the Police, Polo and Pygmies by Stewart Copeland is published by Friday Project/HarperCollins, priced £15.99.