An SOS To The World:Stewart Copeland's Adventures in Music.

"De do do do de da da da" was, fortunately, not all that Stewart Copeland wanted to say to us. In BBC4's recent three part series, Stewart Copeland's Adventures In Music, the former Police drummer proved himself to be an affable, articulate, enthusiastic, self-deprecating, and knowledgeable television presenter. Better still, well into his seventh decade, he remains eager to learn, eager to join in, and, best of all, restlessly curious. He comes across a regular, and fun, guy.

I'd not been a big fan of The Police (at school sides were taken between Police and Adam and the Ants fans, those of us who preferred Madness and Dexy's Midnight Runners dipped out) so I'd not paid a great deal of attention to his drumming but I was amused by the possibly apocryphal story that he had the legend FUCK OFF YOU CUNT written on his toms and each time he pummeled them he imagined doing the same to his singer Sting's face.

Copeland and Sting seem to get on okay now, as evinced by a scene in which Copeland visits Sting's palatial and oh-so-tasteful looking pad for an amiable chat about the old days (which Copeland remarks is the first time Sting and himself have ever deeply discussed music) but then, it seems, Copeland seems to get on with pretty much anyone these days. There are interviews with musical luminaries as diverse as Martin Carthy, Trevor Horn, Talib Kweli, the Afro-French Cuban band Ibeyi, and CeCe Winans who offers up the dubious theory that 'music was created by God. Hmmm!

In Philadelphia, Copeland chats to Bobby McFerrin (whose Don't Worry, Be Happy still seems to be going down well with the kids), in Memphis he hobnobs with a marching band, and in a chapel in Mississippi he listens to some bluesy gospel sounds. He also finds time to pop into New Jersey's Princeton University, Wells Cathedral, a cave in Germany, and Marrakesh in Morocco to witness a live performance of some trance inducing gnawa music.

Sounds like a cushy number - and indeed it is. I'd do it in a trice. But this is more than mere travelogue and it's not your average music documentary either. Copeland wants to get under the skin of music. Find out just what it is about music that affects us in such a deep way. We can all appreciate the talent, genius even, of Shakespeare, Spielberg, and Rembrandt but how often do they make us cry, make us fall in love, or truly fill our hearts with joy?

Music, Copeland asserts, takes us to a higher plane and connects us in a way that no other art form does. I agree with him. Music sends chills down my back, makes me fall in love, makes me want to smash up everything single thing I own while at the same time holding every person I've ever loved close to me and never letting them go. Most of my friendships have been informed by music, most of my conversations are about music or at least reference it, and I can't even imagine being in a relationship with someone who is not passionate about music.

Not everyone will agree with me and Stewart Copeland that "music is essential equipment for being human" but evidence suggests that music builds communities. Every US football team and most armies have songs, football fans sing their hearts out for ninety minutes (even calling the referee a wanker is set to a tune), weddings end in discos, and even at the very end of our lives our friends say goodbye to us while listening to the music that meant the most to us.

Stewart Copeland's first introduction to the passion that music can stir was Carl Orff's bombastic Carmina Burana while mine was likely something far more prosaic like Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks or Everything I Own by Ken Boothe but what if we go right back? Humans learned to make music before we even worked out how to grow food, "beauty before beans" quips Copeland, and the oldest musical instrument so far found is an ancient bone flute discovered at The Holy Falls cave in southern Germany.

The Holy Falls cave was shared by Neanderthals and Homo sapiens but, as the fact I'm writing this and you're reading it proves, Homo sapiens won out and Neanderthals are no more. Some believe that the music which Homo sapiens made helped create more complex and cohesive social structures which in turn propagated the species and, ultimately, lead to our success.

Is that why babies respond to rhythm before they do language (if one's crying, rocking them to sleep tends to work better than explaining to them the benefit of sleep)? It could well be argued that many babies wouldn't even have appeared if it had not been for music. Music contains a "hidden sexual power", it's used for "mating" rituals, and to enable the obvious human desire to reproduce.

Nowhere is this more overt than on a nightclub dancefloor. In Berlin, DJ Honey B Jones demonstrates how she bonds dancing crowds with phases of anticipation that act as delayed gratification. She builds the crowd up to a climax and just when they're about to explode - boom - the drop. The money shot of music.

Charles Darwin, who Copeland calls "the governor", included songbird calls in his studies of sexual selection suggesting that he felt music wasn't just a form of sexual healing to get us "hot just like an oven" but it also helped us choose sexual partners. I'm with Darwin. Someone who can make music, sing, or even (cough) write about it instantly becomes twice as sexy to me.

It's almost as if music is "human plumage". Studies have shown that women in the more fertile phases of their cycle find themselves attracted to more complex music and, even, the composers of that music. It is, some have it, the reason for Lisztomania in which female fans of the 19c composer would stash his used cigar butts in their cleavages as if giving Franz an imaginary titwank.

If music brings people together in sexual union it does in social union too. In a way that religion and government can never do. Obviously, there has been violence between various musical tribes, most famously the mods'n'rockers of the sixties, but, for the most part, music is a unifying experience. A metropolitan return to the campfire and the cave singalong. Copeland believes that "for bonding a tribe there is no better glue than music".

When we see Copeland, playing a frying pan, in New York City as Patti Smith leads a choir through People Have The Power it's hard to deny just how moving the experience is. Just watching it on TV at home, on my own, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, my eyes (as ever) got watery, and my soul, I felt, had been elevated to a higher sphere.

I'd love to have been there to witness it live. Elsewhere in the series, Copeland looks at how music tells a story, how it creates a narrative. It was something Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms argued about. Wagner wanted to tell a tale while Brahms thought that music should stand alone. In and of its own worth.

The Human League's Don't You Want Me (love the band, love the song) and Sting's employment of 'bait and switch' techniques on The Police's Every Breath You Take show that pop music, for the most part, sided with Wagner on that argument. But even instrumentals tell a story. Copeland visits Matthew Herbert in the 'Kentish countryside' (a phrase he knowingly savours, suggesting he's spent plenty of time on these shores). Herbert's formed a European anti-Brexit jazz band and has also recorded a concept album about the life of a pig by sampling pigs oinking, retching, being slaughtered, and, ultimately, turned into food, shoes, or even musical instruments that Herbert then plays on the album.

It wasn't one that went down well with PETA but it undeniably told a story. A pretty cruel and tragic story at that. Of less concern to vegetarians like myself but equally relevant in the study of how music tells stories is the use of music as film soundtracks. Think of Danny Elfman's Simpsons theme or John Williams' music for Jaws. They may not, initially, have conjured up specific images but listen to them now and try not to think about Bart skateboarding or a huge man eating fish terrorising Amity Island.

Star Wars works that way too and other examples cited include Vertigo, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola even pops up to give his two penn'orth), and Copeland's own Rumble Fish soundtrack. The first screen versions of both Frankenstein and Dracula were silent and, looked at today, they're simply not scary. With Max Steiner's theme, 1933's King Kong was suddenly far more unsettling and still stands as a classic today.

We see how dissonance in a score suggests something bad is imminent and how employment of pizzicato strings poses a question and infers confusion on the part of the protagonist, we're taught about 'the devil's tritone' - a pitch that lacks the expected resolution and has been used to great effect by both Black Sabbath and Gustav Holst in his Mars suite, and we're schooled in how reggae music uses silence to create tension.


There's a light debunking of the Western belief that major keys mean 'happy' and minor keys indicate sadness and there's a truly touching scene when a busker plays Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending to a couple beneath the subway tracks in New York. Moved by the music, the guy proposes to his girlfriend. She accepts and then they both start crying.

That's music making, or at least moving forward, the story at its most explicit. Elsewhere there's footage of a young Martin Carthy at a folk club, Sting talking about how Carthy popularised Scarborough Fair before Paul Simon 'borrowed' it and, shades of Graceland, took years to finally give Carthy any credit.


On a different folk route, there's a brief section on how, in the days of slavery, African traditions were kept alive through music and eventually helped shape the prominent musical forms that came to define Cuba, Brazil, and the USA. Funk, soul, salsa, son, blues, jazz, and even country music all owe their unique sounds to the influence of Africa. A whole series could, and should, be dedicated to this and hopefully one day will.


Hip-hop is now the most consumed music on the planet and though there have been many programmes dedicated to the genre I'd love to see one that drills down on how rappers, and DJs, use hip-hop to tell stories. In the hands of Public Enemy, NWA, The Wu-Tang Clan, Jay-Z, Angel Haze, Fetty Wap, and Danny Brown as well as so many others hip-hop has become one of the easiest, and most potent, ways for stories to spread around America and the world.

It is, in many ways, modern folk music. The stories that music tell have become a huge part of music but it is rhythm, the progenitor, that still dominates. Through the "spiritual drunkenness" of Sufism and the Balinese gamelan orchestras that soundtrack births, marriages, and deaths much like our own popular music to Alfred Parry's transformation of William Blake's Jerusalem into a patriotic hymn, rhythm underpins almost all music.


Stewart Copeland has a blub on hearing a powerful example of choral polyphony and then waxes lyrical about "the natural elevation towards the divine", mystical absorption through music combined with sight and smell, and "flow states" that place us so completely in the moment that we are only peripherally aware of time and place.


An interview with piano, zither, and mbira player Laraaji (whose music was dismissed by my friend Richard Sanderson as "hippy shit") expands upon the nature of trance inducing music, the hippy movement, and MDMA fuelled dance music while Steve Reich brings things back to earth with more reflective and sober thoughts concerning the power of repetition in music.

As Mark E Smith once said, there's "repetition in the music and we're never gonna lose it". Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain On Music, talks of how music can release oxytocin - the love hormone - and dopamine which is associated with our most primal urges and claims that, on top of that already alluring combination, music acts like an eternally unsolvable puzzle. As soon as we think we've solved one riddle, another five even more glorious ones appear.

Like a multi-dimensional sudoku made not of numbers but of love. Almost everyone interviewed attests to the mighty power of music but even the one cynic can't bring himself to go so far as to say he doesn't like the stuff. Steven Pinker, the author and cognitive psychologist, speaks from Harvard about his belief that music is nothing more than 'auditory cheesecake'.


It's a claim he first made in his 1997 book How The Mind Works. A book in which he suggested that if music was to disappear tomorrow our lives would not be significantly altered. Pinker loves that music gives us pleasure (like cheesecake) but he sees no biological use for it or no Darwinian reason.

Charles Darwin, it seems from the research on songbirds I mentioned earlier, may not have been in harmonious alliance with Pinker and Copeland, amicably as ever, wasn't either. Believing music to be far more than 'pudding for the ears'. Though taking Pinker's point, I felt myself far more on Copeland's (and, hopefully, Darwin's) side of the debate.


Music isn't just fun. It's important. I know people who have come out of terrible life situations who swear that listening to and making music virtually saved them. In life's choppiest of seas they clung on to it like a lifeboat and it soothed their troubled souls and healed them. It was a friend when one was most needed, it was medicine at a time of great mental anguish, and it was a reminder that, no matter how bad things are, there is always beauty.


Not every piece of music in the series was, to me, beautiful but there was, of course, lots of great music along the way to underline Copeland's assertions and aid his studies. Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Saint-Saens, Rufus Wainwright, David Byrne (singing Bowie's 'Heroes'), Bob Marley, The Kinks, NWA, Stravinsky, The Temptations, Elton John, The Human League, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Dvorak's New World Symphony (the Hovis advert one), Kylie Minogue's 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head', Brian Eno's Music for Airports, and, er, Ed Sheeran! The Police too. Of course.

There's Kanye West, gospel music from the Hillsong church in New York, and Steve Reich's Music for Eighteen Musicians and It's Gonna Rain (incidentally, Reich's house looks EXACTLY like you imagine it will) but, most of all, what comes through is not the love of any specific music or musical genre but the love for music itself.

Stewart Copeland did a superb job of making a case that music is an art form above all others, that it can touch the soul in ways that even film and literature cannot, and, even, that without it our lives would not just be completely different but would be fundamentally much much poorer. That may not be true for everyone but it's true for Stewart Copeland, it's true for the vast majority of the people I love the most, and it's certainly true for me. As my mate Rob Uriarte would always say if I was playing a record to him - "give it some beans".