Stewart Copeland

29:31That's your business, Supercharged. Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S. where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Ookla of Speedtest Intelligence Data 1H 2025. The greatest music stories aren't always in the songs themselves. They're in the late night studio sessions, the chance encounters, and the cultural moments that shaped entire movements. For music lovers who find themselves going down rabbit holes about their favorite artists, Claude, an AI thinking partner, helps you explore those deeper questions.

30:09Whether you're wondering about the connections between different scenes, trying to understand what drove a particular creative period, or exploring how social movements influenced sound, Claude works through these complex cultural puzzles with you. It's built for people who know that understanding music means understanding the human stories behind it. Claude doesn't just compile facts. It helps you see patterns across decades of music history, ask the kinds of follow-up questions that reveal deeper truths, and works through the nuanced relationships between artists, movements, and moments. Whether you're a music journalist, industry professional, or someone who just lives for understanding the stories behind the sounds, Claude matches your level of curiosity about what really drives great art.

30:52Try Claude for free at claude.ai slash brokenrecord and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. One of the things I think is universal to nearly everyone is that warm feeling you get when you find someone you feel comfortable sharing parts of your life with that otherwise you might just keep to yourself. Often it's a friend, sometimes it's a loved one, but in those moments you really take a load off. That's one of the things I've enjoyed most about therapy, that there's someone regularly in my life that I'm able to talk to about things I'd probably keep to myself for longer than I really needed to.

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31:59Find the one with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10 % off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash broken. That's BetterHelp.com slash broken. We're back with Bruce Hedlum and Stuart Copeland. I think like a lot of fans, I knew your father was somehow involved in the CIA. not realizing that your father was one of the founders of the CIA. He was a legitimately big deal. But a great jazz trumpeter, too. Also a great jazz trumpeter. Now, you didn't know he was in the CIA at that point, growing up. Not when I was growing up, but when I was in college, he wrote his first book, and there it was on the liner notes.

32:41Dad, gosh. And the book came out during the time of the Chilean crisis. when the CIA was involved in very dirty stuff. And so the CIA was a bad word at the time. But I understood what my father's work in the Middle East was all about, which was keeping the oil flowing to the West rather than North to the Soviet Union because there was a war going on. There was a Cold War going on. And it was critical for American interests. And my father was doing his patriotic duty to manipulate local politics for the betterment of the American economy, to feed our factories. And the Ruskies, their job was to tear down our systems, our relationships with the Saudi Arabian oil fields in the Gulf states.

33:25Their job was to shake it up and make it unstable so as to foil our global dominance. So my daddy played his part in those local politics. And as an apologist for my father's work, I can say that that world was run by monarchs or other forms of dictator. That was their political system. And for them, democracy was a very strange idea because of their tribal rivalries. For them, democracy was exactly like two wolves and a sheep voting on the dinner menu. Now, your mother was in, was she in British intelligence? Yes, during the war, not quite as sexy as the CIA. she was at a desk in London analyzing train schedules, radio, and just basically figuring out where the British RAF should bomb, where the German resources were being transported to and from.

34:28And so it was kind of desk work. But technically, yeah, my mommy and daddy were both spies. They sound like difficult parents to fool in case you were trying to get away with anything. Well, no, when I came along, I'm the fourth child. and I now recognize the father of seven, that by the time you get to the fourth child, willful blindness is an asset. I don't know if you have children, any of your listeners who have children out there. I do. There's sometimes when you're just having a nice time and the child does something bad and you gotta pull out the daddy voice and it's just gonna pop the bubble.

35:03We're all having such a nice cozy time. So I think I will just somehow fail to observe that transgression so that we can continue this evening in a nice way. And I think I got away with stuff because they were lazy. And also, they fought. My older brother, Ian, was the black sheep of the family. He was the motorcycle thief of the family. So they were worn out by battling with him. And all I wanted was just to be a good kid. And I totally forgot, your dad was good friends with Kim Philby, one of the most famous of the Cambridge Five, one of the most famous double agents of all time. Yes, they were suspecting it, but they couldn't believe it.

35:42His best friend, we were parallel families. They had kids the same age as our family. Young Harry was my age. We were chums, and we would go on to archaeological sites. We would go off into the desert to visit the Croc de Chevalier castle in Syria or up to Tabarja castle on the coast, you know, up to Byblos. So it blew his mind and broke his heart when Kim Fildy was exposed. Did he talk about it a lot? No. I read about it in his book. At the time, it was very mysterious that Harry's dad just disappeared one night. And for some reason, the Grupps are all in a state of agitation. We didn't really understand what was going on because we lived just outside of Beirut, in the hills above Beirut.

36:27And they were escaping attention just by holing up in our place. And then it came out that he had jumped on a Greek ship and defected to Russia. And then I never saw them again. To this day, I have not been able to find my old friend Harry Philby. Just vanished off the face of the earth. I can't find him. If I Google him, I get the dad, who is also H. Philby. And I'm sure we regarded it as kind of a joke in our family, CIA daddy. But for them, it was utterly devastating. He was in a boarding school in England, kicked out. Just the family was just trashed. I can hardly imagine how devastating it was for his family.

37:08And his family didn't join him. I think Eleanor went over to Russia for a while, but they didn't actually join him there. No, they didn't. One of the sons visited him there, the eldest, who I didn't know that well. And he was remarried. I don't know whether he had an affair going on the side all the while, but he was never reconciled with his wife Eleanor, who was American, actually. She was quite fierce. it was dad, Philby, who was the jovial boozer, who was the fun one. He was the easier of the two parents. But as my mother used to say, you can always tell the spy, they're the one talking the most bullshit.

37:48They're just talking about trivial bullshit stuff. Life of the party, apparently drunk all the time. Couldn't possibly be a spy. He has nothing with gravitas going on in his head. You mentioned the mother was the fierce one. In your family, you are a fierce character. We talked about how much... No. I was the good kid at the bottom. I was the fourth of four. And like any youngest in any family, I'm the cheerful one. But you also have thrown yourselves at so many new projects. You make a film. You wrote an opera, which... Excuse me. I've written seven operas. Thank you. Seven operas, ballets, you write an extraordinary amount of film music, all these things you didn't know how to do when you started.

38:36Well, except that I had the wherewithal. I had the material to work with. I had the clay, which 70 years of life gave me the experience to work up the skills to go with that clay, to go with that gift. And when I was in college, I studied music theory and so on until I went to UC Berkeley and couldn't get into the music department there. And so I didn't learn that technique, you know, the advanced technique of music theory until years later, but that didn't matter. I didn't need that music school education. I had the music. I just had the instinct. That was a gift, God knows from where, but I had that gift.

39:13And just as a punchline to that study, I'm going back to Juilliard to teach. After years of learning on the job, I suppose, I was paid for most of my music education. But you even say in your book, you have to be willing to throw yourself off the cliff. Yeah. Well, it's much easier for me than it is for that skiing hot dogger. When I throw myself off the cliff, there are no hard rocks beneath me if I screw it up. It's only music. Nobody's going to die. Nobody's even going to experience pain, except for the bandmates momentarily. There are a lot of creative people who don't have that attitude, though, for whom taking on adventures like that would be terrifying.

39:53And you? I don't know that that's a matter of fear as a failure of imagination. I do look askance at my peers who just play guitar or just play drums or just play bass, and that's their entire musical career on one instrument. My God, you got four strings on that bass, you know. I can't even conceive of just sticking with one instrument the way most of my peers do. I do want to talk about your drum playing a little, because your dad encouraged you to, or you started on the trombone, right? My first music, I guess, was on the piano, my sister teaching me how to play piano and actually how to read the dots.

40:36And then trombone lessons, because trombone is a very easy brass instrument to play. Trumpet takes an actual embouchure, whereas trombone with that huge mouthpiece, any damn fool can get a sound out of it. But I couldn't, when I was seven, I couldn't reach the extended positions. But it didn't last. As soon as I discovered banging stuff, that just took over my life. But you bang stuff in a very distinctive way. Certainly your stuff with the police was very distinctive. I recently, when I was preparing for this, I just saw a clip of you conducting. And I thought it looked strange. And then I realized something.

41:13You're left-handed, which I didn't know. That's wrong. You're not left-handed? It's right that I am left-handed, but it's wrong to be conducting with the left hand. And by the way, using a drumstick as the baton, well, that's so they can see the damn thing. Well, they seem to be able to follow you. That's the important part. Yes, yes, yes. Well, the rhythm's good. My conducting is show business. I did not go to conducting school, but I have a lifetime in show business, and I learned a lot there. And I'm actually in the conducting school of Mickey Mouse. It's all about the show. and i do the cues as well i did take a course in conducting so i know the conductor's actual job which is pretty simple really in concept but very difficult in practice with really complicated music which is that you know there's something in you don't see much in rock and roll which is the word tacit uh which is where the flute player he's tacit which means he doesn't play don't play for 16 bars 32 bars because in orchestral you don't use all the instruments all the time in a rock band, guitarists, bass, drums, you don't stop.

42:18If the bass player stops, it's a special effect. No, you play from the beginning of the song through to the end of the song. There's no such thing as tacit. But in an orchestra, the bassoon is sitting down. He's staring off into space for 32 bars. He's not counting 32 bars as they go by. That's what the conductor is for. The conductor's keeping all the parts. Okay, Mr. Bassoon, your part's coming up. It's coming up. Okay, now. And so the bassoon can launch into his bar 347 with confidence because he hasn't been counting for 32 bars. And so the conductor gives the cues. He also gives the emotional attitude.

42:56There's all kinds of things that are not so discernible to the audience, which the conductor provides. And I provide all those while putting on a show. How did being left-handed affect your drumming, do you think? Possibly it gave me a slightly different vocabulary. I maintain that on most instruments, both hands are working, whether it's the violin, you know, the right hand's doing the bowing, but the left hand is doing some complicated stuff. Same with the guitar or any instrument. Maybe brass instruments. The left hand is at your side while the three fingers are doing all the work as far as dexterity.

43:34With drums, both hands and both feet are working. It doesn't matter whether you're left-handed or right-hand. It's all working. But perhaps left-handedness, like with Ringo Starr, for instance, just gave me a different approach to using the instrument, navigating around the instrument, using the toms, the hi-hat. My kit, like Ringo, is set up normal, i.e. right-handed, like the same way a right-handed person would play it, because it's very, very impractical to rearrange the drums so the hi-hat is on the other side, and it just means that you never get to jam with a band because moving the drums around in that way is utterly disruptive.

44:11So I tell all your listeners, any left-handed wannabe drummers out there, play a right-handed kit. Don't be messing around with trying to change the kit. Change yourself. And the same goes with guitar. I think Jimi Hendrix just turned the guitar upside down, but it was a regular guitar. Make it easy to play other people's instruments, basically. So left-handing might have changed my vocabulary slightly, but I think actually there were other factors. It was that Arabic influence, I think, was a big part of it. The Arabic influence being the beat you were using? Yes, the rhythm. The fundamental rhythmic structure of Arabic music, baladi or country Arabic music, shares some features with reggae, believe it or not, on the other side of the planet.

44:54No cultural cross-pollination there, just coincidence, that both forms of music emphasize the third beat of the bar. and they hide one of the bar. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Rock me goes, un, da, un, da. One, two, three, four. Backbeat on two and the downbeat, one, two, three, four. Whereas reggae and Arabic music is on three. One, two, three, four. Two, three, four. Nothing. Two, three, four. Two, three, four. And then those up chicks that hold it together. which turned into my secret sauce when it came to introducing reggae rhythms or reggae-ish rhythms to rock music. And I think it was the Clash who did it first, attempting skinny white guys trying to play reggae.

45:50And the reason they did that, another sidebar story about how Don Letts brought dub music into the punk clubs. It was the only acceptably hostile form of chill music. But Clash were the first attempt playing reggae with their white sensibilities. And they did it pretty effectively. But it was just a whole lot easier for me because that formula was already there in my DNA. So I didn't need to listen closely to what the reggae cats were doing in Kingston, Jamaica. I just got, oh yeah, you can do that. And I just came up with my Arabic vocabulary, which most of the world saw as being reggae. Interesting.

46:27And in Arabic music, is there any stress on the one or is it just on the three?

46:37No, it's just they hide it. It's a gap. It's a void. It's a pit that you fall into. And then they land hard on beat three. Well, that's interesting because another thing I've noticed in your playing is if you're playing a crash, you often do it on the fourth beat or even four and a half. In the wrong place. not the wrong place if it works but yeah i think invisible sun would be a good example of that you know i guess to the annoyance of my bandmates i would resist the straight backbeat and i'm sure stingo writing his song he could care whether it's a downbeat or a backbeat or whatever it is as long as you can hear his darn lyric and so it's probably a distraction why can't you just play a backbeat.

47:22Well, because I don't want to. I want to look for something else, some way of making it interesting or difficult. That was a Freudian slip. Interesting or different, I meant to say. I'll let you take that up with your therapist. Yeah, really. It's just an avoidance of standard. And that's as far as the, you know, there's no more detail to the brief than that. Just, okay, what else is there? After this last break, we'll be back with more from Stuart Copeland. In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

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48:38and with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite to mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business, Supercharged. Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S. where you can see the sky. Best network based on analysis by Ukla of Speedtest Intelligence Data 1H 2025. The greatest music stories aren't always in the songs themselves. They're in the late night studio sessions, the chance encounters, and the cultural moments that shaped entire movements. For music lovers who find themselves going down rabbit holes about their favorite artists, Claude, an AI thinking partner, helps you explore those deeper questions.

49:26Whether you're wondering about the connections between different scenes, trying to understand what drove a particular creative period, or exploring how social movements influenced sound, Claude works through these complex cultural puzzles with you. It's built for people who know that understanding music means understanding the human stories behind it. Claude doesn't just compile facts. It helps you see patterns across decades of music history, ask the kinds of follow-up questions that reveal deeper truths, and works through the nuanced relationships between artists, movements, and moments. Whether you're a music journalist, industry professional, or someone who just lives for understanding the stories behind the sounds, Claude matches your level of curiosity about what really drives great art.

50:09Try Claude for free at Claude.ai slash brokenrecord and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. Lexus is a company that believes in the importance of setting a standard, which I can appreciate as someone who holds themselves to lofty if not ridiculous standards, especially with the car I drive. The standard Lexus has set for themselves is to experience amazing. Lexus measures success by the feeling and emotions evoked in a driver, like exhilaration and joy. Amazing can only be achieved by knowing people on a deeper level. The standard of amazing results in a feeling in drivers that their car was built in anticipation of them.

50:47Machines that make you feel more human. Because a car that doesn't make you feel something is a car that stops short of amazing. Experience amazing at your Lexus dealer. we're back with the rest of bruce suttlem's conversation with stewart copeland so how did you arrange the songs he brought them in they could have been done very conventionally you come in you're often turning the beat around on these things a lot of hi-hat like on bring on the night well i would say and i'm guessing you'll have to ask them but i i think as we were excited when Sting brought in a song, he was excited when I'd fuck up the rhythm because, you know, we were codependent at the time.

51:30And he was real pleased that we'd take an interest in his song. Of course, later, after he'd written 20 hits, you know, he was less concerned whether we liked the song or not. It's a hit because he wrote it. And as he got more and more in control of his medium and became a better and better songwriter, he had less and less patience for collaboration. And we understand that now. And I'm very grateful that we got five albums out of that son of a bitch, because it became more and more difficult for him to compromise and collaborate, because his musical ideas, and I understand this as an orchestral composer, the musical ideas are fully formed in his mind.

52:09And by the way, he knows a thing or two about where to put the drums, and how to use the drums. And the times when it was most urgent that I throttle and kill him was when he was right. But in the early days, he was very pleased that we took an interest. And if I came up with some wild, offbeat rhythm, all he had were the chords. He didn't have that fully developed concept of what the music should be. So I think in the same way that we leapt on every one of his songs as he pulled them out, they leapt on every one of my strange rhythms as I pulled those out. And also Andy got much love from his bandmates when he came up with a guitar part that was unique.

52:51You just mentioned that he was usually right, Sting, that he knew a thing or two about drums. No, no. Well, he was often right. Let's call it often right. What he was wrong about was the effect it had on his two bandmates for him to be implacable. And I would describe it as a form of Asperger's, and I mean that as a compliment, that he's just, music is so important to him. It just makes him feel sick to get it wrong. And I'm grateful that he was able to put up with these intrusions on his pure concept, but he did put up with it. And it got more and more difficult, which is why there was friction in the band.

53:31And finally, you know, if you love somebody, set them free, and off he went. And immediately played with jazz players who you can't really control, which I always thought was a very odd choice. Good point. I never thought like that. He left the frying pan and into the fire of jazz musicians who didn't hold him in such reverence, which annoyed me. Once again, he was back in the supplicant position of, gosh, you like my songs? You'll play with me, the skinny white kid? My goodness, I am so honored. Play what you like. And they did to his benefit. I mean, his first album, I Dream of Blue Turtles, was a brilliant record because he had faith in his players.

54:10They were great players. Kenny Kirkland. Oh, man. All those guys were sensational. Yeah. It reminds me of a part in your book where you're incredibly happy where you got your first tape recorder, one you could put multiple tracks on. Ah, yes, the TIAC, four tracks. And that's when you recorded all your, or did the demos for Clark Kent. Yes, and for Police, too. I've always been a home recording enthusiast. And before that, I had a Reevox A77. And you record on the left channel, usually a drum box, which I, you know, a nightclub, a lounge act to accompany the pianist in the bar, the piano bar. You know, or pop one or pop two.

54:57Or whatever. And then lay that down on one track. Then I feed that track onto the other track while adding a guitar. And so the drum box and my live guitar goes on to track two, married together. Now I've got drums and guitar. I take that track, bounce it back onto track one while adding a bass guitar. And so I'd go bouncing tracks back and forth. But they would get mushier and mushier. Kids these days probably don't have a concept of signal-to-noise ratio, which is a byproduct of magnetic tape as opposed to digital data. and so every time you back you got tape hiss as a layman's term for signal to noise ratio which increases and so the earlier tracks get mushier and mushier which by the way is why on old rolling stones records and beatles records the tambourine is so prominent because by the time they did that they only had four tracks recording in the early days and they did a lot of this bouncing of tracks they call it when you merge tracks onto another track then go back and forth The initial tracks, that's to say the drums, get mushier and mushier.

56:08So to add some sparkle back into the rhythm, the last thing they add is a tambourine, which is, in your face, bright, fresh recording, whereas the actual live drum set has gotten a bit mushy. We digress. I got the four-track machine, which meant that I now have four tracks that I could record on, which was a huge breakthrough, and I can now play guitar, bass, and two guitars, bass, and drum box. And this really surprised me in the book. Maybe you were overstating the case. When you went into the studio to record your Clark Kent album, you said it was the happiest day of your creative life. Oh, absolutely, without doubt.

56:48I've had a few happy days since then. But at the time, I was a recording enthusiast, frustrated guitarist, and I had these songs which the band were not into. They did not leap on my songs, you know, because Sting had to sing them. And my puerile American college kid lyrics just did not match his persona. But I do have recordings of him singing those dumb songs of mine, including the one I had a hit with called Don't Care. The lyric is something like, I am the neatest thing that ever hit town. There isn't anything that could bring me down. Don't care. Don't care. You know, Sting is a man of great genius and grave posture.

57:29You know, he's a great poet. and to sing those. I've got a recording of him singing that dumb song, which I like to remind him of occasionally. I was going to say, do you ever just leave a message on his answering machine saying, I've decided to release those? You've got me busted. Well, these days we get along great. We don't have to play music together, which means that we get along really great. And we do like to rattle each other's cage. There's some very touching things in the book. People know about you guys battling it out, But at one point, you babysit for him so he and his wife can have a night.

58:03Oh, yeah. Well, we had to keep secret from our punk scene the fact that he was a father. He had a baby. He's married, for one thing. That's bad enough. But he actually had a wife and kid. God, I mean, Joe Strummer wouldn't have talked to us if he'd known that. But one day, his wife was an actress. And here's something else that I will expose to his discomfort, is that he was a model. and if he went for a gig, he would get the job because he just had charisma out to here. And so one day he was out doing a modeling job and she was out doing an acting job and what are they going to do with their child?

58:40They must have been desperate to call me and they dropped off young Joseph who was old enough to crawl. He was out of his crib, but a little destruct-a-thon and for the next 200 hours, he made my life a misery while I tried to keep him out of trouble and stop him from destroying my world. But a lifelong bond was established. That little kid left a dent in my heart, which survives to this day. And now Joseph Sumner is himself a father of many, just a really one of the world's great human beings. You also called Sting at one point one of the world's most loyal people. True, to this day. In fact, he has around him.

59:20The only people he wasn't loyal to are Andy and me. Everyone else in his world is old police crew. He forms relationships and they last. And our relationship lasts. The only thing that doesn't last is our musical relationship, which is secondary. And there's a good reason for that. We are not musically birds of a feather. We make music for different reasons. Music has a different function in our lives. We go about it in different ways. And when we were young and codependent, that worked. we now understand that that clash provided the police. It gave the police its thing. But he's very loyal to me to this day in every matter except for music.

1:00:03And that's fine. You know, we enjoy each other's company and I don't enjoy getting dictated to any more than he enjoys struggling with collaboration. Just raise a really interesting point. You have traveled around the world. You did a film, going to Africa, kind of like one of your heroes, Ginger Baker, did. and you were looking for Western music, you just said music has a different function in your life. Other than it's your job, and I think you love doing it, what is music in your life? How does it function? It is a river that flows. I wake up in the morning, I rush through breakfast so I can get into this room right here and make some more music.

1:00:46It just flows out of me like a river. And this isn't true of all musicians. many musicians are players and they achieve their musical nirvana just by playing their instrument you know and music doesn't happen for them until they pick up their instrument and start playing it for me it's a river that flows that doesn't mean that this gushing torrent of music that comes out of my brain is any good or that anyone else will like it apart from me fortunately enough people do so that I can earn my crust from producing this stuff. But it's a gift that comes to me. And, you know, like I have musicians who are an incredible pianist, for instance, concert pianist.

1:01:27He'll come fly into the Chicago Symphony and play Rachmaninoff's fourth piano concerto and just incredible musicality in every which way, except the composing part. And he will say, you know, this summer, I think I'm going to compose a piano concerto. No, you're not. If you were going to compose a piano concerto, you would need that gene, that gushing torrent of musicality, and you would have written 10 piano concertes by now. If you're going to wait till this summer, that means where are you going to get it? You know, his fingers do it. His heart plays the music with great musicality, but that composing gene is another and separate and distinct factor.

1:02:06So the relationship with music is that I just have this music that I want to make. and when I sit down behind the drums, I just play. It's just something I don't think about. I just do it. And to be working with a musician that has an agenda, actually, I kind of want the drums to do like this. I go, you what? Say what? Okay, I'll try that. And as soon as I start playing, it goes right out of my head. And the function of music for me is kind of the other way around. I am a vessel for this music that comes from my heart. But you have an incredible gift for melody. I've been listening to a lot of your music.

1:02:44I've been listening to the orchestral album you did. It seems almost limitless. well the the music i've been doing this for 70 years and it hasn't quit in fact it's getting as i develop more skills i've still gotten the same musical identity i had that i was born with the same inclination to use these intervals or those intervals melodic signature if you like but as the years and decades go by i develop more skills so where i was you know in the 70s i was just limited to the chords I could play on a guitar, recorded into my Revox A77. Now I have full orchestration skills and can now work with a 70-piece orchestra to take my music and turn it.

1:03:26But it's the same music. It's the same melodic sensibility. It's the same harmon. I just gravitate towards this chord and that chord. It's the same identity. The only thing that's changed is the skill set. The technology's changed, though. It's allowed you to do that. Absolutely. One One day they invented a computer that would do as it was told. Before that they had a drum machine which you could just set a rhythm and play along with it. Then Roland developed drum machines that you could program, kind of complicated but you could program into it the rhythm for the verse and then say at bar 25 switch to this other rhythm and you could program that other rhythm.

1:04:03It was kind of fiddly but you could do it. And then they invented the Fairlight computer where you had a visual display and you could enter the notes on a keyboard and tell it to play back exactly what I tell you in a much more comprehensive way. And that created me as a composer. It enabled me to really think of music in a broader way and have total control. And that's where my orchestral journey began. Well, there's a technological change going on right now, and I'd love to know what you think about it, which is artificial intelligence. That is a tool that a lot of musicians, perhaps a lot of music labels are going to be using.

1:04:41What's your view of that? I've had my career, and therefore I can wish well all of those non-musicians who can now make music using AI. And I say that as a drummer, which is the first instrument to get brushed aside by technology. You know, how many guys does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. Get your drum box to do it. And it's weird that my instrument should be supplanted thus. because rhythm, the most elemental, instinctive, mammalian part of music that gets your pudenda thrusting in public, you would think that would be visceral, and that a machine would be the furthest thing to be able to recreate that visceral rhythm thrusting.

1:05:27But no, on the disco floor, it's a machine that gets humans dancing. And another thing to think about is an artist like Moby, who's very creative and musical, but to my knowledge, he doesn't play a musical instrument. He assembles musical elements and creates beautiful music as a result. And Kanye and Kendrick and all these other modern musicians who don't need some band, guitar, bass, and drums, they create music with found sounds and so on. With musicality, they're not limited by what their fingers can do. and so the technology has set Moby and Kendrick and the rest of them you know set them free to create stuff with their imagination but they don't necessarily need to have that that finger twiddling piece it's just music from whatever source and of course people musicians of my generation despise it and are threatened by the fact that you can make music without actual living musicians I say who cares it works it moves people you know in the case of the drum box get some dancing on the dance floor.

1:06:31That's what we're here for. And yet, you know, what those artists are doing is a kind of form of collage, putting together different elements. Okay, well, I can see what your next question is. What about when a machine does the collaging, when a machine assembles these things, a machine called AI? And I have the same feeling about it. Now, I was at the Me Dem Festival in Cannes a couple weeks ago where I was on two different panels, one of artists talking about it and the other with lawyers talking about it. And on the second panel, it was the lady who runs SASEM, the BMI of Europe, and all these people who are the legal aspects of copyright and who's protected.

1:07:14If you merge Mick Jagger with David Bowie and you've got this, sounds like both of them, but isn't either of them. Who owns that? And so the legal issues and they're not my problem. And the artists were more sanguine about it because they can use it because it gives them more tools than it takes away. And there's another aspect which is the sense that music is evolved in Homo sapiens for the benefit of all of us. We are all, you and I are both and everyone are incredibly musical. All of us are not Eric Clapton but our species is a very musical species. We are all gifted musically. We can all sing a tune.

1:07:55Well, most of us. We can all coordinate our body motions to fit into a rhythm. We are more musical than we think. And so a tool such as AI gives the gift of music to every man, woman, and child on the planet. That's a really good thing for non-professionals. It goes back to campfire music where before the age of specialization, where I get to spend all my time banging stuff and getting really, really good at it, and you get to just pay me money to listen to me banging shit, AI gives you the tool to make your own music and create your own community, and you get to do it. And so for humanity, it's a blessing.

1:08:35For individual musicians trying to make a living at it, the same thing happened back in the days of Moby with samples and so on. Now any damn fool can make music, which means every damn fool is making music, which means the competition is real fierce. And so I feel some sympathy for my young musicians trying to create a career. And this creates an obstacle for them. But for humanity at large, it's a blessing. Well, I'm going to keep listening to you banging shit, I think, in the meantime. Cool. All right. Thank you so much. And I love the book. Cool. Glad you enjoyed it. And thanks for listening.

1:09:41and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Tolanay. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for$4.99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.

1:10:14The more you learn about your favorite artists, the more you want to know. Claude helps you keep digging, finding new threads and rabbit holes to explore. Whether it's discovering deeper meaning behind a detail in an interview or figuring out the influence behind an artist's particular era, Claude thinks with you to find the next clue. If you can't get enough of the stories behind your favorite music and artists, Claude will help you discover new layers you didn't know existed. Try Claude for free at Claude.ai slash brokenrecord.

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