Police guitarist Andy Summers on Akira Kurosawa and photographing Japan: Japan Times column
Andy Summers captures life on and off stage in moody monochrome
In 1980, one of the first music videos for then up-and-coming British rock trio The Police was filmed on the Tokyo subway. In the footage, three blond musicians — bass player/singer Sting, guitarist Andy Summers and American drummer Stewart Copeland — mug for the camera against a backdrop of anonymous Japanese commuters, lip-syncing into walkie-talkies to their aptly chosen hit single, “So Lonely.”
But Summers would soon find himself on the other side of the lens, pursuing a passion for photography that he had nurtured since his adolescence in Bournemouth, England, where he fell in love with black-and-white art films from around the world shown at a local cinema, including early masterworks by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. When The Police was hitting peak popularity in 1983, Summers tracked down American photographer Ralph Gibson in New York, who helped him publish his debut photo book, “Throb.”
Four decades later, at age 81, Summers returned to Japan last month to open two exhibitions of his work at galleries in Tokyo and Kyoto operated by German camera-maker Leica. Both shows are based on his latest book, “A Series of Glances,” and will run through July 7.
Sporting a royal blue jacket and hoisting a flute of champagne, Summers welcomed the invitation-only crowd on opening day in Ginza by dryly confessing that it wasn't his usual gig. “I’m used to standing up a little bit higher on a stage with a guitar,” he said, stretching his left arm out to an imaginary fretboard. “It’s very nice to be back in Tokyo and I've played many concerts here, but right now, I’m completely jet lagged.”
The following morning, Summers met me two blocks from the Leica Gallery at The Peninsula Tokyo hotel, dressed in a dark gray sweatshirt and sipping coffee refills to stave off fatigue. Far more than just a tour stop or music video prop, he says, Japan has been a source of lifelong fascination since he saw Kurosawa’s films in Bournemouth when he was 15.
“Kurosawa got into my head at a young age, those early black-and-white films before he started his samurai phase,” Summers says. “I sort of soaked up Japanese culture through those movies. Later, I was into Zen and a lot of other things that were very appealing to me. And much later, when I got into photography, it all started to come back out in a way that I couldn’t necessarily express on the guitar.”
Summers is a decade older than his Police bandmates, and was raised in an England still ravaged by war. School buildings were blown out, bridges reduced to twisted frames, beaches bombed and covered in barbed wire. Summers saw echoes of his childhood environs in Kurosawa’s late 1940s films, such as “Stray Dog” and his personal favorite, “Drunken Angel,” both of which feature seedy characters in dark and ruinous Tokyo backstreets. These films resonated with a British youth surrounded by remnants of the same global calamity thousands of miles away.
“As kids in the English countryside, we were always coming across these little dumps in the bushes with gas masks,” he says. “It was grim. And early on, Kurosawa was showing these gangsters and thieves and addicts passing ramshackle houses and downtrodden alleyways, these slum areas. Everything is shit and looks terrible after everything that happened in the war, but the emotional relationships are so powerful and the cinematography is brilliant.”
Summers’ own early work focuses heavily on his world-beating band and a lifestyle dominated by rock stardom. Touring almost constantly, Summers tells me he used to sneak out of his hotel at night wearing a skullcap and hoodie with a black camera hidden away so he wouldn't be recognized as either a famous popstar or a photographer. “I was that guy,” he says.
The best of them have nothing to do with life in a rock band, but visually reveal Summers’ musical personality, particularly his taste for abstraction and eccentricity. In “Nazarenos,” a nighttime procession of priests during Santa Semana, or Holy Week, in Seville, Spain, is ghostly and haunting, yet Summers’ focus on one priest’s eyes pushes it toward the menacing. Similarly, after a few minutes of looking at “Centaur,” the effect of the waterborne horse in Montserrat with its eyes fixed on the camera lens shifts from the comically absurd into the quietly terrifying.
After six years and five original albums, The Police disbanded in early 1984, less than a year after releasing their bestselling record, “Synchronicity,” which yielded one of the world’s most popular and heavily downloaded pop singles, “Every Breath You Take.” The success of The Police, however, gave Summers a platform, and he has put it to good use, recording 15 solo albums since “Synchronicity,” publishing five books of photographs, a collection of short stories and an autobiography, and contributing essays to a book of Gibson’s photographs, all while expanding his musical palette through ongoing collaborations with avant garde guitarist Robert Fripp, formerly of progressive rock icons King Crimson, and a team of Brazilian musicians. His photos have been exhibited in cities throughout Europe and North America, and in Brazil, Australia and China.
At an age when many musicians give up touring, Summers will hit the road in the U.S. later this month with a multimedia solo show called “The Cracked Lens + A Missing String,” which weaves together his photography, music and storytelling into a single performance, a project he hopes to bring to Japan. After years of being shushed by Police bandleader Sting, Summers is now free to chat all night with the audience about life behind his guitar and his camera. Based on our two-hour conversation in Tokyo, it’s something he relishes and does very well.
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