Best known as the drummer for The Police, Stewart Copeland has enjoyed a prolific personal career, notably as a film composer. Born in Alexandria (Virginia, USA) on July 16, 1952, he grew up in Beirut (Lebanon), where he began taking drumming lessons at the age of twelve. He studied in London and then California, and played in the progressive rock band Curved Air, before taking part with Sting and Henri Padovani in the creation of The Police, whose manager was none other than his elder brother Miles Copeland III, founder of the I.R.S. Records label. From their punk beginnings, The Police became the most popular band of the 1980s, with four No. 1 albums and numerous hits, including five No. 1s, until they broke up in 1986. Renowned for his virtuoso playing, the drummer, who took the pseudonym Klark Kent for an album in 1978 and contributed to the arrangements of several The Police tracks, established himself as a composer of music for the screen. His film scores include Rumble Fish (1983), Wall Steet (1986), Rapa Nui (1994), The Leopard Son (1996) and Simpático (1999), as well as several TV series, video games and ballets. In 1985, The Rhytmatist album illustrates a documentary on African music, in which he plays. He collaborated with groups and artists such as Strontium 90, Mike Rutherford, Peter Gabriel, Animal Logic, Oysterhead and Gizmodrome, and created the orchestral musical Orchestralii (2005), before The Police's 2007 reunion tour and the award of the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. In 2021, the album Divine Tides saw him collaborate with composer Ricky Kej and win two Grammy Awards. Stewart Copeland then composed the opera Electric Saint, based on the life of Nikola Tesla, and went back on tour to perform the re-orchestrated hits of his former band, resulting in the album Police Deranged for Orchestra (2023), which debuted at No. 3 in the Billboard classical music charts. He then embarked on an ambitious project linked to his travels and his taste for ethnic music for the album Wild Concerto (2025), collecting sounds of nature captured in different parts of the world and combining them with classical orchestral writing.
