Stewart Copeland Transforms Studio Into Nature's Orchestra

Stewart Copeland's Los Angeles studio is not a place where you go to record a song in the conventional sense. It is a room where sound itself has become the subject of investigation—a space packed with instruments most musicians will never touch, arranged with the precision of a naturalist's field kit. The former drummer of The Police has spent years collecting percussion that ranges from the practical to the exotic: waterphones that sing like nothing in nature, gongs that seem to contain entire frequencies, tuned bells that ring with mathematical precision, and a trumpet from the 1920s that belonged to his father. When Bill Whitaker visited for 60 Minutes, Copeland walked him through this landscape of sound the way a guide might walk through a forest, pointing out what each instrument could do and why it mattered.

For decades, Copeland's name has been synonymous with the tight, propulsive drumming that defined The Police. But somewhere along the way, his curiosity moved beyond the four-four beat. He began asking a different question: What if the orchestra wasn't just the instruments humans had invented, but the sounds that already existed in the world? That question led him to British naturalist Martyn Stewart, and together they embarked on a project called "Wild Concerto"—an album that treats animal vocalizations and environmental soundscapes as legitimate members of an ensemble.

The collaboration is not a gimmick. Copeland and Stewart recorded hyenas, owls, and howler monkeys, capturing their calls and cries with the same care a classical composer might notate a violin part. These recordings became the foundation for compositions that layer orchestral percussion—the custom rigs Copeland has built, the bells and gongs—against the raw, unfiltered voices of the animal world. In the studio, Copeland demonstrated how these elements fit together, how a gong's resonance could answer a monkey's howl, how the architecture of human-made sound could create dialogue with nature's own music.

The project reflects something larger than one drummer's midlife experimentation. It suggests a shift in how contemporary musicians think about composition and collaboration. Copeland's studio has become a kind of laboratory, but not in the sterile sense. It is a working space where the boundaries between disciplines dissolve—where a naturalist and a rock musician can sit down and ask what happens when you treat the natural world not as background or inspiration, but as a creative partner.

Whitaker's tour revealed a man still driven by the same restlessness that made The Police's music so distinctive. Copeland showed him a guitar that Sting had given him, a tangible reminder of the band's history. But the real story was not nostalgia. It was the evidence all around the studio that Copeland had moved forward, that he had taken the technical mastery he developed as a drummer and redirected it toward questions that had nothing to do with rock and roll. The studio itself had become his instrument, and the world—the actual, living world of animals and weather and geological time—had become his orchestra.