Stewart Copeland – “Have I Said Too Much?”
Auckland, Bruce Mason Centre, 21st Jan 2026
Reviewed by Jeremy Elwood; photos by Stella Gardiner
Over Stewart Copeland’s 50-plus year music career, he’s won seven Grammy awards, composed dozens of film scores, traversed the globe and been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Oh, and for a brief moment in the late 1970’s and 80’s, he managed to find time to be in a little three-piece rock band that he founded, called The Police.
That intro may sound a bit tongue in cheek, but Copeland’s show last night ran along a similar vein, covering stories from his truly fascinating life and career without diving too deeply into the one decade of it that, in all likelihood, the majority of his audience most wanted to hear about.
Takapuna’s Bruce Mason Centre is barely half full, I’m sure partly thanks to the horrendous weather, but also due to the nature of this show. Paying to hear an artist talk about doing what they’re famous for, rather than actually doing it, is a relatively rare event in New Zealand outside of Arts and Writers festivals. But it doesn’t seem to phase Copeland at all, as he bounds onto the stage to welcome us all to a night of “Talk and Roll.” Sidling on behind him, without fanfare, is Australian radio host Sarah Tout, our interlocuter for the evening.
In the first half, at least, she’s surplus to requirements. The few questions she throws in are clearly prompts, guiding Copeland into a series of stories about his upbringing, his musical origins, his time as a tour manager and, finally, his break as the drummer in prog-rock band Curved Air, which led to a chance encounter with a singer and bass player called Sting.
It’s all interesting stuff, particularly the tales of his formative years in the centre of the Cold War – his father was a CIA operative in Lebanon, and a friend of Kim Philby. And he tells it enthusiastically, with a delivery eerily akin to Eliott Gould doing an open mic set, jumping up and down from an unfortunately low-slung chair that makes him look like the “blown away guy” in the famous 1980’s Maxell cassette tape ad, right down to the standing lamp beside him.
If you’ve just had to google everything in that last paragraph, that’s entirely by design –Copeland’s stories assume a level of familiarity from his audience, both with his own work and the era he describes.
The first act takes us up to the final piece of The Police puzzle, when Andy Summers joins on guitar, and during the interval the audience are invited to put their own questions into a drum left onstage – the closest we’re going to get to hearing anything from Copeland’s instrument.
Act two begins with a rapid-fire Q and A from Sarah Tout, which finally gives her something to do, and significantly improves the onstage dynamic. When Copeland actually has to stop and consider an answer, much of his slightly forced performance style gives way to a more open approach. But soon enough, we’re back into the stories, picking up in the dying days of The Police, as the band struggle through their final two albums…wait, what?
There’s an entire decade missing here, and it’s an important one. There’s nothing about the heyday of the band, no tour stories, no backstage revelations. It’s all dismissed with a handwave, assuming again that everyone knows the story already. More than once, he throws out the phrase “…and the rest was history” – but that’s the point: the fractiousness and implosion of The Police has taken on mythical, rather than fact-based historical, proportions. We do get a better look behind the curtain later, when he gets to their 2007 reunion tour, and the stories of how fraught that rehearsal period became, in contrast to the cathartic live shows, are a highlight of the night. When he comes to the conclusion that his issues with Sting were genuinely “artistic differences”, I believe him, but if you went in expecting “Motley Crue – The Dirt” live on stage, you’d be leaving disappointed. Given that the title of the show is “Have I Said Too Much”, the answer is a resounding “No”.
The format itself leaves a lot to be desired. It’s clearly a one-man show, with the interlocuter rendered irrelevant for long stretches as he jumps from one reminiscence to another. And for a show by a musician, talking about music, there’s a strange and total absence of audio. It’s perhaps obvious why there are no clips of The Police – the band are currently embroiled in a potentially precedent-setting legal battle over the application of arranger’s rights to digital streaming. But as he covers his post-Police career as a film and then opera composer, it would have been great to hear examples of his work, rather than just see the PowerPoint images play out in silence.
Everything ends on a series of “audience questions” – (several genuine ones, and a few obvious plants – a forgivable trick being used by plenty of other acts these days) – which again help Copeland drop the raconteur schtick a little and show his more conversational side.
As we exit into the damp, humid Auckland night, I’m left with three clear impressions. Stewart Copeland is a man who cherishes being in full control, which leads to a suspicion that despite how it’s played out in the press, perhaps the breakdown of The Police wasn’t entirely about ego and greed at all.
Secondly, he’s put all of that behind him. The Police were just one step on his journey, albeit the one that made so many subsequent steps possible. But Copeland is just as proud of everything he’s done since, if not more so.
And as a result, he’s happy where he is. He’s perfectly content to bring this slightly bewildering show to New Zealand, and spend nearly three hours regaling an undersized Auckland crowd with the stories he wants to tell, the way he wants them told, and not a lot more. And you can’t begrudge him that.