“It was a sort of weird head trip that I went through”: Andy Summers explains how he re-gained interest in guitar after The Police split

Andy Summers has admitted he lost interest in guitar after The Police broke up, but also explained how he later rekindled his passion for the instrument.

Summers was speaking to Adam Levy in an interview where he began by saying that he never grew tired of tinkering around with music on his guitar.

• READ MORE: “We always knew that we didn’t want to sound like anybody else”: Andy Summers on The Police

“I’ve never gotten tired of it. I enjoy it. I like playing guitars. I mean, I can’t even imagine life without it, because it’s been part of me since I was a kid. Yeah, okay, life is terrible, but you’ve still got the guitar, so whatever.

“It’s sort of a central fact of your existence because you come back to it. I never got bored with it.”

However, Summers corrected himself and explain that he did go through a fallow period when The Police disbanded in 1986. He recalled that he went through a phase of going through the motions with playing guitar without putting in any dedicated time to working on his craft.

“Maybe, oddly, I say that — I’m just catching myself — I think right after The Police, I sort of went through a weird period — now I’m thinking about it — where I didn’t want to play it much anymore.

“I would do shows, I made records, but I barely picked up the guitar. It was a sort of weird head trip that I went through.”

He went on to reveal that going out on tour with his American colleague & jazz virtuoso Larry Coryell helped to break his inertia.

” Larry is a very enthusiastic person and actually, he was a catalyst — he brought me back to it. And I’ve, you know, played and toured with Larry, I started playing all the time again, and it’s never gone away again.”