Andy Grieve‘s Can’t Stand Losing You (3.20 NY, 4.3 LA), a doc about the nine-year ride of The Police from the perspective of guitarist Andy Summers (and based on Summers’ “One Train Later: A Memoir“), has been a long time coming. The film’s website says it “brings together past and present as the Police members reunite, two decades [after breaking up], for a global reunion tour in 2007-’08.” (Sting formally quit The Police in 1986 but the group had been on hiatus starting sometime in ’84.) So the bulk of it was apparently shot seven or eight years ago. Plus it was first screened at DOC NYC in November 2012. Why did it take almost two and half years to open this film commercially? There’s a hint why in John DeFore‘s 11.12.12 Hollywood Reporter review: “Of interest to Police fans but hardly a rock-doc for the ages, it’s best suited to small screens.”

My most profound Police moment happened on the evening of December 8, 1980, in a small pub in the Stockwell section of London. Never a hardcore audiophile and even less so due to being poor, I was a little late in getting into their music. I had just bought a cassette tape of Zenyatta Mondatta maybe a month or so earlier but I hadn’t listened to it that much. I was edging my way in. Anyway there I was in London to do an interview with Peter O’Toole (hot at the moment off his career-reviving performance in The Stunt Man) for GQ. I was crashing with a couple of ladies I knew through a journalist friend, and I was sitting at a table and drinking a pint and feeling great about being in England for the first time alone, and then somebody got up and played “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” on the jukebox. And all of a sudden I heard that song for the first time. The juke was putting out super-thrompy bass tones and it just sounded perfect, and from that moment on I was a Police fan. I also got into Bow Wow Wow during that visit.

The next morning I awoke around 7 am to news on the radio that John Lennon had been shot and killed only a few hours earlier in New York City.