Andy Summers of the Police

Andy Summers has enthralled music fans with his unique talent since entering the music scene in the late 1960s. Since picking up a guitar at the age of thirteen, Andy has made his mark as an essential component of The Police, as a solo artist, and as a writer, photographer, composer, and producer.

With The Police Andy is a driving source of energy and color behind Sting’s dynamic vocals, his guitar playing a distinctive and original signature of The Police sound.

During his Police years, Andy’s guitar was heard and imitated worldwide making an indelible impression on guitar and guitarists everywhere. Apart from the band’s multi-million selling records Andy received two Grammys for Best Rock Instrumental Performance and was also voted the number one guitarist for five years by Guitar Player Magazine, and then entered the Guitar Player Hall of Fame. 

Andy, Sting, and Stewart Copeland — The Police — were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003.

Andy Summers Photography & Writing

Despite the demands of his music career Andy has also established himself as a writer and photographer with a number of books, essays and several photography collections. His works include Throb, Light Strings, Desirer Walks the Street, I’ll Be Watching You: Inside the Police, and A Certain Strangeness. Along with these published editions, Andy has held around fifty exhibitions across the world. In 2019 the Pavilion Populaire Montpellier France staged a three-month retrospective A Certain Strangeness which broke all attendance records and was later transferred to the Bonnafanten Museum Maastricht in The Netherlands for a further six months.

Andy then completed this run with his multi-media solo concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art In New York June 2019.

Andy’s autobiography, One Train Later, voted number one music book in the UK 2006, has been made into a documentary film and was released in the summer of 2015 to glowing reviews. Andy continues to tour, write, photograph and has never stopped being a guitarist. 

One of the greatest guitar players of our generation, fans of Andy Summers know that this prolific artist will continue generating groundbreaking work for years to come.

On this site, you can explore Andy Summers photography by viewing online image galleries which include pictures from Throb, I’ll Be Watching You, and Desirer Walks the Streets. You can also look at Andy’s retrospective shows  “ A Certain Strangeness in Europe last year

Andy Summers Music

After the break-up of the Police in 1984, leaving a legacy as the number one band in the world for several years and one of the biggest selling bands of all time, Andy moved into his own career of nonstop creative output that has embraced many solo recordings, books, photo exhibitions, tours, film and composing. To date he has recorded fourteen solo albums:

 XYZ (1986), Mysterious Barricades (1988), The Golden Wire (1989), Charming Snakes (1990), World Gone Strange (1991), Synaethesia (1996), The Last Dance of Mr. X (1997), A Windham Hill Retrospective (1998), Green Chimneys (1999), Peggy’s Blue Skylight (2000), Earth + Sky (2004), The X Tracks (2005), Metal Dog (2015), Triboluminescence (2017) and Harmonics of the Night (2021).

Andy has also collaborated and recorded with a number of other artists, including:

Robert Fripp: I Advance Masked, (1982) and Bewitched (1984).

John Etheridge: Invisible Threads (1994).

Victor Biglione: Strings Of Desire (1998) and Splendid Brazil (2004).

Ben Verdery: First You Build a Cloud (2007).

Fernanda Takai: Fundamental  (2012).

Rob Giles: as Circa Zero Circus Hero (2015)