For 20 years there was little synchronicity among the members of The Police, so when the band decided to launch a reunion tour in May 2007, no one expected it would carry on for two summers and nearly 150 shows.

One might even conclude from the duration that they must be enjoying themselves.

Stewart Copeland will tell you otherwise.

"Oh, it's been a soup of utter misery," the drummer says via telephone. "We've been at each other's throats. We've had to put up with the shouting and yelling at us all the time, and people are throwing all this money at us, and we have too many roadies and, our dressing rooms, it's like 'What are you going to do with all this space, god [darn it]?!' And the private jet's driving me nuts. Actually, Sting's used to all this. Andy and I can't get accustomed to these five-star hotels."

Copeland can look back now and realize he could have spent the past 25 years getting used to the five-star hotels.

Instead, The Police called it a day in 1984, at the height of its popularity, after selling more than 8 million copies of "Synchronicity." In the aftermath, Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers got to watch Sting become king of the soccer-mom set, a movie star and some tantric-sex god, to boot. They also watched their contemporaries, U2, get along just fine through a world-beating three-decade career.

But with the arrival of the band's 30th anniversary and Sting's numbers declining in the sheds, it only made sense for The Police to patch things up and launch the reunion tour that every band with enough living, breathing members eventually does -- even the Sex Pistols.

For The Police, it was a better idea than most. The band grossed $171 million in 2007, making it the top-selling tour of the year in both revenue and tickets sold. When 2008 is tallied up, The Police should be right up there again.

But will The Police exist past August? It remains to be seen.

At first sight

Copeland clearly remembers the first time he laid eyes and ears on Gordon Sumner, the man who would be Sting.

Copeland, son of a CIA agent, had been in a progressive rock band in the mid-'70s called Curved Air and was looking to respond to the punk scene that was exploding around him.

"A local journalist took me to see his favorite band," Copeland says, "and it was Sting's band, Last Exit, and I swear to God, there was a golden ray of sunshine coming down from the heavens to alight his golden brow, and his golden voice shone out. And it was night, by the way, so that ray of sunshine was very weird ... But it was obvious. You just look at that guy and you say, 'I gotta get that guy, and we're going to go conquer the world.' "

The Police formed as a quartet in July 1977, with Summers from The Soft Machine and co-guitarist Henry Padovani, who quickly became the odd man out. Fusing elements of punk, pop and reggae, The Police was an accomplished trio more focused on groove than guitar heroics. The band recorded its first album, "Outlandos d'Amour," on the cheap with no record contract. Copeland's brother, Miles, who founded I.R.S. Records, then got them a deal with A&M Records in 1978, and the quirky "Roxanne," still the band's signature song, became a hit in April 1979.

Mere weeks before that, on March 20, 1979, the band played Pittsburgh, at the late Decade in Oakland, as part of its first U.S. tour.

"They only had about eight songs, and I seem to remember they repeated them," says Karl Mullen, who was in the Pittsburgh band Carsickness. "When 'Roxanne' came out I put it in the jukebox at the Dirty O [where I had worked]. It sounded great at the time. I liked the reggae influence and the band for about a minute ... but thought the dyed blond hair was a fake pose."

"They did 'Roxanne' twice as the second song and as the encore," says Sam Matthews, who was in the local punk band The Whereabouts. "Sting was wearing the jumpsuit and catching air as he jumped, but he couldn't jump high, as the ceiling [parachute] at the Decade was so low. Copeland was amazing, one of the best drummers I ever saw at that close of a range. They rocked harder than the record. It was obvious they were 'musicians' and not punks who had just picked up their instruments."

Copeland has a vague memory of the place -- a better memory of the tour. "I remember the clubs," he says, "but I don't remember the arenas, even though the clubs are longer ago. Each club is different. In an arena, you don't meet anybody. We used to joke that by the time you start playing arenas, that's when the sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll tapered off, 'cause for girls to get backstage they had to go through the entire road crew. I'm JOKING!"

Anyway, upon that debut, Rolling Stone called The Police "part-time members of the New Wave" and said that "while the record had a convincing unity and drive ... It's on the emotional level that it all seems somewhat hollow. Posing as a punk, Sting, as both singer and songwriter, can't resist turning everything into an art-rock game. He's so archly superior to the material that he fails to invest it with much feeling."

He wasn't Johnny Rotten or Joe Strummer, but like Bono, he was picture-perfect for the new era of MTV. And with the bleached hair, done for a Wrigley's TV commercial, it was a band you couldn't miss. The Police had a No. 1 hit in the UK with "Message in a Bottle" from the second album, "Reggatta de Blanc," and then the third album, "Zenyatta Mondatta," delivered the Lolita-fueled "Don't Stand So Close to Me" and the tongue-tied love song "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da."

The Police expanded the color palette with keyboard and saxophone on "Ghost in the Machine," inspired by the sci-fi Arthur Koestler novel, and featuring the hits "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" and "Spirits in the Material World." The swan song, "Synchronicity," with The Police's only No. 1 U.S. hit, "Every Breath You Take," moved even further from the band's earlier primitive material toward a more textured, arena-pop-rock sound.

"I saw the evolution as a positive trend," Copeland says of the later albums. "We got better, some people like primitive, some people like slick. Like R.E,M., those guys still can't play their guitars, after [expletive] 30 years. C'mon, guys, you can't pretend to be teenagers who can't play their instruments FOREVER. It's like they refuse to grow up as musicians. Bless them."

By 1984, The Police was one of the world's biggest bands. The band had nine Top 40 hits, a few Grammys and was selling out stadiums. But the band also was splitting apart. Although there was never a formal breakup, Sting ventured back into his jazzier roots in 1985 with "The Dream of the Blue Turtles," the start of a superstar solo career, and the recording sessions for a follow-up to "Synchronicity" were abandoned in July 1986.

Billboard Magazine Canadian bureau chief Larry LeBlanc told a Canadian journalist that during a reunion gig in Chicago for an Amnesty International benefit in June 1986, "I thought Sting was going to get a drumstick in the back of the head. There was no communication between them, and it was ferocious watching them play. You could feel the anger in the music. And it was brilliant."

Summers went on to do film scores (including "Down and Out in Beverly Hills") and solo albums. Copeland scored soundtracks for films such as "Wall Street" and "Rumble Fish" and played in the band Oysterhead, while fathering seven children. He pursued his interest in The Police with the 2006 documentary "Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out."

All reports from Sting were that a reunion was pretty much out of the question.

The reunion

The Police first got back together for the band's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. But that was just for the sake of ceremony, and reunion rumors were all denied.

Then, a new buzz started in late 2006, just before The Police reappeared to open the Grammy Awards with a slooooowed-down version of "Roxanne."

"There are friends of mine who say 'Roxanne' was brilliant, and then we screwed it up. I disagree," Copeland says.

It certainly didn't scare people away from the tour that finds The Police recapturing the early energy on some songs and displaying the members' maturity (Summers is 65, Copeland and Sting are 56) on others.

"The songs Sting wrote are very sophisticated and more sophisticated than even he knew," Copeland says. "Now that we're a lot more experienced musicians, there's a weird kind of way where we play them more relevantly. We were a punk band and we were trying to burn down the world when we were 25, but the songs Sting actually wrote back then were pretty serious. And, uh, almost too serious for a three-piece punk rock band, but now we've almost grown up and matured to the point where we play the songs better now."

The natural progression for a reunited band -- whether it's The Eagles or Smashing Pumpkins -- is the eventual appearance of the comeback album.

Nothing can be ruled out, but it might not be in the works for The Police. Why?

"What it really is, is we're good for each other, like cod liver oil," Copeland says. "But we are spoiled brats, and we enjoy the life without each other. The music we make together is very powerful, based on music we made in the past. The idea of making new music is just too much, for a couple reasons: ... we appreciate each other, but we don't get each other musically. We totally get along socially, but we realize the effect that Sting has on me and I have on him, it's not comfortable, but it works."

Among the other reasons is one that will have bands sweating in a van in the middle of America right now rolling their eyes.

"The Police has become this huge monster. And we're proud of this enormous monster we've created. But it owns us. The Police doesn't belong to Sting, Andy and me anymore -- we belong to The Police. In terms of the entity that is The Police, the band, the 200 roadies, the equipment, the plane, the trucks, all those people, we need to show up on stage for two hours a day to sustain this huge machine. I screw up, I trip, I stub my toe, break my hand, Sting gets a cold, something like that, [screws] it all up. Our bodies don't even belong to us anymore -- we're wrapped in bubble wrap, we're surrounded by people who make sure we're going to get to that stage, fully equipped to play that show, and it's my duty to deliver up this body of mine, my knees, my elbows, my nose, I have to deliver that [stuff] up, ready to play. And it's kind of a responsibility.

"The music doesn't even belong to us anymore, it belongs to the people in whose lives its woven. Everyone grew up to these songs, they got married, they got divorced, they got fired, they got 'whatever' with this music as a soundtrack, and they want to hear it the way they want to hear it."

Which leads to a third thing -- that being the performance of music frozen in time.

"The Police is a celebration of something that's already there, sort of like when you go to see a Mozart in concert. You already know the music, you just want to see it performed. We're performing something that's already there and has a huge dramatic impact on the night, but we're creative artists, we have to do something new -- not necessarily with each other. We've all got to go off and live our lives. I want to be able to stub my toe if I want to, damn it. I want to be able to stay up late and have a hangover in the morning if I want to."

And so the three men woefully ensnared in this five-star Police machine plan to grind it to a halt with a final show Aug. 7 in New York, and then go their separate ways.

But in one of Copeland's final comments, there is a cliffhanger .

"What we do understand," he says, "is that whatever we do with each other seems to work. But we're all getting kind of nervous now, 'cause on the last leg of the tour, we're looking at each other every day and saying, 'What part of this sucks?' And none of us can seem to think of anything, really."