The Police are featured on the cover and five inside pages of the Daily Telegraph magazine, which comes with the Saturday July 14 edition of the newspaper...

"OK, everybody: pilates on the lawn at 8am tomorrow,' Sting says as he heads up the stone steps of his 20-room Tuscan mansion to bed.

It's 11pm. Limping slightly, drummer Stewart Copeland, who at 54 is a year younger than Sting, and guitarist Andy Summers, sipping from a mug of camomile tea, follow soon afterwards.

Their work attire - T-shirts, vests, tracksuits - indicates the concentrated, physical approach to their daily rehearsal schedule for the Police's reunion tour, which includes exercise sessions and nutritious meals.

Their daily morning fitness regime, overseen by a teacher flown in from London with an armoury of machinery, will ensure that they are at their physical peak, and hopefully heal a back ailment of Copeland's, problematical for a drummer.

Sting himself instructs his colleagues in daily ashtanga yoga sessions. By late evening, when the final studio rehearsal ends, all three band members are exhausted.

It is 23 years since the Police, then the world's number-one band, split up. The group that Stewart Copeland formed in 1977 using the British punk explosion ('a flag of convenience,' Sting later admitted) as a springboard, had seemed unlikely contenders for success.

But the combination of bass-player and former English teacher Sting's intuitive songwriting and high, keening vocals, Summers's skilful guitar work, and Copeland's polyrhythmic drumming proved irresistible.

The band's synthesis of hypnotic reggae rhythms with traditional pop and rock'n'roll (they were one of the first mainstream white bands to do so) unleashed a string of hits. After their classic song Roxanne broke through in 1978 in the USA, their album Outlandos d'Amour entered the British charts, where it was to remain for the next 96 weeks..."

For the rest of the interview visit www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/.

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