Stewart Copeland Transforms Animal Sounds Into 'Wild Concerto' at Abbey Road

Stewart Copeland walked into Abbey Road Studios one morning with an unusual collaborator: not a singer or fellow musician, but a naturalist named Martyn Stewart and the sounds of nearly 100,000 animals. The drummer who had thundered through The Police's 75 million record sales had spent decades reinventing himself as a composer, scoring films and writing orchestral music. Now, at the world's most famous recording studio, he was about to do something stranger still—turn the raw calls of wolves, hyenas, and rare birds into a concerto.

The album, called "Wild Concerto," emerged from an unlikely partnership between two men who had spent their lives listening in different ways. Copeland had learned rhythm from his father's jazz records and his mother's Stravinsky, developing an ear that could hear percussion in anything. Stewart had been recording the natural world since he was eleven years old, escaping to the Bluebell Woods near his home in England with a tape recorder. Over six decades, he had built an archive of extraordinary scope—30,000 hours of field recordings that captured the voices of creatures across the planet. Some of those voices no longer exist.

When Copeland faced the task of selecting which animals would become the stars of his composition, he waded through thousands of hours of material. A screaming piha bird became a natural choice; its piercing call translated into orchestral arrangements with an almost operatic intensity. Arctic wolves provided another foundation—their howls, played back through musicians' headsets in the studio, became the basis for trombone lines that seemed to echo the animals' own emotional register. Copeland's method was simple but profound: he let the animals themselves dictate which instruments would accompany them. A hyena's varied vocabulary—loving sounds, aggressive sounds, and the distinctive laugh—earned its own track on the album.

But the project carried weight beyond its artistic ambition. Martyn Stewart was living with cancer when he decided to share his life's work with Copeland. His niece, who works at the BBC, had urged him to preserve the archive, to ensure that what he had spent sixty years documenting would not disappear with him. Stewart's collection had become something else entirely: a record of loss. He held the last known recording of the golden Panamanian frog, a species now extinct. The northern white rhino existed in his archive only as sound. When he returned to places he had monitored for twenty years, the changes were unmistakable. The decline was accelerating, not slowing.

Stewart spoke of his work as a kind of stethoscope pressed against the planet itself. The health of a stream could be read in the dipper's call; the condition of a marsh in the frog's chorus; the state of the entire world in the birds' songs. He had risked his life to capture some of these recordings—a crocodile had once swallowed one of his microphones. Now, facing his own mortality and the extinction crisis unfolding around him, he believed that beauty might be the only tool left. If people could fall in love with the sound of a screaming piha or a marbled frogmouth, perhaps they might fight to keep those creatures alive.

Copeland, for his part, had become a convert. The man who once wielded drumsticks like weapons now spoke of the orchestra's beauty with genuine reverence. He hoped "Wild Concerto" would reach people who would never otherwise listen to field recordings, who might walk past a nature documentary without pausing. The album was meant to be a tribute, a human-made elegy to the orchestra that had been singing long before humans learned to compose. It was also, whether Copeland fully acknowledged it or not, a race against time—an attempt to immortalize voices that were disappearing faster than anyone could document them.