WE’RE NOT WORTHY
WHERE IS THY STING?
Branford Marsalis on sax with Sting since 1985.
It’s all here, in three albums, says James McNair.
Palma Kolansky
TODAY STING IS ENSCONCED AT THE LAKE House, the Elizabethan manor house in Wiltshire whose bucolic surroundings inspired his song Fields Of Gold. This is where he’s spent most of the pandemic (“Not a bad place to do a lockdown,” he says cheerfully) and recorded his latest album, The Bridge. He was touring The Last Ship, his stage musical about the shipyards that loomed over his childhood, when the world shut down, and he returned home to a blank slate.
”There’s a lot of people who sing and write songs, but they don’t have the natural musical instinct that Sting has. And that’s as true now as it was 40 years ago. He just did this Vegas show, and out of 20 songs, 18 were hits he’d written! I think I’ve been lucky to play with one of the best in the business.”
ULTIMATE POLICE!
“I didn’t have an agenda,” he says, settling down in front of a huge model sailing ship and an oil painting (ships again). “I just wanted to write songs. But having written them, I was looking for connective tissue and realised that all the songs are about people in some kind of transition. I think we’re all looking for some kind of bridge to the future. I certainly am.”
The Police Ghost In The Machine
Sting has been building bridges to unexpected destinations for a long time. The Bridge is only his second album of new pop songs in the two decades since 2003’s Sacred Love, during which he’s released The Last Ship; a lute-powered tribute to early music maestro John Dowland; a Christmas record of hymns, folk songs and madrigals; a team-up with Shaggy; and two collections of old hits with new arrangements. However far he wanders from pop’s main drag, this gold-plated catalogue (recently sold to Universal Music for an estimated $300m) means that he can always fill a room.
★★★★
WE’RE NOT WORTHY
Branford Marsalis on sax with Sting since 1985.
”There’s a lot of people who sing and write songs, but they don’t have the natural musical instinct that Sting has. And that’s as true now as it was 40 years ago. He just did this Vegas show, and out of 20 songs, 18 were hits he’d written! I think I’ve been lucky to play with one of the best in the business.”
(A&M, 1981)
And what unusual songs they are. The former Gordon Sumner was 25 when he formed The Police with drummer Stewart Copeland in 1977, with guitarist Andy Summers close behind. They rode the punk wave without subscribing to its orthodoxies (too old, too virtuosic) and scored global hits with curious genre-hopping songs about stalkers and sex workers, astronauts and Armalites. Steered by Copeland’s gung-ho older brother Miles, they promptly became the biggest band in the world and went out on top in 1986.
Named for Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book on philosophical psychology and part-hatched at Air Studios, Montserrat, Ghost… leavened greater lyrical sophistication with sunny Caribbean horns, steel drums and playful keys. These Sting-driven evolutions betrayed solo ambitions, but his plum pop writing was still beautifully served by Messrs Summers and Copeland on Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, a joyous palette cleanser after stringent, politicised opener Spirits In The Material World.
Sting segued smoothly into an even more unpredictable solo career. A reggae song about Quentin Crisp? Why not? An orchestral plea for Cold War détente? Oh yes. A Hollywood power ballad with Br yan Adams and Rod Stewart? OK, forget that one. Between his Dowland album and his Christmas record, Sting finally agreed to reunite The Police for what became the highest-grossing tour of 2007. He’s had his cake and eaten it, too. “I get bored easily,” he says. “For me, the essence of music is surprise. When I listen to music, if I’m not surprised within eight bars I move on. Maybe 16.”
SOUL-BARING SOLO!
Sting is well aware that he rubs some people the wrong way. He’s too pretentious, they say, with his ostentatious allusions to literature and histor y. And he’s a hypocrite, they add: the rainforest activist who is also a jet-set celebrity. Perhaps it’s partly because he seems to be enjoying himself too much. He’s happily married to film producer Trudie Styler, has raised six children (including actor Mickey and singer Eliot), and always looks about 15 years younger than he is. Last October, he celebrated his 70th birthday with a concert at the Parthenon in Athens. “We were looking for a venue that was older than me,” he says with a r ustling chuckle.