The story of Sting

A milkman's son from Wallsend

Sting was born Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner on the second of October 1951, in a hospital in Wallsend, on the River Tyne in the north east of England. He was the eldest of four children. His mother Audrey was a hairdresser and his father Ernest was a milkman who had once worked as a fitter at an engineering works. The family lived so close to the Swan Hunter shipyard that it sat at the end of their street, and the ships being built there were big enough to block out the sun. Young Gordon helped his father on the milk round. One day the Queen Mother drove past in a Rolls Royce and waved at him, and he decided then that he wanted a bigger life than the shipyard.[1] [2] [3]

Music came early. At home there was an old Spanish guitar, left behind by someone who had emigrated, and by the age of ten he was obsessed with it. That same year, messing about at the Wallsend swimming baths, he heard the Beatles singing Love Me Do on an attendant's transistor radio. He later said the Beatles did not make him a musician, because he was always going to be one, but they did make him a composer. He passed the eleven plus, one of only four from his school, and went to St Cuthbert's, a Catholic grammar school in Newcastle. He went to the Club A'Gogo to see Cream and Manfred Mann, and taught himself bass by speeding records up so the bass lines came through clearly.[1] [2] [3]

Home was not always a happy place. His parents' marriage was unhappy, and his mother eventually left with one of his father's workmates. As the eldest, Gordon felt he had to shield his younger brother and sisters from what he knew, and he later called himself the keeper of secrets. He described himself at seven as detached, lonely and driven, and said he had hardly changed since. He was a fast runner who sprinted for his county, but he left school in 1969 with modest grades. He lasted one term at the University of Warwick, then worked as a bus conductor, a building labourer and a clerk in the tax office.[1] [2] [3]

He trained as a teacher at a college in Newcastle, qualified in 1973, and was offered a job by a nun who had taught his sister. For two years he taught at St Paul's First School in Cramlington. By night he played jazz, with the Phoenix Jazzmen, the Newcastle Big Band and a fusion group called Last Exit, named after a Hubert Selby novel. His nickname came from a black and yellow striped jumper that made him look like a wasp, and it stuck so firmly that he later said you could shout Gordon in the street and he would just step aside. He also busked, backed a stripper and played in theatre pits. Several Last Exit tunes later turned into Police songs.[1] [2] [3]

In Newcastle he met the Northern Irish actress Frances Tomelty, who was playing the Virgin Mary in a rock musical called Rock Nativity while he played in the band. They married on the first of May 1976, and their son Joe was born that November. Last Exit had caught the eye of Richard Branson's publishing company, but no record label could work out how to sell them. In early 1977 the band moved to London, and Sting was soon the only one who stayed. He, Frances and the baby slept on floors and in squats while he drew the dole, and he later said he felt depressed and dehumanised. Then punk arrived, and a drummer called Stewart Copeland came calling.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Police years in brief

In January 1977 Sting joined Stewart Copeland and the Corsican guitarist Henry Padovani to form the Police. That summer a side project called Strontium 90, put together by the former Gong bassist Mike Howlett, brought Sting and Copeland together with the guitarist Andy Summers, who soon replaced Padovani. Copeland's older brother Miles heard Roxanne at the end of a session, won them a deal with A and M Records on the strength of it, and became their manager. Between 1978 and 1983 the trio made five studio albums, won six Grammys, and moved from punk energy to a lean mix of reggae rhythm and pop. Sting was the singer, the bass player and the main songwriter.[1] [2] [3]

Fame came fast, and Sting spread himself wide. In 1979 he played the Ace Face, the king of the mods, in the film Quadrophenia. In 1980 he became a tax exile in Galway, and that summer he wrote Demolition Man while staying at Peter O'Toole's house in Connemara. Grace Jones recorded it before the Police did. In September 1981 he gave his first solo performances at the Amnesty International benefit The Secret Policeman's Other Ball, and he said that before it he had not known about torture in the world. He starred as a sinister drifter in Brimstone and Treacle in 1982, with a solo hit, Spread a Little Happiness, and played the villain Feyd Rautha in David Lynch's Dune in 1984.[1] [2] [3]

His private life was also in upheaval. Sting, Frances and baby Joe lived in a basement flat in Bayswater, and two doors down lived another young actress, Trudie Styler. She later said she first noticed him in the summer of 1977 because he had green hair. Trudie and Frances became close friends, and by 1981 Trudie and Sting had begun an affair. After their daughter Kate was born in April 1982, Sting separated from Frances, and the divorce followed in 1984. Trudie became pregnant in 1983 and went on the road with the Police. When Sting called her his mistress at a press conference, her acting work dried up. He later called his first marriage the only thing he ever failed at.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1983 the Police released Synchronicity. Its biggest song, Every Breath You Take, began at Ian Fleming's writing desk in Jamaica, where Sting had retreated from the press. He said he woke in the night with the key line and finished it in half an hour, only later realising how sinister it was. It spent eight weeks at number one in America. The sessions were miserable, with verbal and physical fights, and on the tour Copeland broke one of Sting's ribs. On the eighteenth of August 1983 they played to seventy thousand people at Shea Stadium, and Sting said that night felt like climbing Everest. He decided there was nowhere higher to go.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The tour ended in March 1984 and the Police went quiet without ever announcing a split. They reunited in June 1986 for the last three shows of Amnesty's Conspiracy of Hope tour, then handed their instruments to U2 on stage. A month later they tried to make a new album, but the night before the sessions Copeland broke his collarbone falling from a horse. All that came out was a remake called Don't Stand So Close to Me 86. Summers later wrote that Sting clearly had no intention of writing new Police songs. Sting told Mojo in 2022 that he was tired of having to tell bandmates their songs were not good enough, and said no grown man can really be in a band.[1] [2] [3]

Going solo with the Blue Turtles

Sting's first attempt at a solo record went in a very different direction. He began working with a synth pop production team called Torch Song, which included William Orbit, but he dropped the electronic funk sound and went looking for jazz. In January 1985 he held auditions in New York and hired a band of young American jazz players, the saxophonist Branford Marsalis, the pianist Kenny Kirkland, the drummer Omar Hakim and the bassist Darryl Jones. Branford's brother Wynton, the trumpeter, made no secret of his scorn when Kirkland and Branford left his band to play pop. After a week of rehearsal they played three surprise shows at the Ritz in New York, then spent seven weeks recording at Eddy Grant's studio in Barbados.[1] [2] [3]

The Dream of the Blue Turtles, named after a dream Sting had, came out on the seventeenth of June 1985. It reached number two in America and number three in Britain. The opening single, If You Love Somebody Set Them Free, reached number three in the States, and Sting said he wrote it as the antidote to the possessive Every Breath You Take. Russians borrowed a theme from Prokofiev and grew out of late nights watching Soviet children's television, via a satellite signal that an inventor friend was secretly pulling in at Columbia University. We Work the Black Seam was about the miners' strike, and Moon Over Bourbon Street, inspired by Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, had Sting on double bass.[1] [2] [3]

It was a busy year beyond the album. In November 1984 Sting had sung on Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas. Mark Knopfler then asked him to sing the MTV slogan on Dire Straits' Money for Nothing, set to the melody of Don't Stand So Close to Me, which is why Sting shares the writing credit. Knopfler remembered Sting walking into the studio and asking what was wrong, because nobody was fighting. In July 1985 Sting played Police songs at Live Aid at Wembley, joined Dire Straits and sang duets with Phil Collins. He even turned up on a Miles Davis album, speaking French in the role of a police officer.[1] [2]

The director Michael Apted filmed the new band as it came together. His documentary Bring On the Night follows nine days of rehearsals at a French chateau outside Paris and the first concert at the Theatre Mogador. It ends with Trudie giving birth to their son Jake. Sting said he resisted filming the birth at first, then saw a link between a band being born and a baby. The film won a Grammy. Critics were split on the album. Some praised the playing, while rock and jazz purists disliked the mix, and one reviewer thought the pairing flattered Sting's more exotic poses. It still went triple platinum within a year and earned a nomination for album of the year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Grief, causes and the rainforest

The late eighties brought loss. Sting's mother Audrey died of cancer in 1986, and his father Ernest died of cancer the following year. To keep the press away from his family, Sting did not go to either funeral. At the same time his work with Amnesty International was taking him to Latin America, where he met the families of people tortured and murdered by military regimes. Both experiences poured into his second album, and grief would shape his third. He said later that his father had always regretted not becoming a sailor, and that thought would eventually unlock a whole record.[1] [2] [3]

Nothing Like the Sun came out on the sixteenth of October 1987. It was written largely on a computer music system called a Synclavier, recorded at AIR Studios on Montserrat, and featured Andy Summers, Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler on guitar. The title comes from a Shakespeare sonnet that Sting once quoted to a drunk who asked him how beautiful the moon was. Be Still My Beating Heart was dedicated to his mother. They Dance Alone was for the Chilean women who danced their national dance alone, holding photos of relatives who had disappeared under Pinochet. Fragile honoured Ben Linder, an American engineer killed by the Contras in Nicaragua. It won Best British Album at the 1988 Brit Awards.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Englishman in New York was about the writer Quentin Crisp, who had moved from London to a small apartment in Manhattan. Sting visited Crisp in 1986 and listened for three days to stories of what it had meant to be openly gay in Britain when that was dangerous. Crisp joked about looking forward to naturalisation papers, so as to commit a crime and not be deported, preferably something glamorous and non violent. David Fincher directed the black and white video, and Crisp appears in it. The song only reached number fifty one in Britain at first, but a Dutch remix in 1990 took it to number fifteen, and it has become one of Sting's best known songs.[1] [2]

Sting kept stretching. In July 1987 the great jazz arranger Gil Evans recorded a live big band album of his songs in Perugia. In 1988 he played the soldier in Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale alongside Ian McKellen and Vanessa Redgrave, and sang on Frank Zappa's Broadway the Hard Way. That year he also toured with Bruce Springsteen and Peter Gabriel on Amnesty's Human Rights Now tour. In November 1987 he had travelled to the Xingu region of Brazil to meet Raoni Metuktire, a chief of the Kayapo people, and in 1989 he, Trudie and the filmmaker Jean Pierre Dutilleux set up the Rainforest Foundation. Raoni toured seventeen countries with Sting that spring, and by 1993 a vast area of indigenous land in the Xingu region had been protected.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After his father's death Sting could not write. The block lasted for several years, until he began writing about his father, the sea and the shipyards of his childhood, and the songs finally came. The Soul Cages, released on the twenty first of January 1991, is a concept album about that loss, with Northumbrian smallpipes played by Kathryn Tickell. He and his new guitarist Dominic Miller shaped the songs in the studio in Paris and at a villa in Italy. It went to number one in Britain, All This Time reached number five in America, and the title track won the first ever Grammy for Best Rock Song. The Los Angeles Times called it a lovely downer that took on dad, deity and death.[1] [2] [3]

Lake House and the nineties

By the early nineties Sting and Trudie lived at Lake House, a sixteenth century manor in Wiltshire surrounded by barley fields. That is where he recorded his fourth album, Ten Summoner's Tales, released in 1993. The title is a pun on his surname, Sumner, and on the summoner in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. After the gloom of The Soul Cages, he said he wanted songs that would amuse his band and his family. Fields of Gold was inspired by the wind moving across the barley outside his window. Shape of My Heart grew from a warm up exercise by Dominic Miller, and Sting wrote its words about a card player after a walk with the demo on his headphones.[1] [2] [3]

Ten Summoner's Tales reached number two in both Britain and America and was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize. Some songs showed off his love of odd time signatures, with one verse in seven beats to the bar and another song in five. The album won Grammys, including Best Male Pop Vocal for If I Ever Lose My Faith in You, and in 1994 he was named Best British Male at the Brit Awards. The same year Shape of My Heart played over the end credits of Luc Besson's film Leon. He also teamed up with Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart on All for Love, from The Three Musketeers, which spent three weeks at number one in America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twentieth of August 1992, after ten years together, Sting and Trudie married at Camden Register Office in London, and two days later their wedding was blessed at a twelfth century church in Wiltshire. Trudie arrived on horseback in a Versace dress. They already had three children, Mickey, Jake and Eliot, known in the family as Coco, and a fourth, Giacomo, followed in 1995. Along with Joe and Kate from his first marriage, that made six children. Trudie built her own career as a producer, backing Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, in which Sting played the hero's father, and she has produced the Rainforest Foundation's Carnegie Hall benefit concerts since 1991.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1995 a darker story reached court. Keith Moore, Sting's accountant and financial adviser for fifteen years, was accused of stealing six million pounds from him. Moore had quietly moved money into a bank account Sting did not know existed and lost most of it on schemes including Indian restaurants in Australia and a plan to turn Russian military aircraft into passenger jets. The theft only came to light through an anonymous tip. In the witness box Sting said his finances ran across more than a hundred accounts, and when asked about a large cheque he said he was a generous man, but not that generous. Moore was jailed for six years, and the bank repaid most of the money.[1] [2]

Mercury Falling, released in March 1996, leaned towards soul and country and reached number four in Britain and number five in America. Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot, with the Memphis Horns, was inspired by a friend living with AIDS. Johnny Cash later covered I Hung My Head on his final album released in his lifetime, and a duet of I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Crying with Toby Keith gave Sting his only country hit, reaching number two. The record faded faster than its predecessors. In 1997 Sting sang with Puff Daddy on I'll Be Missing You, the Notorious B.I.G. tribute built on Every Breath You Take, at the MTV Video Music Awards.[1] [2] [3]

In November 1998 came a painful loss. Kenny Kirkland, the pianist who had been with Sting since the Blue Turtles and played on his records through the nineties, was found dead in his apartment in Queens, New York, at the age of forty three. Earlier that year doctors had told him he had a serious heart condition that needed an operation, but he was frightened of surgery and went back on the road. Reports at the time said drug paraphernalia was found near his body, and his drug use was later described as an open secret in jazz circles. The official cause of death was congestive heart failure. Branford Marsalis dedicated his next album, Requiem, to him.[1] [2]

Brand New Day and a new century

Sting took a break after 1997 and returned in September 1999 with Brand New Day, made with the producer Kipper instead of his longtime producer Hugh Padgham. Stevie Wonder played harmonica on the title track. The breakthrough was Desert Rose, sung with the Algerian rai star Cheb Mami, whom Sting had seen perform in Paris. His record label tried to get him to drop the Arabic opening, fearing it would scare off American radio, and at first stations were wary. Then Jaguar noticed Sting riding in one of its cars in the video and spent eighteen and a half million dollars putting the clip in its adverts. Radio followed, and the album sold more than three and a half million copies in America.[1] [2] [3]

Sting had worried the car deal clashed with his environmental work. He joked that luckily he had just planted fifty thousand trees, which he was told balanced out any Jaguars he helped sell. Brand New Day won him Grammys for Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Male Pop Vocal, and he performed Desert Rose with Cheb Mami at the ceremony. It was his last big commercial smash. The partnership later had a grim footnote. In 2009 a Paris court found Cheb Mami guilty of drugging his former girlfriend and trying to force an abortion on her, and sentenced him to five years in prison.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1997 the Disney director Roger Allers had asked Sting to write songs for an animated film about the Incas called Kingdom of the Sun. Over the next three years the film was torn up and rebuilt as the comedy The Emperor's New Groove, and most of Sting's songs were cut. Trudie filmed the whole saga, including the moment the producer phoned Sting to tell him his songs were gone. Her documentary, The Sweatbox, premiered in Toronto in 2002, but Disney owns it and has never released it on home video. One surviving song, My Funny Friend and Me, earned Sting his first Oscar nomination.[1] [2]

On the eleventh of September 2001 Sting was due to film a concert at his villa in Tuscany for a live album and webcast. After news of the attacks in America, the webcast was stopped after one song, Fragile, and Sting let the audience decide whether to go on. They chose to continue, and the album All This Time was dedicated to those who died that day. He sang Fragile again at the America, A Tribute to Heroes telethon, and with Yo Yo Ma at the opening of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The Tuscany concert special won him an Emmy.[1] [2]

Honours piled up. In 2002 Sting won a Golden Globe for Until, from the film Kate and Leopold, along with a Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music and the Ivor Novello award for lifetime achievement. In 2003 he was made a CBE. That year he released Sacred Love, with guests including Mary J. Blige and the sitar player Anoushka Shankar, and his duet with Blige, Whenever I Say Your Name, won a Grammy. It would be his last album of new original songs for ten years. His memoir Broken Music came out in October 2003. He wrote it without a ghostwriter, and it stops just as he becomes famous, because he felt people already knew the rest.[1] [2] [3]

Lutes, a reunion and controversy

In October 2006 Sting surprised his fans with Songs from the Labyrinth, an album of music by the Elizabethan composer John Dowland, sung to the lute of the Bosnian player Edin Karamazov. Between the songs he read from a letter Dowland wrote to the statesman Robert Cecil. It won respect in the classical world, but it sold slowly for a Sting record and was his first album in twenty years to miss the British top ten. Three years later came If on a Winter's Night, a collection of carols, folk songs and seasonal tunes named after an Italo Calvino novel. Some fans who heard early copies openly questioned his direction.[1] [2] [3]

On the eleventh of February 2007 the Police opened the Grammy Awards with Roxanne and announced a reunion tour. It began in Vancouver that May, and after the second show Stewart Copeland posted a review on his website calling it lame, which the press read as a feud. He later apologised to his buddy Sting. Sting's son Joe opened many shows with his band Fiction Plane. The British dates sold out in thirty minutes, and the tour finished at Madison Square Garden in August 2008, after selling about three point seven million tickets and grossing around three hundred and fifty eight million dollars. Sting later called it a very successful exercise in nostalgia that he would never repeat.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In October 2009 Sting played a concert in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, at a festival run by a cultural foundation, and campaigners said it was staged at the invitation of the daughter of the country's president, Islam Karimov. The United Nations and Amnesty had accused Karimov's government of serious human rights abuses, and reports said Sting was paid between one and two million pounds. He said he thought UNICEF was sponsoring the event, but UNICEF said it had nothing to do with it. Sting argued that cultural boycotts were pointless and only made closed countries more closed. A former British ambassador to Uzbekistan asked whether he was mad. In 2011 Sting did pull out of a concert in Kazakhstan after Amnesty raised concerns about the treatment of oil and gas workers there.[1] [2]

In 2010 Sting toured with orchestras, recasting his songs for strings and brass, and released Symphonicities on the classical label Deutsche Grammophon. It sold more than a million copies. He then stripped back again for the Back to Bass tour. In 2011 Time named him one of the most influential people in the world, and he signed an open letter urging the British government to consider decriminalising drug possession. Turning sixty that year, he told the Guardian he was not usually happy, but that happiness was a rather bovine state, and he preferred being curious. He also called his first marriage a huge psychological event that he still felt bad about.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Last Ship and a late second wind

For years Sting had struggled to write new songs. What broke the block was going home in his imagination. In 2011 he confirmed he was writing a musical, The Last Ship, about the closure of a Wallsend shipyard like Swan Hunter, where he had watched ships launched as a boy. He worked with the playwrights John Logan and Brian Yorkey, and drew on The Soul Cages and his relationship with his father. He called it paying off a soul debt to the community he had worked so hard to escape. The album of songs from the show came out in September 2013, his first original record in ten years, with North East voices including Jimmy Nail, the Unthanks and AC/DC's Brian Johnson.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Last Ship had a tryout in Chicago in June 2014 and opened at the Neil Simon Theatre on Broadway on the twenty sixth of October. The reviews were mixed and ticket sales weak, with the fifteen million dollar show playing to houses around sixty percent full. So Sting stepped into the lead role of the foreman Jackie White himself, replacing Jimmy Nail from the ninth of December. He insisted he had been at every rehearsal for five years and had not flown in from Planet Rock Star. Sales rose, but the show closed on the twenty fourth of January 2015 after about three months. It still earned two Tony nominations. Sting called those years the most satisfying of his life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In December 2014 Sting received Kennedy Center Honors in Washington. Lady Gaga sang If I Ever Lose My Faith in You, and Bruce Springsteen joked that Sting made him feel like a musical Neanderthal, because Sting insisted there were more than three chords. He toured with Paul Simon in 2014 and 2015 and with Peter Gabriel in 2016. A duet with the French singer Mylene Farmer, Stolen Car, gave him his first number one in France. Then in November 2016 came 57th and 9th, named after the New York crossing he walked every day to the studio. He called it rockier than anything he had done in a while, and joked that it was not a lute album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The new album carried the weight of the times. Sting wrote Fifty Thousand in the week Prince died, thinking also of David Bowie, Glenn Frey and Lemmy, and The Empty Chair, inspired by the journalist James Foley, who was murdered by the Islamic State group, earned him a fourth Oscar nomination. On the twelfth of November 2016 he reopened the Bataclan in Paris, a year after the terror attack there, and the Police's first guitarist Henry Padovani joined him for Next to You. In 2017 he shared the Polar Music Prize. In 2018 a reworked Last Ship opened at Northern Stage in Newcastle, the theatre where he had once played bass in the orchestra pit.[1] [2] [3]

His strangest pairing began in 2017, when his new manager Martin Kierszenbaum sent him a Shaggy song called Don't Make Me Wait. Sting walked into a Los Angeles studio singing its chorus. The resulting album, named after the dialling codes of Britain and Jamaica, came out in April 2018 and won the Grammy for Best Reggae Album. Shaggy later said Sting taught him to really sing, by playing every note on a keyboard so he could hear the harmonies. In 2019 BMI named Every Breath You Take the most played song in radio history, with nearly fifteen million plays. That May Sting released My Songs, reworking his hits, and set out on a world tour.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Later years, courtrooms and home again

The pandemic pushed back his Las Vegas residency, and Sting spent the time writing. Duets, a collection of his collaborations, came out in March 2021, and The Bridge followed in November, written in what he called a year of pandemic, personal loss, separation and lockdown. Branford Marsalis returned on saxophone. A new song with the violinist Ray Chen, What Could Have Been, featured in the animated series Arcane, and Sting opened the Game Awards with it. In March 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, he recorded Russians again to raise money for aid, saying he never thought the song would be relevant again. He also recorded a reggae album of Frank Sinatra songs with Shaggy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In February 2022 Sting sold his entire songwriting catalogue, solo hits and Police songs alike, to Universal Music Group. The price was not disclosed, and estimates ranged from two hundred to three hundred million dollars. Forbes ranked him the highest paid solo musician of 2022. Not every headline was flattering. In January 2023 he gave a private performance for Microsoft executives at Davos, a day before the company announced ten thousand job cuts. In 2023 he was made an Ivor Novello Fellow, and in 2024 he joined a letter warning the men only Garrick Club that members would resign unless women were admitted. He took a stripped down trio on the road as Sting 3.0.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Then the oldest tensions went to court. Legal action began in late 2024, and in 2025 it became public that Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland were suing Sting and his company Magnetic Publishing at the High Court in London. They said the band had agreed in 1977 to share about fifteen percent of songwriting income as an arranger's fee, and that Sting's side had wrongly left out money from streaming. Sting denied the wider claim and said they might even have been overpaid. At a hearing in January 2026 the court heard he had paid them more than eight hundred thousand dollars for admitted historic underpayments, while their lawyers valued the claim at eight million pounds or more. As of 2026 a full trial was still to come.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Meanwhile The Last Ship came home in a new form. With a revised book by Barney Norris, Sting now played the foreman Jackie White himself, and Shaggy joined as the Wallsend Ferryman, a part Sting wrote for him. The production toured to Paris, Amsterdam, New York and Brisbane. The Guardian found it sincere but at times cloying, and noted that Sting's voice no longer had its Roxanne era power. Sting said the show was his way of making amends to the community that made him. Its London run at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane was booked from the twenty second of September to the third of October 2026. Announcing it, he told the Guardian the loss of manual work may be feeding the toxic side of modern masculinity.[1] [2] [3] [4]

As he approaches his seventy fifth birthday in October 2026, Sting's record speaks for itself. With the Police and alone he has sold more than a hundred million records and won seventeen Grammys, along with a Golden Globe, an Emmy, Brit Awards, four Oscar nominations, Kennedy Center Honors and the Polar Music Prize. Rolling Stone ranked him among the greatest bass players of all time. Hip hop keeps finding him too. Shape of My Heart has been sampled by Nas and interpolated on Juice WRLD's Lucid Dreams. The boy who ran from the shipyard now tours a musical about it, and says the thing that keeps him going is surprise.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Sting

Sting and Frances Tomelty. They met in Newcastle during a rock musical in which she played the Virgin Mary and he played in the band, and married in May 1976. She encouraged him to move to London and they lived in poverty as the Police began. They had two children, Joe and Kate. The marriage ended after Sting's affair with her close friend Trudie Styler, and they divorced in 1984. Sting later called it the only thing he ever failed at.[1] [2] [3]

Sting and Trudie Styler. Neighbours in Bayswater in the late seventies, they began an affair around 1981 while he was still married to her friend. They married in 1992 and have four children. Trudie became a film producer and an activist, and together they founded the Rainforest Foundation in 1989. Sting has called her his cornerstone, and she describes herself as the ideas person and the noise around him. They have been together more than forty years.[1] [2] [3]

Sting and Stewart Copeland. Copeland founded the Police with Sting in 1977 and his drumming defined their sound, but the two clashed constantly. Producer Hugh Padgham said they hated each other by Synchronicity, and Copeland broke one of Sting's ribs on tour. Copeland later said it was a myth that they fought all the time and that they still send each other silly clips. In late 2024 he and Andy Summers began legal action against Sting over royalties.[1] [2] [3]

Sting and Andy Summers. Summers was about nine years older and far more experienced when he joined the Police in 1977, after meeting Sting through Strontium 90. His guitar gave the trio its shimmering sound, and he says his part rescued Every Breath You Take. He played on Sting's Nothing Like the Sun, and returned for the 2007 reunion, joking that the Police was not a democracy but an ego cracy. Since late 2024 he has been one of Sting's opponents in the High Court.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sting and Miles Copeland III. Stewart's older brother managed the Police from 1978, got them their record deal on the strength of Roxanne, and went on to manage Sting through seven solo albums. In the film Bring On the Night he is seen as a pushy manager arguing about stage clothes. He was left out of the 2007 reunion, and said money was the issue. Sting's side in the royalties case says it was Miles who first floated the band's income sharing idea.[1] [2] [3]

Sting and Dominic Miller. The Argentine born guitarist has played with Sting since 1990, on almost every album from The Soul Cages onwards. He cowrote Shape of My Heart, which began as his warm up exercise. Their friendship has a running joke. Miller once told fans he played the guitar on Fragile, which he did not, so Sting punished him by making him play bass on it live for years.[1] [2] [3]

Sting and Kenny Kirkland. The Brooklyn born jazz pianist left Wynton Marsalis's band in 1985 to join Sting's Blue Turtles, which Wynton openly scorned. Kirkland stayed a key part of Sting's records through the nineties, on albums including The Soul Cages and Mercury Falling. He died in November 1998 at forty three, of congestive heart failure, after putting off heart surgery he feared. In 2020 Sting discussed Kirkland's playing philosophy in a video for a tribute project.[1] [2] [3]

Sting and Branford Marsalis. The saxophonist was one of Sting's first solo recruits in 1985, and his soprano saxophone floats over songs like Englishman in New York. He stayed a regular guest for years and returned for The Bridge in 2021. Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland were close friends, and Marsalis dedicated his album Requiem to Kirkland after the pianist's death.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sting and Keith Moore. Moore was Sting's accountant and financial adviser for fifteen years, trusted enough to design a web of more than a hundred accounts. Behind his back he took about six million pounds, losing most of it on risky ventures. Sting gave evidence against him at Southwark Crown Court, and in 1995 Moore was jailed for six years. It emerged he had been disciplined for misconduct three times before.[1] [2]

Sting and Raoni Metuktire. Sting met the Kayapo chief, famous for his wooden lip plate, in the Brazilian Amazon in 1987. Raoni asked for help protecting his people's land, and in 1989 the two toured seventeen countries together to launch the Rainforest Foundation. The campaign was mocked in the British press at the time, but by 1993 a huge area of indigenous land in the Xingu region had been protected.[1] [2] [3]

Sting and Shaggy. An unlikely friendship that began in 2017 when Sting walked into a studio singing the hook of Shaggy's song Don't Make Me Wait. Their joint album won a Grammy in 2019, they later recorded Sinatra songs in reggae style, and Shaggy says Sting taught him to sing properly. Since 2025 Shaggy has played the Wallsend Ferryman in The Last Ship, a role Sting wrote for him.[1] [2] [3]

Sting and Ernest Sumner. Sting's father was a milkman in Wallsend whom the boy helped on his rounds, and who had always regretted not becoming a sailor. Their relationship was complicated by an unhappy family home. Ernest died of cancer in 1987, and Sting stayed away from the funeral to keep the press away. His grief caused years of writer's block and eventually produced The Soul Cages and The Last Ship.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Sting

• Sting taught himself bass by speeding up records so he could hear the bass lines more clearly. As a teenager in Newcastle he played records at faster speeds to pick out the bass parts. He had no formal lessons and taught himself on an old Spanish guitar before moving to bass.[1] [2]
• Before music paid, Sting worked as a bus conductor, a building labourer and a tax officer. At Keith Moore's fraud trial the defence even pointed out that Sting had once worked for the tax office. Sting replied that his dislike of paperwork might explain why that career was so short.[1] [2]
• Sting spent two years as a primary school teacher in Cramlington, Northumberland. After qualifying in 1973 he taught at St Paul's First School. A nun who had taught his sister phoned to offer him the job, and he said teaching felt like a safe haven for a young father.[1] [2]
• Hearing Love Me Do at the Wallsend swimming baths made ten year old Gordon Sumner want to write songs. He heard the Beatles on an attendant's transistor radio and was struck by their harmonies. He later said the Beatles did not make him a musician, but they made him a composer.[1]
• Sting loved Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books so much he bought the film rights. He named pets, a racehorse, his publishing company and his daughter Fuschia after characters in the books, and in 1984 he played the villain Steerpike on BBC Radio 4.[1]
• The three Police members first played together in another man's band, Strontium 90. Former Gong bassist Mike Howlett formed Strontium 90 in 1977 with Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland. It was this project that introduced Summers to the other two.[1]
• Sting wrote Demolition Man while living in Peter O'Toole's house in Ireland, and Grace Jones released it first. He wrote it in the summer of 1980 in Connemara. The Police recorded it afterwards for Ghost in the Machine, and Sting remade it in 1993 for the film Demolition Man.[1]
• Russians was inspired by Soviet children's television, watched on a secretly captured satellite feed. An inventor friend at Columbia University had found a way to pick up Russian TV. Late at night only children's programmes were on, and Sting was struck by how much care went into them.[1]
• James Cameron said Russians helped inspire the boy hero of Terminator 2. In 2021 the director said Sting's song made him think nuclear war was the opposite of life itself, and that is where the character of young John Connor came from.[1]
• A copy of Ten Summoner's Tales was the first item bought securely over the internet. On the eleventh of August 1994 a compact disc of the album was sold online for twelve dollars and forty eight cents plus shipping, in what is recorded as the first secure web purchase.[1]
• The horse on the cover of Ten Summoner's Tales was Sting's own Icelandic horse, Hrimnir. The cover was photographed at Wardour Castle in Wiltshire. Sting had bought the horse from an Icelandic friend and owned it for a period.[1]
• Fragile was written for Ben Linder, an American engineer killed by the Contras in Nicaragua in 1987. Linder was working on a hydroelectric project when he was killed. Sting later said the song's meaning changed every year, and it became his song of mourning after the September 2001 attacks.[1]
• Sting banned Dominic Miller from playing guitar on Fragile live after a harmless fib. Sting played the guitar on the studio recording himself and was proud of it. When Miller let fans think he had played it, Sting put him on bass for that song in concert for years.[1]
• Shape of My Heart began as a guitar warm up exercise by Dominic Miller. Miller told Sting it was only a warm up, but they turned it into a demo that morning. Sting went for a walk listening to it and came back with a story about a gambler.[1]
• Garry Kasparov beat Sting and four of his bandmates at chess simultaneously in under fifty minutes. The exhibition took place in 2000. Sting, a keen chess player, was joined by Dominic Miller, Jason Rebello, Chris Botti and Russ Irwin, and the grandmaster beat them all.[1]
• A Colombian tree frog, Dendropsophus stingi, is named after Sting. Scientists named it for his commitment to saving the rainforest, work that began with the Rainforest Foundation he set up with Trudie Styler in 1989.[1]
• Sting is colour blind, which he says is one reason he likes black and white music videos. He mentioned it in a documentary interview. Several of his best known videos, including Englishman in New York and Russians, were shot in black and white.[1] [2] [3]
• Jaguar spent eighteen and a half million dollars featuring Sting's Desert Rose video in its adverts. The car maker spotted Sting in one of its cars in the video. Sting worried about the environmental clash and joked that the fifty thousand trees he had just planted balanced it out.[1]
• Sting's only country hit came from a duet with Toby Keith that reached number two. Their version of I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Crying hit number two on the American country chart in January 1998 and earned a Grammy nomination.[1]
• Johnny Cash covered Sting's I Hung My Head on his last album released in his lifetime. The song first appeared on Mercury Falling in 1996, played in an unusual time signature. Cash recorded it for American IV, The Man Comes Around.[1]
• Sting's first number one single in France came in 2015, as a duet with Mylene Farmer. Stolen Car, a song from his 2003 album Sacred Love, went straight to number one on French download charts and then the main singles chart.[1]
• Every Breath You Take was written at Ian Fleming's desk, where the James Bond novels were written. Sting was staying at Goldeneye, Fleming's Jamaican estate, while escaping the press after his marriage broke up. The song became the most played in radio history.[1]
• Sting wrote If You Love Somebody Set Them Free as the antidote to Every Breath You Take. He said the earlier song was about possession and surveillance, so his first solo single argued the opposite. He joked that he had to write an antidote after poisoning people.[1] [2]
• The black and white Englishman in New York video was directed by David Fincher. The clip features Quentin Crisp, the subject of the song, and ends with an elderly voice talking about wanting to meet everybody in the world.[1]
• The film Bring On the Night ends with the birth of Sting's son Jake. Director Michael Apted wanted to film it. Sting resisted at first, then decided the birth of a baby matched the birth of the band.[1]
• Sting's accountant gave him a Jaguar sports car while secretly stealing millions from him. At the 1995 trial the court heard Keith Moore presented the car as a thank you. Moore had earned a reported eight hundred thousand pounds a year.[1]
• Trudie's documentary about Sting's Disney songs has never been released on home video. The Sweatbox shows the producer phoning Sting to say his songs were being cut from The Emperor's New Groove. Disney owns the film.[1]
• In 1988 Sting played the soldier in Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, with Ian McKellen and Vanessa Redgrave. The recording was made with the London Sinfonietta conducted by Kent Nagano, one of several classical side projects long before his lute album.[1]
• A Kentucky Derby winning racehorse was named after Sting's youngest son. The horse Giacomo, a winner of America's most famous race, took its name from Giacomo Sumner, born in 1995, the youngest of Sting's six children.[1]
• Sting told a journalist his baby daughter's middle name was Prufrock. It was a joke. In 1993 he claimed Eliot was named Eliot Prufrock Sumner. The writer only realised he had been caught out after writing it down. Eliot's real middle name is Paulina.[1] [2]
• Sting played bass in the orchestra pit of the Newcastle theatre that later staged The Last Ship. He called bringing the musical home to Northern Stage in 2018 one of his dreams. He said the British version was more political than the Broadway one.[1]
• For The Last Ship on Broadway, Sting took over the lead role himself to save ticket sales. The fifteen million dollar show was playing to houses around sixty percent full. He replaced Jimmy Nail as Jackie White for six weeks, but the show closed in January 2015.[1] [2]
• Shaggy says Sting taught him to sing by playing every note on a keyboard. Shaggy said dancehall uses two chords, and Sting's songs had six or seven, so Sting played the in between notes so he could hear them. His confidence as a singer grew from there.[1]
• Sting's Last Exit band was named after the novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. The Newcastle jazz fusion group formed in 1974. Its tunes Carrion Prince and Savage Beast later became the Police's Bring on the Night and Sting's We Work the Black Seam.[1]
• In 2024 the men only Garrick Club listed Sting under his real name as a member elected in 2023. He signed a letter with Stephen Fry and Mark Knopfler warning they would quit unless the club voted to admit women.[1]
• Every Breath You Take was streaming about three and a half million times a day on Spotify in early 2026. That put it in the daily global top ten, ahead of many new hits, helped by Stranger Things and TikTok, which is why its royalties matter so much in court.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.