The Full Biography
Sting. Musician. The Wallsend schoolteacher who turned a yellow sweater into a name, a trio into a worldwide weather, and a solo catalog into a second life that never quite left the first.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a blond man in a black turtleneck, bass held high, singing about a breath being watched. The year is 1983. The band is the Police. The song is “Every Breath You Take,” which a generation took for a wedding vow and which the writer has spent forty years reminding them is a surveillance report. What the still cannot show is Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner of Wallsend, a milkman’s son, a jazz bassist in Newcastle pubs, a teacher who kept a guitar in the cupboard, a tabloid season about tantra he did not ask for, and a living man who still writes as if the next ship might be the last.
He was born on October 2, 1951, in Wallsend, on the Tyne, in the northeast of England, where the shipyards set the skyline and the river set the weather. His father, Ernest, delivered milk. His mother, Audrey, had been a hairdresser. The boy passed through St Cuthbert’s Grammar School in Newcastle, tried the University of Warwick, and came home. He trained as a teacher and took a post at St Paul’s First School in Cramlington. Days were a classroom. Nights were jazz: Last Exit, a Newcastle band that already knew he could write. A bandleader looked at a black-and-yellow striped sweater and said he looked like a wasp. The nickname was Sting. He kept it. The first pressure was not London. It was to get out of a town that could love you and still close over your head.
In 1977, in London, he met Stewart Copeland, an American drummer with a journalist’s last name and a policeman’s snap. Andy Summers, older, a guitarist with a jazz vocabulary, completed the trio after a brief first lineup with Henry Padovani. They called the band the Police, which sounded like a joke in a punk year and became, within five years, a fact. “Roxanne,” a tango written in a Paris hotel about a sex worker Sumner had not quite met, failed as a first single and then, rereleased, opened the door. Outlandos d’Amour (1978). Reggatta de Blanc (1979), with “Message in a Bottle” and “Walking on the Moon.” Zenyatta Mondatta (1980), with “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” a teacher’s song that the tabloids would never let sit as fiction. Ghost in the Machine (1981). Then Synchronicity (1983), which sat at number one in the United States for seventeen weeks and made the trio the largest rock band on earth for a short, loud season.
“Every Breath You Take” was written at Goldeneye, Ian Fleming’s old house in Jamaica, while a first marriage was ending. Frances Tomelty, an actress, had been the partner of the teaching years and the first Police years. The song is not a love letter. It is a man who cannot stop watching. Radio made it a slow dance. He has never pretended the radio was wrong to play it, only that the lyric is not the toast people think it is. The band played Shea Stadium. The band played every continent that would have them. The band also, by 1984, could no longer share a room. Copeland and Summers were not sidemen. Sumner was not a hired singer. Three writers in a trio is a mathematics problem. They stopped. They did not issue a funeral. They simply did not continue.
The solo door was The Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985), cut with jazz players including Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, and Omar Hakim. “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free.” “Russians,” a Cold War meditation that borrowed a Prokofiev melody and asked a superpower question in a pop single. The album reached number two in the United States. It established that the Police frontman was not a man waiting for a reunion. …Nothing Like the Sun (1987) gave “Englishman in New York,” written with Quentin Crisp in the room of the mind, and “Fragile.” The Soul Cages (1991) was the record after Audrey Sumner’s death, a shipyard album, a son walking the Tyne in public. Ten Summoner’s Tales (1993) — the title a pun on his own surname — brought “Fields of Gold” and “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You,” which won a Grammy. Mercury Falling. Brand New Day (1999), with “Desert Rose” and the Algerian singer Cheb Mami, a worldbeat hit that put him on a Jaguar commercial and back on American radio. He has collected seventeen Grammy Awards, band and solo counted together. He does not perform the number. The songs do.
I don’t like being famous. I like being a musician.Sting
In 1982 he had begun a life with the actress Trudie Styler. They married in 1992. Six children in all, from the two households: Joseph and Fuchsia from the Tomelty years; Mickey, Jake, Eliot, and Coco with Styler. In 1989 he and Styler, with the Kayapo leader Raoni Metuktire, founded the Rainforest Foundation. This was not a logo on a tour program. It was land rights, legal title, a Carnegie Hall benefit that became an annual habit. A Colombian tree frog, Dendropsophus stingi, was named for the work. He has been appointed a CBE. He has not asked anyone to call him sir. The Police were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003. In 2007 and 2008 the trio reunited for a world tour that was a business and a peace treaty and, when it ended, was allowed to end. He has not spent the years since teasing a second one. Between the Police years and the foundation years he also did the work of a man who could still write a political single without a committee: “They Dance Alone (Cueca Sola),” about the women who danced in Chilean streets for the disappeared under Pinochet; “Russians,” already mentioned, a pop record that quoted a Soviet composer and asked a question the Reagan years did not always want sung. He toured for Amnesty International. He has never asked those nights to replace the hits. He has also never treated them as decoration. The teacher in Cramlington is still visible in the man who will explain a lyric if the interviewer will sit still.
The tabloid season about tantric sex belongs in the file in one paragraph and then should be left there. In the 1990s he and Styler spoke, in interviews they did not treat as sacred, about a private practice. The British papers made it a national joke for a decade: the hours, the stamina, the rock star as a punch line. He has said the story outgrew the fact. He has also never sued the joke out of existence. A complete life holds the Police, the rainforest, and the season the papers would not put down. Fond memory that keeps only “Every Breath” is a cleaned room. A sneer that keeps only the tabloid is a different cleaned room.
Six things most people never knew
- The birth name is Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner. Wallsend, October 2, 1951. A milkman’s son. The wasp sweater gave him Sting. He kept the joke and made it a passport.
- He was a schoolteacher first. St Paul’s First School, Cramlington. The guitar stayed in the cupboard until the night work became the day work.
- “Every Breath You Take” is not a wedding song. Written at Goldeneye while a marriage was ending. A watcher’s lyric. Radio made it a slow dance anyway.
- The Police stopped at the peak, not in a decline. 1984. Three writers, one trio. They reunited once, in 2007–08, and then let the treaty close.
- The Rainforest Foundation is a second occupation. Styler, Raoni Metuktire, land title, Carnegie Hall. A frog carries his name. The concerts are the fundraising, not the point.
- The Soul Cages is the shipyard record. After Audrey Sumner’s death. The Tyne, not the turtleneck. The solo catalog has a hometown in it.
The children have had to share a father who is a bass line and a tabloid and a foundation. Friends from the jazz years in Newcastle describe a professional who still counts a room the way a teacher counts a class. The man on the Tuscan estate and the New York townhouse kept the same count without the blond spike. Both are the life. He has lived between Wiltshire, Tuscany, and the road. He has not become a recluse and he has not become a nostalgia act that only plays 1983.
The later years
The second half of the public life has been a refusal to stay in the turtleneck. Sacred Love (2003). Songs from the Labyrinth (2006), John Dowland lute songs with Edin Karamazov, a sixteenth-century melancholy he treated as a job, not a costume. Symphonicities (2010), the Police and solo catalog rewritten for orchestra. The Last Ship, a musical about the closing of the Swan Hunter yards in Wallsend, opened on Broadway in 2014 after a Chicago tryout. He wrote the songs. He took a role when the production needed the famous face to keep the lights on. The show was not a hit in the way Synchronicity was a hit. It was the hometown brought to Forty-Fourth Street, a milkman’s son sending the yards back across the ocean as work. That is a different kind of success, and he has not apologized for the difference.
The Kennedy Center Honors came in 2014, the same season as the State Department still of the honorees at dinner. He has toured My Songs, a rearrangement of his own catalog, into his seventies, a man who would rather recast a hit than retire it. He has played the lute on television and the bass in stadiums and has not asked the audience to pick a lane. Trudie Styler remains the partner of the rainforest years and the household years. The children are grown; Joe Sumner has his own band. The Carnegie Hall benefit still returns. The foundation still does the land-rights work the joke years never mentioned.
He is in his seventies as this is written and still taking a stage. The blond is silver. The turtleneck is optional. The voice has lowered and tightened, which is what voices do, and he has written around the change instead of pretending it has not happened. New songs still arrive. Old songs still pay the house. He does not sneer at either column. What he will not do is become a Police tribute act with the original singer attached. Copeland and Summers remain in the sentence. The sentence is the right trio. Wallsend remains in the other sentence. The two towns — the Tyne and the world — are the whole late style.
He still talks about the next record as if it might be the one that explains the last. He still walks onstage without a speech about legacy. He still corrects interviewers who call “Every Breath You Take” a love song, and then he sings it, because the audience paid for the breath and he is a professional. The Rainforest Foundation is the civic object that will outlast the tabloid. The Last Ship is the civic object that will outlast the turtleneck. The teaching certificate is in the drawer. The wasp sweater is a story he still tells, because it is true and because it is short. The long story is a boy who left the yards, wrote a watcher’s song the world misheard, funded a forest, and then wrote the yards back into a musical. He is still in the middle of that story. The call time is the same. He still keeps a lute in the house and a bass on the truck. He still writes in notebooks the way a teacher marks a draft. Lake House in Wiltshire and the Tuscan estate are not retirement sets. They are places a working writer goes when the road lets him. Friends from the Last Exit years in Newcastle say the ear is the same ear that used to count a pub. The pub is larger now. The count is the same. He has not become a knighted monument, because he was appointed a CBE and left the rest of the honors to the rooms that wanted a turtleneck. The rooms can have the turtleneck. The yards, the foundation, and the next song are the life he is still in.
After the spotlight moved
It moved to whoever the next blond singer borrowed a bass line from, and then it came back every time a film needed “Every Breath You Take” and every time a benefit needed a man who could still hold Carnegie Hall. The Police remain a grammar. The solo records remain a second grammar. Styler remains. The Tyne remains. The frog remains a footnote that is also a fact.
He came out of Wallsend, taught a classroom, named himself after a sweater, built a trio, wrote a watcher’s song the world danced to, left the band at the peak, funded a forest, put the shipyards on Broadway, and kept writing. If you only remember the turtleneck, you have the still. If you remember the milk round, the classroom, the treaty tour, and The Last Ship, you have him.
Portrait: David Shankbone · CC BY 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons