Born 2 October 1951, in Wallsend, north-east England, Gordon Sumner's life started to change the evening a Phoenix Jazzmen bandmate caught sight of his black and yellow hooped sweater and decided to re-christen him Sting. Always a muso, Sting paid his early dues playing bass with local outfits the Newcastle Big Band, The Phoenix Jazzmen, Earthrise and Last Exit, the latter featuring his first efforts at songwriting. Last Exit were big in the North East, but their jazz fusion was doomed to fail when 1976's punk rock exploded onto the scene. Curved Air drummer, Stewart Copeland, saw Last Exit and whilst the music did nothing for him he recognised the potential and personality of the bass player. Within months, Sting, first wife actress Frances Tomelty, and infant son, Joe, were tempted into moving to London.

Seeing punk as flag of convenience, Copeland and Sting together with Corsican Henri Padovani on guitar started rehearsing and looking for gigs. Ever the businessman, Copeland took the name The Police figuring it would be good publicity, and the three started gigging round venues like The Roxy, Marquee and Nashville. Ejecting the inept Padovani for the proven talents of Andy Summers' the band also enrolled Stewart's older brother, Miles, as manager, wowing him with a Sting song called Roxanne. Days later, Copeland had them a record deal. The London press hated the Police seeing through their punk camouflage, and their early releases had no chart success. Instead The Police did the unthinkable - they went to America. The early tours are the stuff of legend - flight's courtesy of Laker's Skytrain, humping their own equipment from gig to gig, and playing to miniscule audiences at the likes of CBGB's and The Rat Club. Their bottle paid off as they slowly built a loyal following, the audiences being won over with the bands combination of new wave toughness and laid back white-reggae.

They certainly made an odd trio with veteran guitarman Summers having a history dating back to the mid-60s, the hyper-kinetic Copeland had been a prog-rocker, and Sting with his love of jazz. The sound the trio made was unique though, and Sting's pin-up looks did them no harm at all. Returning to the UK, where the now reissued Roxanne was charting, the band played a sell-out tour of mid-size venues. The momentum had started. Their debut album Outlandos d'Amour (Oct 78) delivered three hits with Roxanne, Can't Stand Losing You and So Lonely, leading to a headlining slot at the '79 Reading Festival, but it was with Reggatta de Blanc (Oct 79) that they stepped up a gear. The first single, Message In A Bottle, streaked to number one and the album's success was consolidated further when Walking On The Moon also hit the top slot. The band was big, but about to get even bigger. 1980 saw them undertake a mammoth world tour with stops on all continents - including the first rock concerts in Bombay - and the band eventually returned, exhausted, for two shows back in Sting's hometown of Newcastle.

Record company pressure had them back in a Dutch studio within weeks, but Sting's stock of pre-Police songs and ideas were wearing out. It was noticeable that the hits were all Sting's and the pressure to deliver a killer, all important third album was on. History will record Summers as hugely talented guitarist but not as an accomplished song-writer, and whilst Copeland could write catchy tunes, the band knew exactly who was expected to deliver the hits - Sting. When Zenyatta Mondatta was released in October 1980 it produced another number one in Don't Stand So Close To Me and a top five hit with De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da and sold well, but in other respects it was disappointing. A rethink was required.

The results of the rethink materialised with 1981's Ghost In The Machine, a rich, multilayered album which was augmented not only by Jean Roussel's keyboards and Sting's self taught saxophone playing, but by much better writing contributions from Copeland and Summers. A darker record in many ways, the album still had the usual clutch of hit singles with Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic making number 1 and the bleak Invisible Sun reaching number 2 (the latter despite a BBC ban being slapped on the video) and Spirits In The Material World also charting.

Sting was starting to feel the confines of the band oppressive and was turning to other outlets. In the late 70's he had appeared in a couple of movies - a minor part in Chris Petit's "Radio On" and an excellent cameo in Franc Roddam's "Quadrophenia" - and 1981 saw him take his first lead role in Dennis Potter's big-screen version of "Brimstone and Treacle" and in the BBC play "Artemis '81". His first, albeit short solo appearances at The Secret Policeman Ball benefits in aid of Amnesty International also showed a burgeoning interest in humanitarian causes.

The early eighties were becoming a turning point for Sting. His marriage effectively over, he disappeared to Ireland and Jamaica to write songs for the Synchronicity album. The album was preceded by the release of a new single Every Breath You Take in May 1983. The song went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic and simply stayed there. Dressed up as a love song, the song was anything but - it's sinister theme was one of obsession and surveillance. Seventeen years later, the song is one of the most played records on American radio having clocked up five million plays. With such a stand-out track the album couldn't fail and it duly took its rightful place at the top of the world's charts. The band started a spectacular stadium tour of the States, the high spot of which was a sell-out show in New York's Shea Stadium. Further hit singles in the shape of Wrapped Around Your Finger, King of Pain and Synchronicity II helped the album's success even more, including the award of three Grammies, but the writing was on the wall for The Police.

The band's tense relationship was slowly breaking down, with Copeland and Sting occasionally resorting to fist-fights. The pressure cooker of being on the road, of being too big, of too many egos was starting to tell and after the Shea Stadium show Sting told the others that it was time to take a break. The Synchronicity tour finished in March 1984 and the three went their separate ways. Copeland to movie scoring, Summers to guitar duets, and Sting initially to acting. A vastly over-hyped cameo appearance in David Lynch's movie "Dune", and another lead role in the awful "The Bride" followed before Sting picked up his guitar again. This time however, it was not a bass.

In June 1985, Sting released his first solo album The Dream Of The Blue Turtles and it was a revelation. Featuring the cream of America's young, black jazz musicians - Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, Omar Hakim and Darryl Jones - the album showed that Sting had lost none of his songwriting ability by being outside of the Police camp. The new material had a more political stance - We Work The Black Seam dealt with the miner's strike, Children's Crusade with drugs, and Russians with the West's demonisation of communism. He even wrote what he termed "an antidote song" to Every Breath in the shape of If You Love Somebody Set Them Free. The album was premiered at a series of shows at Paris's Mogador Theatre - a period captured in Michael Apted's movie "Bring On The Night" - and the band were magnificent. The success of the album, a successful solo appearance at Live Aid, and the subsequent world tour convinced Sting that the safety net of potentially reforming The Police was no longer necessary - he had not only a retained a fan base he had started to gather another one.

Released after the death of his mother, :Nothing Like The Sun (Oct 1987) was another strong collection of songs, containing perennial favourites Englishman In New York and Fragile. Sting even got himself banned from Chilean radio thanks to They Dance Alone, a haunting song which resulted from his meeting with some of South America's "Mothers of the Disappeared". Also released was a mini-album Nada Como El Sol which featured several of the album's songs in Spanish, and which helped strengthen his popularity further in Central and South America. The world tour started in Rio's 200,000 capacity Maracana Stadium on the day that Sting received the body-blow news of his father's death. His new band included Kirkland and Marsalis, Delmar Brown, Jeff Campbell and Tracey Wormworth, with Sting content to sing, dance and play occasional guitar. In mid tour, the entourage joined the Amnesty International "Human Rights Now!" tour alongside Bruce Springsteen and Peter Gabriel for several huge fundraising concerts.

Ever busy, when the tour finished he was looking for a new project, and found it with a starring spot on Broadway during late 1989 in Brecht's "3 Penny Opera", and the role of Macheath. Despite some savage criticism, the shows were popular and the show completed a three month run. Also at this time, visits to the Amazonian rainforest led both he and partner Trudie Styler to establish a charity, The Rainforest Foundation, aimed at protecting both the environment and indigenous peoples. This has proved to be no passing interest, with an annual all-star benefit concert at New York's Carnegie Hall helping keep the charity running.

Not all was well on the musical front however. The loss of both parents in quick succession had hit Sting hard and one of the world's most famous songwriters was suffering from severe writers block. Returning to his childhood memories for inspiration, Sting produced 1991's The Soul Cages. Jokingly referred to as a record for the "recently bereaved", the album was bleak but compelling. Depending on your point of view it was either impenetrably dense or his strongest work - only the listener can decide. The first single, All This Time, was deceptively poppy and Mad About You was also a minor hit, but the rest of the album was not radio friendly. Nevertheless the album still sold well, the title track collected a Grammy, and the live shows saw a stripped down rock band of Dominic Miller (guitar), Vinnie Colaiuta (drums) and David Sancious (keyboards) with Sting returning to the bass. During the tour a very popular MTV unplugged session was recorded in New York and this was followed by a small acoustic gig at a Wallsend Arts Centre some of which was released on the Acoustic Live In Newcastle set.

Sting and Trudie Styler were married in 1992, and bought Lake House in Wiltshire, part of which was subsequently turned into a recording studio in time for the writing and recording of Ten Summoner's Tales (Mar 1993). As upbeat as The Soul Cages was downbeat, this was a remarkable album, and saw the emergence of a new, less earnest and relaxed Sting. Recorded in his home, the album was a major return to form producing instantly likeable tracks such as If I Ever Lose My Faith In You, Fields Of Gold, Seven Days and Shape of My Heart. It also hinted at what was to come on later albums with odd time signatures and its mix of musical genres and styles. During the inevitable world tour he found time to record a Stateside number one by performing with Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart on All For Love from the "The Three Musketeers" and to add another three Grammies to his ever increasing collection. Life was looking good, and the 1994 retrospective Fields Of Gold saw the release of two new tracks This Cowboy Song and When We Dance.

A significant part of 1995 found Sting preparing for a court appearance, against his former accountant who had misappropriated several ?m of his money, much to the amusement of the press without Sting even knowing it had vanished, but the second part of the year found him turning to writing for his fifth solo album, Mercury Falling. Released in March 1996, the album showed an increasing tendency for Sting to risk commercial success by writing to please himself and his band. Foregoing standard pop and rock fare, he was now writing country tunes such as I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Crying, bossa nova such as La Belle Dame Sans Regrets, gospel tinged material such as Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot and songs in devilishly difficult time signatures (I Hung My Head). It was clever, and much of it was good, but it was an even bigger rag-bag of styles than Ten Summoner's Tales. Some fans weren't sure if they liked it.

Sting was also becoming more noticeably involved in contributing songs to movie soundtracks - there was always a demand for Police songs, but in 1993 he had been approached to write the theme song for "Lethal Weapon 3", and duly complied with It's Probably Me. A reworking of The Police's Demolition Man followed for the film of the same name, as did the recording of several jazz standards for the "Leaving Las Vegas" and "Sabrina" soundtracks. Mercury Falling continued this trend with Valparaiso, which was used in the movie "White Squall". Puff Daddy's reworking of Every Breath You Take (in the shape of I'll Be Missing You) brought Sting's earlier work to the notice of a new generation, and to the fury of many Police fans he and Pras from the Fugee's reworked Roxanne in 1997. Further soundtrack contributions to "The Mighty" and the remake of "The Thomas Crown Affair" followed, as did a cameo role in the British hit movie "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels".

The much anticipated Brand New Day album was released in autumn 1999 to a mixed reception amongst critics. This is a shame because Brand New Day was a tour-de-force. If Mercury Falling mixed genres, Brand New Day took it a step further - the title track was full of optimism and starting over, a true millennium message. The remarkable, arabesque Desert Rose featured the prince of rai music, Cheb Mami, Fill Her Up crossed country with gospel, Perfect Love:Gone Wrong included French rap, and Big Lie Small World was gentle bossa nova. The difference over Mercury Falling was that the songs were stronger and the music more confident. This was one of Sting's finest albums.

And what of 2001? The Brand New Day world tour continues throught the summer, as the release continues to Sting's most successful solo album. The inevitable Police-to-reform rumours will no doubt continue to surface periodically, but having survived the last seventeen years and successfully rebuilding their friendships, Sting's intention of "keeping that legend intact" looks to be pretty secure. Let's hope so. by D&W©

Article/Interview

Songwriting

His creative approach to Brand New Day, for example, typified his desire to test himself. 'I composed, finessed and even sequenced the music before I'd even written a word,' he says of his seventh and best-selling solo album. 'I had to trust that the music would tell me stories, begin to create characters. It's almost a mysterious process. You have to be patient.

Songwriting...

"I'd always wanted to make a connection between the energetic music of punk and more sophisticated musical forms. There was this amazingly aggressive music full of energy on the one hand, and I wanted to take it and bridge a gap between the interesting chords and harmonic variations and this wild energy. And what eventually allowed me to do it was listening to reggae. Bob Marley, especially. I saw a rhythmic connection between the fast bass of punk and the holes in reggae. I got interested in trying to write songs that combined these apparently diverse styles. I think we succeeded with Roxanne."
Melody Maker, 4/79

"This is how I do it - I get a pad here and in it are written... titles. There's a list of titles, half of which are on the new album, half of which are potential songs. I always start from the title and work backwards. The title is usually the hookline, or the chorus. The germ of the thing[1], and you work backwards from that. The procedure is very conscious, and very thought out but the actual lines that appear are really unconscious. I've got the germs of a few songs when I was half asleep. Just waking up: immediately have to rush to that piece of paper and write it down. I've read a lot about it. I've read a book called "The Act of Creation" by Arthur Koestler in which he scientifically analyses the moment of creative thought, where, according to him, the brain has different compartments and everything is well ordered, but in kind of semiconscious states those compartments sort of dissolve and ideas that should be in one place kind of seep into another and then you get a creative spark and something happens. And I would go along with that. I think that in a dreamlike state, you get ideas, but the actual hard work is a conscious thing. Once you get that idea you then, with a lot of discipline, piece it together."

Hot Press, 8/80

Песни пишутся из собственного жизненного опыта?

In answer to a question on whether or not the songs come about from personal experience...

"I don't think that's at all essential. I mean Agatha Christie wrote hundreds of murder stories but I doubt if she ever committed a murder or was involved in one. That's the power of imagination - there's nothing amazingly pure about something that's been done from personal experience. It's probably the easiest way to write because you have lots of actual facts to draw on. Imaginary writing is a whole different ballgame. But my songs are a bit of both. Most of the songs about loneliness and alienation are personally felt things. Even though we treat them in a poppy manner - they are nonetheless meaningful for me, anyway. And as I travel the world, I see different things that change my ideas abut the world. There's A Hole and some other songs are about that. If anything that's what is different on the new LP. Whereas the first two tended to deal with the individual and the individual situation, the new one is more to do with people as a whole."

Hot Press, 8/80

Писать в уединении или вместе с кем-то?

On why he prefers to write alone and not with the other band members...
"I find the creative thing a very private enterprise situation. Co-operation is also compromise, and that's the last thing we need. Especially writing songs, which are the basis of the whole industry."
Hot Press, 8/80

"Composing is a very private thing. I don't get many of my songs from jamming. I just sit at home with a drum box. Voices Inside My Head came through a drum box. I had a Latin rhythm on the drum box, and started playing the guitar riff. Then I added a bass part. A lot of my compositions come from guitar parts. Message In A Bottle, that was a guitar riff. The way I write, I don't have a melody first and then fit words to it. Actually, what happens is that I write them both together. There's this magical moment where you have this series of chords, this progression, and suddenly the words and the music actually come together at the same time. There's no sort of welding one onto the other. There is no other melody for the chorus to Message In A Bottle. It just happened at the same time, so in a sense, I see the two as equal."
Musician, 12/81

Рок-н-рол+Регги

"What I started off doing was structuring songs that had an eight-bar section of rock'n'roll coupled with, say 16 bars of reggae. Which, in fact, you can see in Roxanne. And through listening to the various songs you can see how my writing gradually became more sinuous[2]. There's a reggae element in Don't Stand So Close To Me, but you can hardly hear it. The music flows more now - there's hardly any breaks. Initially, though, it was just very crudely[3] obvious that if you joined the two things together you'd get something else. And now we've refined that down to the pap[4] we currently present."
NME, 1/81

Я люблю минорную девятку

"I write with chords, and my favourite chords I suppose are minor ninths. I used to love a minor ninth ! Andy's voicing knowledge is quite, quite very sophisticated so he can embellish on my basic ideas. Generally, the harmonic thing comes from the melody. It's the melody which is the main thing. I just try to make that. There are probably three pop melodies and you just have to go beyond the three. You have to be original - a lot of people don't realise that since most pop records have the same melody!"
Guitar World, 7/82

В доме Флеминга

"Following my awful separation from my wife actress Frances Tomelty in the early '80s, I went to Jamaica to escape, and I stayed at Golden Eye, the old Ian Fleming house in Oracabessa that Chris Blackwell of Island owns. While I was there, I sat at Fleming's old wooden desk overlooking the ocean, the one at which he wrote all his James Bond books, and I wrote Every Breath You Take, King Of Pain, Wrapped Around Your Finger, all these neat songs. And that was also the first time tried I sensimilla. I brought those songs to Montserrat and we cut Synchronicity."
Spin, 7/85

"I'll make a notation and then carry those things around while they gestate[5]. The analogy for me is a little seed and somehow, by a genetic code like DNA, it grows arms and legs - it grows a verse, a chorus and a middle eight."
Q, 12/87

Песни рождаются из жизни, а не от игры на пианино

"The ideas for a song come from living a life, not from staring at a piano or a wall. The songs are about news events, people I've met, conversations I've had, ideas I've come across. Inspiration comes from living, it comes from an oblique part of the brain, not when you say, "Now I'm writing a song." You do that later, but you have to live first."
Musician, 12/87

Money For Nothing... и Dire Straits'

Я спел фразу по просьбе Марка похожую на мою, а паблишеры решили заработать на этом деньги. Мне было за них стыдно:

On taking a co-writing credit for Dire Straits' Money For Nothing...
"This is very embarrassing to me. Mark asked me to go in the studio and sing this line, "I want my MTV." He gave me the melody, and I thought, "Oh, great, 'Don't Stand So Close to Me,' that's a nice quote, it's fun." So I did it, and thought nothing of it, until my publishers, Virgin - who I've been at war with for years and who I have no respect for - decided that was a song they owned, "Don't Stand So Close to Me." They said that they wanted a percentage of the song, much to my embarrassment. So they took it."
Musician, 12/87

Использование Клише как hook для написания песни 12/87

On the suggestion that he uses very basic cliches as hooks in his songs...
"Clichйs are perfectly acceptable, as long as they aren't the whole story. A lot of songs are buzz words, like "let's be sexy" or "let's dance baby." It's perfectly acceptable to use buzz words as long as there's some kind of idea backing it up. I think that in both of those songs there's a theme, an idea, a journey made. So I don't feel embarrassed by them. A hook is a hook, something that catches somebody, that's even recognised by somebody. Once that's done, it's the listener's turn to figure out what it means, what's the point. Often there isn't a point. I hope that in my songs there always is."
Musician, 12/87

Правое-Левое Полушарие

"There's a time for the right brain and a time for the left brain, and I tend to think they're equal. First there's a gestation period which is definitely the right-brain activity, where I just try and relax and not worry about things and let ideas come and note them down. With this album there was a period of about two years collecting those seed ideas. Sometimes they coincided with the title, like They Dance Alone. The seed idea was from reading about the wives and mothers of the political prisoners in Chile who dance by themselves in front of the prisons as a form of protest. The images were of dancing, of protest, of expressing grief. It's like a pregnancy in that you carry these things around with you for months and every so often you get a musical idea, or an idea for a line that you can attach to it, or some other development. So the seeds grow and maybe cross-polIinate and join one another. But where the left, "linear" brain comes into play was in the three months before I went into the studio, when I had to craft these ideas into a shape where I could program them on the computer or shape them so I could present them to musicians and it wouldn't be gobbledy-gook[6]. That's about understanding musical structure - left-brain work - and there's a component to it that's really hard work."
Spin, 12/87

Инструмент

On his Synclavier...
"I've had the machine for four years and every song I've every written, every tiny little musical doodle[7] that I happen to have thought of during the day, every completed lyric, fragment of a lyric, all the information about my gear and travelling around the world is contained on this machine. It is basically my whole life; if I travel the machine comes with me, and if it doesn't, I feel I can't work."
Music, Computers and Software, 3/88

Ждать вдохновения по три года

On writers block...
"I never gave it up in that time, this is how I make my living. I just couldn't see the point of putting a record out for the sake of putting a record out and just filling a load of tracks up with stuff I didn't really mean or didn't care about. I'm in that fortunate position of being able to wait until I'm inspired to do something, but it was almost three years and I did kind of wonder whether I was taking a holiday, or had a mental block[8], or whether I should be thinking about doing something else altogether."
Making Music, '91

On the Soul Cages...

Музыка абстрактна, а тект - нет. Но то что было у меня в голове не касалось темы альбома
"I was still playing music every day, but the most difficult thing for me now is to write lyrics. Music is kind of abstract, you can just do it, like doodling at it all the time. Lyrics are not abstract, you have to write about something, and I did want to write about something, it's just that what was going on in my mind at the time wasn't the subject of an album."
Making Music, '91

Я не делал записей до 25 лет, поэтому я имел то, что написал за 10 лет как ресурс. Я воровал оттуда то, что мне было нужно. Это прошло и последние три года я вынужден начинать с набросков.

"I didn't start making records until I was 25 or something, so I had ten years of songwriting to act as a reservoir, to steal ideas from when I needed them. That ran out, and for the past three albums, I've had to start from scratch."
Making Music, '91

"The Bed's Too Big Without You was actually an old Last Exit song written over the chords to Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out. So Lonely and I Burn For You were Last Exit songs. And some of the melody and lyrics to We Work the Black Seam, off the Blue Turtles album, came from a Last Exit Song. It took me five albums to run out of Last Exit songs, so now I don't have a reservoir to dip into at all. It's a drag [laughs]. I was 25 or 26 before I had a recording contract, at which point I had ten years of writing behind me, so I didn't really have the sophomore- album problem. Now I have to start from scratch again."
Bass Player, 4/92

Dominic:

Если я и знаю недостатки Стинга, то не скажу 3/91

On what he thought Sting's wekanesses were... "That's a difficult question. He's able to write simple tunes that people can grab hold of when they listen, and his lyrics are not just, I love you, I hate you, I want to go to bed with you,' which is usually the case with most pop lyrics. And he's very easy to get on with. He doesn't look down on musicians; he kind of looks sideways at them. I don't know what his weak points are. I'm sure they're there, though. And if I did know them, I probably wouldn't tell you."
Dominic Miller: San Diego Union Tribune, 3/91

Sting: труднее стало писать

Раньше мне писать было легче (10 лет назад, 8:): я мог сидеть за пианино и писать Every Breath You Take и говорить 'Черт! Это же хит!' и спокойно продолжать писать: 2/91

"It used to be much easier to write, because I really felt, say ten years ago, eight years ago, that I had a finger on some sort of pulse, some collective sense of what's a hit. You know, I could sit at the piano and write Every Breath You Take and go 'That's a hit, that's a big hit' - and just keep writing them. The pop scene is diffuse now, and very hard to pin down. I don't think you can write hits forever. And I don't think you'd really want to. Unless you're Irving Berlin, and he died miserable. Inevitably, your music becomes more involved, less immediately accessible."
The Independent, 2/91

"You have to keep moving on, even at the risk of losing your popularity. You can't expect your music to coincide with popular tastes forever. When we were turning out those Police albums I felt very close to the pulse. I had my finger on the pulse. I knew when I was writing hits. 'This is a hit, that's not a hit, this is a hit.' Now I don't know anymore. I don't really feel I have my finger on the pulse anymore. I think I go a little bit deeper, so it takes longer. And also your standards get raised all the time. You always want to make a record or write a song that's better than the last one. Ideas don't come that readily. When Dylan was at his peak he just poured this stuff out, incredible song after incredible song. Now he finds it more difficult. You can't be on that level of output forever. So then you have to go for quality, you have to go for saying more with less. I couldn't put out more than one album a year. Lucky if I get one out every two. Peter Gabriel puts one out every five years - it's always great. It's a slow process. I'd like to make a record next year cause it's enjoyable, it's a good process, it's good therapy. But I don't know what to write about."
Musician, 8/91

"Sometimes you just have to wait for it to happen to you, and sometimes you just wait, and you wait, and you wait. Sometimes you'll be doing something that is totally uninvolved with music, having breakfast or getting a cab, and an idea will come to you. You just have to wait and be patient."
Radio Interview with Bob Costas, '93

Те песни над которыми я чаще всего бьюсь и трачу много времени не хиты '93

"It's funny but the songs I really struggle over and really put a lot of work into tend not to be big hits. They tend to be more complex, or too complex for radio and the hits are usually very casually written. There's a lesson there."
Radio Interview with Bob Costas, '93

Когда я писал If I Ever Lose My Faith in You я знал что в ней есть 'фишка'. songwriting is a tradition that's older than rock & roll. I could live without rock & roll 5/93

"The song If I Ever Lose My Faith in You, I knew it had a hook. I thought it could be a flag ship. Once you've got a flagship, you can sail, but until you've got one of those, there's not really much point in putting a record out. But less and less do I know what a hit record will be. I used to have a very clear idea. Now I'm not so sure. I like to think I'm less about rock & roll and more about songs. I think songwriting is a tradition that's older than rock & roll. I could live without rock & roll. I haven't got this sort of religious reverie for rock & roll. I think it's incredibly reactionary and boring."
Rolling Stone, 5/93

Трудно написать простую песню: но иногда достаточно и 4 аккордов

"The hardest thing of all to do is to write a simple song. I don't think that means you can stop studying. I don't think you should really...you can't get to the end of music. That's the great thing about it. My teachers have been people like Gil Evans, who at the age of seventy-six, was still learning. Was still listening. Still had an open mind. You just don't get to the end of it. It's not just about three chords and a relative minor. If you think that then your missing an awful lot. At the same time, you can create beautiful, simple work with just those chords. So, I don't want to rely on just those four chords, but, uh, sometimes that's all you need."
Ten Summoner's Tales Interview Disc, '93

Все начинается с метафоры.

I'd always use a metaphor before I tackled anything

"As a songwriter, you're constantly looking for new sources of material, somewhere else to go. If you continue to write about yourself, it's boring for the listener and boring for you. I was looking for wider issues to write about. Not that I wanted to nail them on the head. I'd always use a metaphor before I tackled anything."
Q, 11/93

Без метафоры вам конец

"Part of your job as a songwriter is to explore areas of yourself which are generally considered to be private, your emotions, and to put them out there for public consumption or public delectation, criticism or whatever. The only way you can do that realistically is to have some form of metaphor with which to express these ideas, and without a metaphor you're really lost. I think I wouldn't even try to be confessional without a metaphor and I think one of the problems with interviews is that they ask you to be confessional without a metaphor. So I tend to be fairly guarded about that because I think I'm saying it in my songs anyway, so why do I have to explain the joke every time?"
All This Time CDRom, '95

Я не могу писать на гастролях: Когда возвращаюсь домой провожу около 6 месяцев просто размышляя о том, что я собираюсь делать осташуюся жизнь! И потом я начинаю. Все начинается с опустошения:

"I think of songwriting as my profession. But having said that, I do tend to avoid the occasions when I have to go to work. I can't write when I'm on the road, so the longer I tour, the more I can postpone having to face that blank page which fills me with terror. When I eventually do come home, I spend six months walking around wondering what the hell I'm going to do with the rest of my life ! And then I begin. It comes from being empty for some of the time. Being creative is a cyclical thing - you have output some of the time and input some of the time, you can't do both at the same time."
TOP Magazine, 3/96

Я склонен к бессознательному написанию песен:

"I tend to be able to write a song - unconsciously almost - and look back on it and go, what am I saying here? And sort of find myself in the song - find my anxieties and needs are in the song. I think it's all the same song, basically. All the songs added up will represent your life - your progression as a songwriter and a person. It's all there in a veiled sort of way."
TOP Magazine, 3/96

"Sometimes songwriting is a bit like building a car out of scrap metal. You get a bit from here, and a bit from there, and lo and behold, it sometimes goes.''
The Baltimore Sun, 3/96

Talking about the writing of Mercury Falling...

Ритм прогулки способствует написанию мелодии: Поздно ночью я теперь не работаю: стал старше

"I think the rhythm of walking is really conducive to composing melody. And lyrics, too, tend to invade your consciousness when you're walking. I walk on my own for miles and compose, then I go back home and try to put things down in concrete form. I don't write songs on the road, so for the next year I will not even think about writing songs because I'll be on tour. But when I finish, it will begin to nag me that perhaps I should go into creative mode now. And that's the beginning of it. Then I start walking to relieve anxiety and things come. I'm also much more patient with myself than I used to be. I clock on in the morning after a walk and I like to have something written down by lunchtime, then I will return after lunch to consolidate it. And I no longer work late at night. I used to live in a state when night and day were the same thing. I was just up all the time. You can sustain that when you're young, then you have to go with the seasons."
The Boston Globe, 3/96

"I tend to start on a record immediately after I finish touring for the one before. I have that desire to fill the emptiness and accomplish something. So, I'll just start wandering around, sort of humming tunes to myself, and hoping that rock & roll occurs. It doesn't for a while, and then for some reason, something will occur to me, a line, a couplet, a melody and then a song, and I'll just build on that. It's a totally mysterious process."
US Magazine, 4/96

Я должен написать такой материал, что бы он заинтересовал музыкантов, которые играют со мной

"This band has the ability to jam to the skies, and in restraining them, there's certainly a tension there that works. I think the musicians like that. You know, one of my biggest tasks is to keep the band together, and the only way I can do that is giving them stuff to play that challenges them and engages their enthusiasm. And once I've engaged their enthusiasm I feel that I've succeeded, and selling records and everything else is beside the point."
Guitar, 4/96

Чувство anxiety

"Well, most of my life has been spent in a state of anxiety - I worry a lot. And I suppose that that's the whole aggravation that creates the pearl - I create because of that, so I'm not ungrateful for being anxious. Sometimes I'd quite like to do without it, but I think it's just a part of my personality."
US Magazine, 4/96

On heartbreak songs...
"For some reason, the relationship in the minor key is much more compelling. Just "I Love You, you love me" - it's very two dimensional. Whereas "I love you, you love somebody else" - there's much more to go round there. I mean, I'm not saying I haven't ever had a heartbroken moment. I'm not having one now, but I remember when I have, and I suppose I'm drawn to that."
US Magazine, 4/96

On writing the soundtrack for Kingdom of the Sun for Disney...
"It's possible that it was one of the reasons why Disney put their interest in me, because the story happens in the old Inca empire. I accepted because the challenge was writing music for children. It was something I have never done before, a real shame for a father of six. So, I was puzzled to see if I could do it or not. It's been a hard task..."
La Naciуn, (Argentina), 3/99

Я достиг того уровня в написании песен, где только моего жизненного опыта уже недостаточно:

"I think I have reached a level in my songwriting where I don't have to experience everything in an autobiographical sense. Things don't have to actually happen to me for me to be able to empathize. In a lot of my songs I put myself into the position of other people to be able to develop sympathy or antipathy for them. I don't write about myself although I could. It simply isn't important."
Trends & Fun, (Germany), 2/00

the right riff

"If you've got the right riff, the song can just write itself. That's what happened with Walking on the Moon. I wish I could find another one of those every day: a simple, easy, three-note or four-note riff. The whole song is based around its cadence, and I'm very proud of that. But there are no rules with songwriting. I can write a song on piano, and I can write one walking down the street or at the computer. I try to explore as many different ways to write as I can."
Revolver, 3/00

Люди несколко циничны на счет смысла в музыке: Смысл песни на переднем плане их не интересует. Сегодня он должен быть завуалирован, в противоположность пропаганде 12/99

"People are a little cynical about music carrying messages. Unless the message can be linked to entertainment first, they don't want to hear a message. Today, messages have to be veiled, as opposed to spouting propaganda."
Sky magazine, 12/99

Писать песни глазами других, не себя

"I am content now. But I have a reservoir of pain and longing to last the rest of my life. Frankly I don't need to put myself through that to write a song. I don't have to be confessional or biographical. It's about stepping into people's shoes and seeing through their eyes. I mean, a transsexual prostitute is about as far removed from my experience as you could imagine. But it's interesting to try and look at the world from their point of view."
TOP magazine, 12/99

Музыка для среднего возраста

On the suggestion that his music was 'middle-aged' or 'middle-brow'...
"If people are saying that I don't give a fuck. It's sort of a scattershot technique really. I'm not aiming for any particular, specific demographic when I make music. My philosophy about music is that it's for everybody. It should be a unifying force in society. It's often in this modern world used to separate people: 'I like heavy metal, so I don't like anything else. This is good music, everything else sucks.' I think that's bad for music, it's bad for society. So in a way, I'm happy when older people come to the shows, or young people, I don't mind. I make music for myself. I do it to amuse myself. Whether other people like it or not is beside the point. I mean, it's nice, but..."
Icon, 12/99

Нужно написать понятную мелодию на эту неразбериху. Это я люблю. Мне нравится писать песни в необычных размерах напевая на них мелодии которые можно легко насвистывать. Но я должен использовать свои ощущения и интеллект чтобы сделать это интересным для самого себя. Детские считалки мне не интересны.

"You have this surface of easily listenable tunes overlaying[9] this complexity[10]. That's what I like to do. I like to write songs in very odd time signatures with tunes on top that you can whistle. I need to engage my own intellect and passion and make it interesting to me. Nursery rhymes[11] aren't interesting to me."
The Soul Cages 'Why Should I Cry For You?'

Associated Press, 11/99

Авторство и группа!!!

Энди и Стюарт вдруг захотель в одну ночь стать авторами, в то время как я долго этому учился

"One of the problems in the Police was that I had the best gig in the band; everyone wanted to be the guy who wrote the songs, and that couldn't be. In the Blue Turtles band, there was a sense that everyone knew what their function was. I got the best drummer, saxophonist, bassist, and keyboard player I could find, so I could concentrate on being the best singer and songwriter I could be. I didn't have to fight for my right to be [the songwriter], so it was much easier and more creative. But Andy and Stewart certainly made key creative contributions to many of the Police songs, even if they didn't write them. They're fantastic musicians, and they did enhance the songs. But the songs themselves are very personal - that aspect had nothing to do with the band. Maybe this sounds terrible, but when people talk to me about "Police songs," I say they aren't Police songs, they're my songs. Andy and Stewart had never been songwriters, but I'd been writing for a long time. Suddenly they were in a successful group, and they wanted to become songwriters overnight without having gone through any of the training."

Bass Player, 4/82

"I get titles. It's common sense, really, because the title of the tune coincides with your hook line, your chorus. So I write titles and work backwards from there. I think the best songs are written with both at the same time, they just find themselves somehow. A title will suggest a certain rhythm: Don't Stand So Close To Me, Da da da da da da. Or Driven To Tears - Da da da da. And it writes itself. There's only eight notes in the scale. The craft[12], which is the hard part, comes in after that. It's weeks and weeks of joining bits of inspiration that cement together."

Musician, 6/83

Во мне как бы два человека: серьезный и удачливый

"My personal life is in my songs, in an archetypal form, of course. At the same time, I regard myself as quite a complicated person, and there are very complex things going on in my head. Many of the songs seem quite contradictory, and I seem to be two people: on the one hand, a morose, doom-laden character, and on the other, a happy-go-lucky maniac. I am as ambiguous as Martin, the character I played in Brimstone And Treacle, and I didn't have to delve too deeply into myself to excavate him. He's definitely an exaggerated version of me. The songs are also very folded in because there's no point in stating the obvious. You implicate the audience and draw them in by forcing them to discover things. So, to a certain extent, the songs are abstract, but if I look at them closely I can see that I'm writing about my private life."

Rolling Stone, 9/83

Почему чем старше - тем больше слов и длиннее песни?

Песни серьезные, эмоциональные и просто для удовольствия

On why his songs have become wordier and longer over the years...
"You have to balance the whole thing. There are songs I did spend a long time on and that I really care about. There are songs that are emotionally charged and there are other songs which are just written for fun, for a laugh, or because the words sound good. I think this record is balanced between frivolity, over-indulgence and actual meat."
Q, 12/87

Политические песни

Хэви метал - тоже фундаментализм:

On whether there is a need for 'political' songs...
"If you're being honest, if there's any integrity at all in your work, what you see and what you believe has to be reflected in it. If something strikes me in that way then I'm forced to write about it, not because I think it's a necessity, but because I can't help but write about it. I think you can put ideas across quite eloquently that eight weeks of Senate hearings couldn't. Nothing but confusion has come out of the Iran-contra thing. It's confusing for people. They see one set of values apparent, and another set of values underneath it which is completely contradictory. Fundamentalism is in music, too. Heavy-metal music is the music of the fundamentalists."
Musician, 12/87

Не понятно как песни складываются

"Songs just kind of grow. You get a little seed idea and it's almost like a DNA code that comes into play as the limbs grow, verses grow, and a bridge and a chorus grows. And it plays this code, like the DNA. And basically, as a songwriter you actually only monitor it and control it. You don't produce it. It's kind of mysterious, and no matter how much credit you take for it you're the agent. And I'm not really sure how the process works."
Spin, 12/87

"When I wrote Every Breath You Take I knew immediately it was a hit. When I wrote Don't Stand So Close to Me, I knew that was a hit. There was no arguing with those songs."
Rolling Stone, 2/88

Кризис в творчестве

On song-writing, pre-Police...

"It was pretty much like what I write now. I see songwriting very much as a craft, which is learned by trying to handle almost every style. And once you've got your chops together, songwriting is a modular system. You chop, you change. I'm quite adept at writing songs. What you can never be adept at is being in tune with inspiration. That's the Great Accident, the Great Imponderable. I used to get so terrified of not being able to write a song. "What am I going to write about? I'm totally empty of ideas and inspiration." And then I realised after about five years of this terrible block that some of the time you have to be on "input." You just have to receive and then retransmit it and hope it comes out as something else."
Rolling Stone, 2/88

Писать квартет используя принцип алеаторики

On his Synclavier...
"Someone asked me to write a string quartet and before I would have shied away from it. When I first started out I was writing the string quartet in a very linear way; the machine tends to dictate a linear approach to things. So I worked out a new way of using it. I would write the viola part, for example, and then I would fly it random down the line. And then I would write the violin part and try that... random down the line. Introducing the concept of random into the computer, and then they would meet at a point which I hadn't decided. And sometimes it's very exciting when they meet because you'd find things you hadn't planned for. You also make a lot of mistakes and things come out that aren't very good. But then you can go on the screen where everything is written down for you and edit. I'm writing this symphony by using the computer, but I'm also using what I call serendipity, which is 'happy accident'. There is a lot of criticism that electronic music is too mechanical, that there are no risks and no chance in it, but I believe that this approach I've invented allows for that."
Music, Computers and Software, 3/88

Я пишу альбом когда у меня готово 10 песен, а Спрингстин когда у него 60:

"I was talking to Bruce Springsteen and he said he's got 60 songs for his next record and he can't decide which ones to use. When people ask me how I decide when the record's finished, it's easy... when I've got ten songs written, ha, ha. If I haven't got a core idea for something, I don't even start it so my albums tend to be pretty much all I've written. I filter as I go. I don't finish a song and then say, no I don't like that."
Making Music, '91

"You do feel nervous, yes - this is what I want to do for the rest of my life, yet I'm always thinking, 'where's the next song coming from?' People say 'Sting, how do you write songs' and I say 'I have no idea.' It happens occasionally but I don't know the buttons to press; I hit them by accident. I'm just glad I do."
Making Music, '91

"I worry about writing the next song. When I finish writing a song, I look at it and think 'A miracle has happened here, but where's the next one going to come from?'. I make my living out of songwriting, not through touring, not through record releases but songwriting is where the money comes from to feed the kids and send them to school. So I worry about it, and your waiting on something that's a mystery. I've no idea how to write a song. I've probably written 300 songs, had 300 songs published but I don't know how I do it. I know I sit in a room with a piece of paper or walk around the garden - I know where I do it, but how I get inspired, I do not know. I can't tell you or predict when its going to happen, so it does create anxiety."
Radio Interview with Bob Costas, '93

"I've never had a (songwriting) partner. I sometimes wish I had. It means I have to compete with myself. Some songs take months. The best come quickly and are very simple. They are given to you."
The Independent, 5/93

метафора

"If you're going to write an issue song you've got to find a metaphor or it becomes terrible. I'm always accused of writing ecological issue songs, but the fact is I've never written one. There are no songs by me called "Don't Chop that Tree Down" or "Don't Put Chlorine in Your Swimming Pool".
The Independent, 5/93

"The ones that come quickly have already been written somewhere else. You just compile them. If you take, say, Every Breath You Take, which is probably my most successful song, it wrote itself. It's completely generic - a rhyming dictionary come to life. Yet there's something compelling about it that I can't explain."
Mojo, 2/95

"Songs have a currency that lasts for years, as I know to my benefit."
Mojo, 2/95

"I think to write an original love song is more difficult than writing a political song because that has been ninety-nine percent of the subject matter of most songs since songwriting began. It's been about love. And yet both require the same tools, you need a metaphor, you need a good tune, you need a structure that works. I never begin a song unless I have a metaphor. I don't start with a good first line, I start with the whole idea in my head about what the song's going to be about, and I work backwards from that point."
All This Time CDRom, '95

Когда работаю, то не слушаю музыку около года

"When I'm writing a record, I tend for about a year before not to listen to any music. I just don't want anything in my head except what I'm working on. I don't listen to much music anyway. I don't find music all that relaxing. I tend to analyse anything I listen to and I would prefer to turn the stereo on and sit back and be blown away - and it's very rare that I do that."
TOP Magazine, 3/96

Песни как дневник

"My songs, are like a diary, where you can look back and say what my preoccupation's were."
TOP Magazine, 3/96

"I'd say it was getting more difficult - once you begin. But I'm trying to be more relaxed about it. It's a paradox: it's more difficult, but I'm more relaxed with the difficulties."
TOP Magazine, 3/96

Вы можете слушать песню на разных уровнях

"I don't like to underestimate the audience. If people want to get information from my songs, then that's fine. But you can listen to a song on so many levels. You don't have to know what the hell I'm talking about - or on the other hand you can take it further and write a thesis on it. But I always assume on first listening you'll be intrigued to go a little bit further and find out what it is that inspired me and what I'm on about."
TOP Magazine, 3/96

"Basically, I think you learn as you progress in the craft of songwriting to fold your meaning inside something else, just so the listener has the pleasure of finding it themselves."
Guitar, 4/96

Что бы заинтересовать музыкантов и жену

"First I need to amuse myself - I need to engage my own interest. And then it's really my wife, and my band. And that's it. If I can engage their enthusiasm, I carry on, and if I can't, then it doesn't go any further. And that's almost enough really. If it goes on to sell millions of copies, that's almost a side effect. To engage the people I work with and have them enjoy the work, that's enough."
US Magazine, 4/96

Метафора

"I don't write about issues unless I can find a metaphor to express them. I'm not a propagandist."
Advocate, 4/96

По сути - сонатная форма

Структура песни из плохого - в нечто символическое, о чем бишь жизнь, потом в середине происходит момент взаимодействия первого со вторым изменяя историю к некоему катарсису, как терапия

"I did a show for VH-1 called Storytellers where you talk about your music. In doing that, I found something out about song structure.

Basically in the first verse the lyric sets up what's usually a negative situation. You're down and low and all alone.

The second verse moves on to something more symbolic: is this what life's about, does everyone feel like this?

Then, if you're obeying the rules, the middle eight forces you into a harmonic change which should be reflected in a thematic change in the story.

In a perfect song, that will lead to a key change which makes you look for a way out musically and lyrically. You can't write a third verse about still being down in the dumps[13]. So the rules of pop song structure will force you into some kind of catharsis, the thing will move. It's therapy. It puts the songwriter and the listener into a state of grace."

Q, 5/96

Творчество из кризиса

"The conceit[14] is that to be relevant[15], you need to be angry or alienated[16] or unhappy. I fell into the same trap[17]. I thought I had to be in pain to write, so I'd literally[18] manufacture opportunities when I could experience this stuff. It worked for a while, until one day I realised I was destroying myself. By various means[19], I was actually trying to kill myself. You have to look for other models of creativity - Bach was a genius but he was also happy to just sit in the kitchen with his kids!"
Time Out, 6/96

"I'm starting to recognise the pattern, and so it makes it a little easier. I just go from one creative crisis to another - that's what the pattern is. I'm always in crisis because my whole way of living is predicated on this very fragile membrane of matching the ability to write songs to the popular taste. So I think it's necessary to be a little anxious about whether you can do it or not. Also, I don't know where else creativity comes from, except from that little nagging[20] doubt that you have that you're useless. I think you've got to be a bit neurotic about whether you can do it in the first place, and whether it's sustainable. It would be nice to sustain this career for as long as possible. Because when it's not possible any more, it will be very apparent[21]. There'll be no argument: you're out, mate. On the other hand, I've had a good innings[22] - a very good life. It's very nice to be in the charts, and it's very nice to sell lots of records, but it isn't the be-all and end-all of everything."
Billboard, 9/99

Писать песни в мажоре трудно, да и сидеть над текстами куплетов не хочется:

"Happy, contented songs are the hardest to write; those in a major key, the kind that have positivity and heart - especially when you just won't settle for rhyming couplets, as I won't. That said, I find writing any kind of songs hard. It's what I do - what I love to do - yet I spend a lot of my time avoiding doing it. It's why I go out on tour for 18 months or two years at a stretch. Playing live is a way of not writing songs, of not having to face the blank page."
The Times, 12/97

On the suggestion that his music On Brand New Day may have lost the 'edge' of some of his previous work...
"I don't know if my music now has an edge. I'm a fairly happy person at the moment, and my music has to reflect that level of happiness and balance. I would be untruthful to myself if I said: 'This is about danger and risk and edge[23].' That's not what my life is about. I did go through that. I manufactured situations where, to be creative, I manufactured pain and used other people (to do so). I have no intention of doing that again. I have enough memory of pain, and can use it. But it doesn't reflect my current life. I am happy."
San Diego Union Tribune, 10/99

Вступления в моих песнях обычно отличаются от самих песен, что можен вас удивлять. Я был бы рад если бы это когда-нибудь стало нормой:

"I like standards, pieces from the Thirties and Forties. At that time, it was customary[24] to put a prologue before each song, often with a completely different musical idea - and when the actual song began you would be really surprised. That's why some of my songs work the same way. I would be happy if they became standards one day, too. That's my ambition - perhaps my only one."
Trends & Fun, (Germany), 2/00

Становится старше - не значить быть менее острым

On whether he is losing his edge as he gets older...
"I don't think so. Getting older, I'm faced with more crucial issues than "my girlfriend left me." I'm facing issues of mortality, responsibility, issues of conscience and moral judgement. So no, I don't think I've lost my edge at all. I think I am the edge. The whole idea of rock'n'roll is to stay young and not to have any responsibility. Well, that ain't happenin' here. If I was doing that, I'd look like a fool."
Sky Magazine, 12/99

"My challenge is to make pop music complex enough for me to dig and yet simple enough for people not to be turned off. I want it to deal with issues that I'm concerned about, and yet not be too highbrow or too highfalutin. I'm trying to achieve a balance between those two things."
Sky magazine, 12/99

Я мыслю себя в первую очередь певцом, я не пишу то, чего бы сам не спел

On whether he sees himself as first and foremost as a songwriter...
"No. I'm a singer first. I don't think I'd write songs that I couldn't sing. If I didn't have a vehicle for my songwriting I wouldn't bother... I see myself singing, hopefully, when I'm much older. I want to do that. But I don't know that I'll become Liza Minnelli or Tony Bennett."
Icon, 12/99

Подтекст (subtext) пропаганда

"I never tackled an issue, social, political or otherwise, unless there was a metaphor in which to dress it up. I was never into writing propaganda or polemic - Fragile is about the rain, They Dance Alone is about people dancing on their own. Okay, it does have a subtext but you don't have to know it. Now, I am of the opinion that when you write about romantic love it is an analogue for the human condition anyway. It's about connecting human beings, it's about optimism for the future, it's a stake in the future."
The Muse, 09/99

"I'm proud of all my songs. It's an emotional as well as financial asset to have songs people love all over the world."
Philadelphia Inquirer, 6/00

Writer's Block...

"I have a game plan, if you like. I'm going to New York to do a Brecht play on Broadway, The Threepenny Opera, and I've signed up for a year. One, it'll keep me out of the jungle! Two, it'll keep me in one place for a year, so hopefully being stuck there will get me grounded and I'll be able to be creative again. At the moment I can't think of anything to do, I can't think of anything to say that's particularly useful. I haven't really got a direction. It's frightening and at the same time it's quite relaxing. I'll just wait. I've got enough money in the bank to keep me going for a while, so I'm not worried about that. I'm not panicking about my creative life. I think things will calm down and I'll get back to it, but at the moment I'm so blinkered about this thing (Rainforest work)."
Q, '89

"It's afflicted me every time I've tried to write something, but never to the extent where I haven't written anything for three years. Not even a couplet, not an idea. Obviously, if you make your living writing, as you know, and you can't write anything it's over. It's very frightening. Hence you have to really start working out why, and I think once you discover why you're not writing, that's the key to finding out how you ran write. I think it really goes back what I did at the end of the last record, which was done over three years ago. I immediately went to work and did a mammoth tour. At the same time, I was just getting over the death of my mother and my father died about six months later. I figured the modern way to cope with death is to ignore it, just work through it. It's the modern thing to do - you go to work. Really, I think it's fear. You're scared to actually deal with the enormity of what's happened and you try and pretend it hasn't happened. So I did that, I worked my butt off, and I got to the end of the tour, and I went off on some rain-forest project, and I didn't stop. I didn't want to think about it. Then, having done all that, I said: 'Well, I have to make a living here, I have to make a new record. What will I write about?' Nothing. There was nothing. I was punished, in a way, because I didn't actually go through the mourning process."
Rolling Stone, 2/91On the Soul Cages...

Musical Influences...

"I'd listen to the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks. Learning the chords to 'Dead End Street' was a major breakthrough. I borrowed some jazz albums from school - didn't like any of the records, but I thought it would do me good. I'd listen to album after album of Thelonious Monk piano solos and I thought - this must be doing me the world of good because it's just so awful. Gradually it grew on me. It was the same with blues. I'd listen to loads of blues albums, and I just didn't like them. But I persevered[25] because I thought they were doing me good. It was like having to take some kind of medicine. Eventually I grew to love things like that. But at first it was a real effort. I just endured them because I desperately wanted to be hip, you know. There was an elite group of us in the sixth form. Very snobbish we were. We knew who John Fahey was. We'd heard of Thelonious Monk. We'd heard Jimmy Witherspoon. We were horribly precocious[26]".
Melody Maker, 4/79

On meeting Bob Marley in Los Angeles...
"He liked what we were doing and this rasta came round and took me into the house where he was staying. He knocked at the door and a voice comes over the entry phone saying 'who's there?' This guy answers 'I and I mon' and I'm standing there trying not to laugh."
Sounds, 1/80

"I've always loved black music. I've been in love with black music from day one. I'd seen James Brown, various people. Bob Marley I'd heard, but it didn't have a great effect on me at first. In retrospect, I do like him very much now, and I think my singing was greatly influenced by him early on. But no, I didn't listen to much reggae then, I don't now. A lot of it is pretty samey."
Musician, 12/81

"I'm not a plagiarist, but I'm open to influence. There aren't that many bass lines. In heavy rock there are perhaps four or five. In jazz there are a lot more and I think Walking On The Moon is a very jazzy tune. In fact, I've heard a jazz group play it much to my delight and that's satisfying. If you ever meet Gil Evans or Quincy Jones I'd like them to hear my music. I think it's been borrowed from those sources and it's gone into pop and now I think it deserves to go back."
Guitar World, 7/82

"I learned from listening to Miles Davis. Some of his finest solos are maybe three notes over eight bars. In fact. I think Kind Of Blue and Porgy And Bess are my two favourite albums. The latter being the first time I was exposed to jazz orchestration, and Kind Of Blue made me aware of the creative use of space combined with rich textures."
Musician, 6/83

"I was always interested in the less obvious things. When everyone around me was playing rock'n'roll, I was playing jazz gigs and getting into people like Thelonious Monk and (John) Coltrane. In fact, I started off playing dixieland - very trad! - and then I got into more big band stuff and reading music. A lot of it was real shit, but I also learned a lot from it, especially the way musicians like Miles Davis play - that economy and simplicity. That really influenced my rock playing a lot, plus the fact that I had to learn how to play bass lines and sing at the same time, even when the two worked across each other. That's when I first began to appreciate the importance of what you don't play - the importance of silence in music."
Playgirl, 10/83

"I started off in Dixieland jazz groups playing trad, two notes of thump-thump. Loved it. Very close to rock'n'roll, really. Then I moved over to mainstream jazz and later big band, where I learned to read on the job. I had to play all the crap and rubbish, but it did serve to expand my vocabulary, which got me in the habit of using my creative troughs to improve my skills. A lot of rock musicians have not had the privilege of working in other forms. Pete Townshend, as good as he is, hasn't played much outside his idiom, and that's a great shame. Same thing with John Lennon. See, I don't think Lennon did enough work. Yes, he was inspired and wrote some great stuff. I just wish that in between those creative peaks he'd worked at his craft. He wasn't a great musician, and yet he could have been."
Musician, 6/83

"For the last two years I've been listening to Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. They were didactic as hell. They wrote ugly songs, but they made you think. Come on now - listen to the radio today - whose lyrics do you think about?"
Rolling Stone, 9/85

"I wanted to work with jazz players because they have the facility and ability to cross barriers that, say, country musicians wouldn't have. Hopefully we'd get something that wasn't strictly rock and roll, that wasn't strictly jazz, but was something else."
Newsweek, 9/85

On Miles Davis' Bitches Brew..."For me, it was almost as important as hearing the Beatles for the first time. It was a bit like taking acid - not that I've ever taken acid - but I can imagine it's as cathartic as that. Also, 'In a Silent Way'. Most of Miles's work has been influential to me. I learned about space from listening to Miles Davis."
International Musician, '85

"When I've stolen music, my wish isn't to trivialise, but maybe to popularise. I think there's a difference. It's an attempt to point popular music in a direction, or admit your sources and say, "Well, this came from that, if you like this then you'll like that. This is the real stuff." I try to be honest about influences. "This melody was stolen from Prokofiev." It's useful. I think a lot of people read Jung from listening to Synchronicity. I don't know if they understood it, but it can't have done any harm. Pop's good at dropping hints."
Musician, 12/87

"Pop music can, more than any other music, be an agent for change. Classical music, jazz and country are so set in their ways that you can't operate inside of them. Pop music takes from all of them like an octopus; it steals."
Musician, 12/87

"Where life comes from is taking from one environment and putting it in another. It might be uncomfortable for a while, but it'll produce something new. It's something I try and do with pop music, and I'm going to try it with the label. Most pop musicians now are nothing but archivists. They pick an archetypal record from the '60s or '70s and they remake it. I do the same, but it's not the sole purpose of what I'm here for. I want to try to do something new; it's what everybody should be doing. I try and borrow from everything that I hear."
Musician, 12/87

"I think pop music needs to be less homogenous. It tends to feed on itself. If you look at the charts these days you can hear the archetypal record that the current hit is based on. Anything that feeds on itself eventually dies. What I'm trying to do is to look for the roots of popular music before the 1950s. I don't think pop music started with Elvis Presley. That's why I included this song Secret Marriage which was adapted from a melody by Hans Eisler. Kurt Weill, Eisler and those people were classically trained musicians, students of Schoenberg who crossed a bridge to Broadway shows, to popular music. That bridge still exists. So I'm going from pop music, finding out about them and how they wrote chromatically, and hopefully bringing it back. There's a source here that is not used."
Q, 12/87

"Jimi Hendirx was like a Venusian. Like someone from another planet. All that hair. And there were hardly any black people in Newcastle - I think he actually was the first black person I'd ever seen It was absolutely electric, almost too awesome to deal with. You felt like you were on the edge of a precipice. 'Hey Joe' had come out only the week before. That was what decided me to become a musician, although I'd probably decided in some vague way already. But seeing a live gig like that was so much more effective than listening to records. I'd been into The Beatles before, but this was the beginning of rock music as opposed to rock 'n' roll. It was heavy. Not like Bon Jovi."
Timeout, 12/87

"For me the greatest music ever performed was Mozart. It's pretty, happy, it's pop music and it's wonderful. If I were to choose a piece of music today that I wanted to listen to, I'd listen to Faure's Requiem. I'd rather listen to that than Schoenberg or Ornette Coleman. It speaks to my soul. I like harmony. Music for me is order out of chaos, and the world is chaos. If you go on-stage or on record and you produce nothing but dissonance and an arrhythmic wall of noise, you might be reflecting reality, but you'll empty the concert hall. I think you have to seduce people. Basically you have to make them feel welcome, feel warm, and maybe during the set, disjoint them. Which is actually more effective than playing for someone who's braced themselves for an hour of noise. I've sat in concerts of modern music. I can hear what they're doing, but everybody's bored rigid! There's a greater challenge for a musician to write something meaningful in a major key than to write something meaningful in a minor one. I much prefer to write in a minor key because it's easier. To write something that's good in a major key is a triumph. I love pop music, because pop music educated me to other music forms. It was the first type of music I heard. On British radio Mantovani was played next to Jimi Hendrix. It was Rosemary Clooney, then the Rolling Stones. You got that kind of world music thing thrown at you. That's not possible now. You listen to any American or British station and you get this same kind of homogeneous music all day long. That's not good for music."
Musician, 12/87

"Not in the sense that it's particularly ethnic, mind you, but more like the music of a person educated by the radio. The British radio was very eclectic, and I think my music reflects that. Although I do pick up ideas in my travels, I try not to make them too overt. I like music that kind of jumps out of the form, has few parameters".
Creem, 2/91

"I actually started on guitar - we had a band down at the local youth club, and I remember learning all of Eric Clapton's solos on John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. When I played guitar on the first Blue Turtles tour, I could still churn out all the cliches on the blues numbers - but I was a much better guitarist at 16 then I am now."
Bass Player, 4/92

On his spatial, economic approach to playing bass...
"A lot of it came from listening to Miles Davis early on. Much of his best work consisted of three or four notes spread over eight bars. Kind of Blue showed me you could use space creatively and still have sophisticated textures. And then Bitches Brew made me realize jazz musicians could play rock & roll and really burn. It was something I could emulate as a teenager. Everybody else was listening to the Stones and Led Zeppelin, but that's not what I was interested in. It's funny - Branford Marsalis can play all those Jimmy Page solos and Yes tunes. While he was learning them, I was trying to figure out Monk and Miles!"
Bass Player, 4/92

"Paul McCartney was a model in terms of being a bass player/songwriter. He had a good understanding of the bass's function, both melodically and contrapuntally. Anyone who plays bass and sings knows that most bass parts go against the rhythm. It's a counterpoint, and if you're singing on top of it you've got two lines weaving in and out of each other."
Bass Player, 4/92

"One day when I was 10, at the swimming baths in Wallsend with some friends; flicking towels at each other's balls, I heard "Love Me Do" on a transistor left by some attendant. I heard these two voices in harmony, dove-tailing in 5ths and 3rds. I thought it was incredible. It wasn't the Beatles who made me a musician. I was always going to be that. But the Beatles made me a composer."
The Independent, 5/93

"One record I really loved was Bruce's (Springsteen, that is). I wrote him a note saying, 'You bastard'. I hope he has the same feeling when he hears my record. But otherwise, I hear my children's music, I guess. I have to steel myself against going in there and saying, 'Turn that fucking row down.' Then I realise it's Blur, or Oasis, or Coolio. I'm hearing what's current through them and not because I choose to."
The Independent, 2/96

"To give yourself a label is self defeating, and I'm a bit of a gadfly in terms of style. I haven't plowed one furrow for the whole of my life, like just rhythm & blues or folk music or jazz, but I use all those elements. And it creates its own genre, almost."
US Magazine, 4/96

"I discovered rock and pop during the boom in soul music - Aretha, Booker T., James Brown, Otis Redding. Puberty was raging, and I was discovering dancing, drinking and sex, so that music has real meaning for me. But I wasn't interested in just copying brilliant records - what's the point? You can't better Otis Redding or Marvin Gaye. But you can put an ironic twist on it, pervert it a bit and combine it with other elements to make it your own."
Guitar World, 7/96

"I like perverting rock and roll into as many different colors and hybrids as I can. Not to show off, but because that's the way I experience music. I've always preferred mongrels to purebreds in music. In the Police we combined rock, reggae, punk, jazz and God knows what else. And I still aim to create something fresh and new with whatever musical forms seem appropriate. Probably because I grew up as a child of BBC radio here in England. You'd hear this incredible mix, Mozart followed by Hendrix or Coltrane, Scottish folk and African music. I hate the tendency to put music into separate ghettos, as if Celtic music is some separate system from Brazilian music."
Guitar World, 7/96

"You can scratch the surface of my songs pretty lightly and you'll find someone who wanted to he James Taylor at the age of fourteen. And the Beatles were obviously very influential because of their background; they were educated in a way that was very similar to me. I think the Beatles are responsible for England producing successful musicians in the same way that Bjorn Borg is responsible for Sweden turning out great tennis players."
Interview Magazine, 7/96

"I see music as a common language, whether you live in Thailand or Memphis, Tennessee. The whole of music is open to plundering. Everyone steals from everyone else, it's as simple as that. My forte, if you like, is mixing musical styles, blending them together. I'm not really into pure rock'n'roll or pure jazz or pure anything any more - in fact I never really was. I like impureness. I like music without any artificial barriers. I don't know, maybe I'm just getting better at it. I suppose it's a mark of maturity, both as a musician and - I hope - a human being."
TOP Magazine, 3/96

"It's increasingly a perversion of mine to elasticate music until you can't recognise it as a style. The vulcanisation of music, which has been brought about largely by radio programming and having to put a label on things, is not something I want anything to do with. I'm playful with musical forms and I have been accused of being diletante about it, but it's not that way at all. I'm not interested in pure music at all."
Music Week, 4/96

On Jimi Hendrix...
"I was about fourteen. He played at the same time as his first single came out - which was Hey Joe - and that totally changed my life. He was the first guy who wasn't only a pop star, he was a virtuoso musician. I'd never seen anything like it, that idea of combining being a pop star with being a real musician thrilled me. I eventually decided I had to take the bull by the horns and move to London and believe in myself. It was a big risk in that I had a job and a family and a pension scheme. So I had to say this is it, if I don't do it now I'll never do it."
The Big Issue, 4/96

"I've been criticised for being too stylistically diverse since going solo, but it has become my thing. I've become my own category, which maybe I should escape from. Having succeeded at one thing, I feel the need to move on to the next stage, even if I'm not sure what that is. The more I learn about music composition, for instance, the more I realize I don't know. It's an onion, and you keep on peeling it. I think rock'n'roll is very reactionary and conservative in a way. It decides that there's these three or four chords and that's it, it doesn't grow. I mean, I like rock'n'roll, but it's a closed system."
Interview Magazine, 7/96

"They (The Beatles) are among my strongest influences. The Beatles created records with songs, not albums of one single style. A lot has been argued in favour of making single style records, but that's not what I am interested in. I like different moods, different colours, different instruments and different influences."
Trends & Fun (Germany), 2/00

"I spent most of last year listening to Cheb Mami, the great Arabic singer, who has an incredible, swooping voice that just mesmerises. A friend introduced us, it was love at first sight, and, rather impetuously, as lovesick musicians often do, we jumped right into the studio together. I had a melody to a song called Desert Rose and asked him to improvise a bit; he created a lovely counterpoint, and everything took off from there. The amazing thing is, he didn't understand a word I was singing. But the lyric he improvised was almost the same as mine - it had to do with lost love and longing - which goes to show how the music suggested to us individually the exact same emotion. It cuts across all cultures, whether you're Arabic or Western European or Japanese or African. Music is the universal tongue."
Sky magazine, 12/99

"I loved the band 'Traffic' for their way of creating a musical universe without these boundaries, because whether it's country, pop, gospel, heavy metal or classical music, it's all a single language, a code. The only way to get ahead with music is to dissolve these boundaries. Of course, pure jazz or pure folk is nice, but to play it does not interest me as a musician. But where jazz meets pop or pop meets classical music - that's where it clicks. Okay, sometimes these blends sound clumsy or horrid, but sometimes you're lucky and you create something good and new."
Trends & Fun (Germany), 2/00

Critics & Criticism

"Praise is a very bland commodity. It's much more saleable to say somebody's an idiot, or too didactic. If I was a critic I'd do the same. You can't just say, This guy's brilliant. You'd be out of work. I understand that. I don't mind people taking the piss, so long as it's funny. I think most critics are fair."
Q, 5/89

On the critical World In Action TV program that alleged misuse & mismanagement of rainforest foundation funds...

"I arranged a meeting with the programme's researcher. I told her there was a lot wrong with that program. The program says Raoni lives in a slum in the outskirts of Brasilia. She said to me, 'Oh, I know that was wrong.' I said, 'Why wasn't that edited out?' She said, 'I don't know.' The program also said 15 Indians died of malaria. What it didn't say was that 15 Indians had died over the last 10 years - a couple from drowning, a couple from old age, a couple from heart attacks. They gave the impression 15 people had died last summer. No one died last summer. They didn't include any information about malaria. Malaria is an endemic disease. In other words, if a person has malaria and you move that person to a place where there isn't malaria, all you do is move the malaria. What you do is give them medical aid until the malaria has subsided and then you move the village - which is exactly what the Rainforest Foundation did."
Now Magazine, 3/91

"That was the critics' problem, that whole pretentious wanker campaign. Their problem."
Q, 11/93

"In a way no one wants you to succeed in more than one field. It would be too much to bear. And, yes, I think I'm an easy target, so I don't think anybody's going going to pick up points for hitting me. I mean if I listened to the critics, I'd be off in a little room somewhere, cowering in a corner. Yes, they can shoot me down, but for me, failure's no disgrace. My life has not been a total success, certain things have failed, one of my marriages failed, some films have been disastrous, but I don't think they've been disgraceful. I've learned from them; I have no regrets about them."
Q, 3/93

"People don't want you to be good at more than one thing."
Q, 3/93

"I saw Denis Leary deconstruct me on television last night. He said, 'Sting singing about saving the fucking rainforest - he should save his fucking hair.' I want to meet Denis Leary in about ten years.'Hey, Denis, how's it feel, ya bald cunt?'"
Rolling Stone, 5/93

"I suppose I am fair game, but it is important to take your own work seriously. There are no rules which say you can't express yourself in the words of a pop song. If the critics are so clever, why don't they write songs? I do mock myself now and again, but the critics don't see that. They want to be the ones to do the mocking. Rock stars are not supposed to be articulate. They're supposed not to know what they're doing. That's the critic's job, to tell us what we are doing."
The Independent, 5/93

On his Rainforest work...
"All the same, eventually the criticism did evaporate simply because I stayed in it this long. It was all shit, utter crap. Nasty. Here's a rock star doing something he shouldn't, let's get him. But they didn't get me. I stuck to my guns and, lo and behold, they leave me alone."
Q, 5/96

"I think it's better to be marginalized. Then you've got nothing to lose. If you're cosseted in the warm glow of critical love, you get spoilt and lazy. My self-esteem doesn't really depend on who understands me and who doesn't. I'm a human being, and it's nice to be loved, but sometimes it's nice not to be."
Live!, 5/96

"I've always annoyed people. I had teachers at school that called me annoying. I've always been a fucking pain in the butt ! That's just me. National Review magazine in America said a few years ago they said that among the five biggest pains in the ass in the '80s, No. 1 was Gore Vidal, and I was No. 3."
US Magazine, 4/96

"I think the they're pretty confused about me, and I think on the one hand I'm an arrogant bastard and on the other hand I'm a do-gooder ecological bum. And also that I'm a rich bastard. It's a lot of extremes. But I have a lot of freedom because there's no consensus. I exist between the extremes of the bastard and the nice rainforest friend. But I don't want to start saying, "Oh, I'm not like that - I'm not that person." Because it doesn't matter - it's just a myth, and it actually shields me."
US Magazine, 4/96

"I've never been the darling of the critics, but that's been a good thing. It makes you tougher to be marginalised."
Vox, 5/96

Literary Influences...

"I read a terrible book last week, by a woman called Ayn Rand, a real reactionary piece about the virtues of selfishness and capitalism. I try not to confirm my prejudices when I'm choosing what to read. I try and readjust about everything. Good books...I spent last year reading conspiracy books: 'The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail' which I couldn't put down, and books about the Freemasons, and a great book about the Vatican called 'In God's Name', about the Pope who only lived for 33 days as Pope, and the accusation that he was murdered by a combination of Mafia, people involved in the Vatican bank, and one or two cardinals as well. Wonderful story for a Catholic to read! Great stuff. I love conspiracy theories, whether they're true or not is beside the point. I like scandal, as long as I'm not involved!"
NME, 6/85

"Somebody just handed a book to me called "Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake and I'd never heard of Mervyn Peake, and I started to read this book and I couldn't put it down. Then I read the second book of the trilogy which was called "Gormenghast", and then I read the third book called "Titus Alone". I just fell in love with this world that the man had created, a sort of gothic world based on a castle with an ancient history. I eventually ended up buying the film rights to this book and meeting Mervyn Peake's widow in London and trying to get a movie made of this book. I failed in that. What I did do with the BBC was made a radio play which actually satisfied my need much more than a film would have done because radio is a medium where imagination is important. You have to imagine vast distances, you have to imagine impenetrable darkness. If you close your eyes the words create that, so in many ways it was the perfect medium for Gormenghast"
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

On James Joyce...
"Part of my education at school was to read "The Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man". It's really about catholic education in Ireland. I'd been brought up catholic myself I related to a lot of the fire and brimstone and guilt. That was really the subject matter of that book. I went on to read "Ulysses". I still don't understand "Finnegan's Wake" to be honest with you. I've tried to read it a number of times but I just find it too dense. I'm told that you should have fun with it, you know it's wordplay... it's like music."
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

On Quentin Crisp, author of "The Naked Civil Servant"...
"Quentin Crisp is a very special man, a very heroic man in many ways. He's probably the most famous gay of the twentieth century and he was openly gay at a time when one, it was a criminal offence and two, it was very dangerous to proclaim yourself gay. He's a hero. To meet the man now - and he's very old now - he still has an amazing storytelling ability, an amazing grace, an amazing dignity. I wrote a song called Englishman In New York about him. I think he moved to New York when he was in his seventies, lived in the Bowery which is a pretty heavy area, and is celebrated as the hero that he is. He's a man who is himself. Be yourself no matter what they say. He was one of those people."
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

On E.F. Schumaker...
"E.F.Schumaker is probably most famous for writing "Small Is Beautiful" which is a treatise really against the idea of big is better, you know, corporations and massive nation states. I suppose really it's about village life and small communities that are self sufficient. He also wrote a wonderful book called "Guide For The Perplexed" which I suppose is about the need for spirituality, how that we haven't really replaced that in our society at all well. There are a lot of empty churches. Society has had religion since there's been society, and now suddenly we feel confident enough not to have any kind of religion. Are we going to replace it with consumer fetishism, which is another kind of religion, but "Guide For The Perplexed" is a very logical explanation of spiritual life, without being preachy or threatening about eternity."
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

On Vladimir Nabokov...
"I'm probably the only person in songwriting who has used Nabokov's name in a pop song. It's caused an awful amount of trouble - people would write letters saying 'What's a Nabokov?' or 'How dare you sully the name this great Russian author in a pop song?', or 'How dare you be so pretentious to rhyme Nabokov with nasty cough?' - I forget what the rhyme was - I think it was shake and cough rhymed with Nabokov. I just think it's funny. He wrote "Lolita" which is a story about middle aged lust and youthful beauty. I quite like the idea of literary references in songs, it doesn't do anybody any harm. Maybe a few people read "Lolita" because it was mentioned in a song, who knows?"
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

On Geoffrey Chaucer...
"Geoffrey Chaucer was something that all English schoolchildren had to read. It's written in middle-English, which was very close to German and it's the way people spoke in the 13th and 14th century. It's related to modern English but it looks like a foreign language and when you're twelve years old it may as well be in Mongolian. But you plough through it, and you plough through his most famous work "The Canterbury Tales". One of his most famous tales is the Summoners Tale. A summoner is where my surname - my surname is Sumner which has been sort of shortened - and the Summoners Tale is mainly about farting, I think. It's a very anti-religious tale. He has a running battle with the monk who is also one of the pilgrims, and it's about the corruption of the church basically - and farting."
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

On Cormack McCarthy's "All The Pretty Horses"...
"Cormack McCarthy is someone I discovered quite recently. I read "All The Pretty Horses" and it's a very beautiful and sustained poem set in Texas in the forties. It's about two young cowboys who ride into Mexico across unfenced land. That was the last time in history when you could do that - when you could ride hundreds of miles without seeing a fence. Again, it's one of those books that can make you cry - it can touch something deep inside you and it's very hard to explain what that is. I think it's the power of words. Some of it is written in Spanish and it has this wonderful reservoir of vocabulary that's Spanish/English. It's all about horses and the technicalities of horsemanship and being a cowboy. It's a wonderful vocabulary."
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

On Carl Jung...
"Carl Jung was a Swiss psychologist who developed a dream theory, after Freud. He worked for Freud but parted the ways with him, and he's probably most known for his theory of synchronicity, which is the theory of meaningful coincidence. All of us have examples in our lives of coincidence - you meet someone, someplace and their father knew your father. Everyone has examples of this. Jung managed to weave a theory around the meaning of these things, somehow existence was kind of holographic and everything was connected to everything else and that there were no real accidents, everything had a sort of meaning. As an artist, as a writer I think it's good to embrace this kind of thing because it means that any observation that you make has some sort of meaning. It has to. Carl Jung came along in my reading at a time when I probably needed it. I was in the first flush of success in the Police, it was the most successful time of my life and probably the most unhappy. I was miserable, everything was going right for me and my life was falling apart at the seams. This book just sort of coincidentally turned up and I started to read it, and I started to analyse my dreams and ended up going to a Jungian analyst to try and figure out what the hell I was doing and who I was, and where I'd been, and I found it very useful. I sort of channelled all of this information into my songs, starting to use dream imagery in my work. It was fun. Whether it was therapeutic, I don't know. It was fun, and I'm here now and I'm reasonably sane, twenty years later, and I think Carl Jung can take responsibility for that."
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

"Brecht has always attracted me in that sense of angry, angular, cynical, yet funny, entertaining side. I think Threepenny Opera is an entertainment, first and foremost. It's not one of his most overtly political works. But it does have a core."
GQ, 12/89

"Well, there's a lot to learn from Brecht's work - I studied him in school and have generally learned a lot from that guy. But there's a lot of bullshit in his stuff, too. Information in songs is important obviously, but it shouldn't be perceived as boring lessons."
Creem, 2/91

On Gabriel Garcia Marquez...
"I just finished reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude", by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and I wept at the end of the book because it had a heart and an eloquent genius to it that seemed beyond human ingenuity. It was about how close dreams and long-term realities can be. As it charts the strivings of a family over a century, predictions and visions come true, for better or worse, but you see them taking shape from the start. It takes enormous courage and belief to meet your destiny in life; you can see it so closely, and yet you still have to struggle toward it. Once you're aware of its existence, it's more a hard-fought objective than a preordained fact. That's why many people miss their calling, their destiny, or allow themselves to get beaten down on the road to finding it. Strange how things can be magical on the one hand, and heartbreaking on the other. We all begin with such enormous promise!."
Spin, 7/85

On Gabriel Garcia Marquez...
"For some reason when I finished that book ("One Hundred Years of Solitude") I wept. It just made me very tearful. It was one of those books that I just didn't want to finish. I wanted to keep living in this novel. I suppose I always look for that in now in novels - to make me do that, to make me tearful, to make me emotional and cry. I think it's much easier in movies to do that because you have music going and you have acting, but in a novel just to do it with words, just to make people feel something deep inside and well up that way is a wonderful talent. And particularly when it can be translated into English from the Spanish and still mean something wonderful."
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

"I think those people (Jung, Koestler) came along at a time when I needed them. I needed therapy badly. I had Jungian therapy and it was very creative and it related to my work. I got to Jung through Koestler. The first thing I read by Koestler was a book about laughter which wasn't a lot of laughs."
Q, 11/93

On Arthur Koestler...
"Koestler was an Hungarian йmigrй who ended up living in England. He was a great populariser of people like Carl Jung. He popularised very complex East-European dense intellectual ideas. The first book I read of his was called "The Act Of Creation" which is basically a very thick tome, scientific tome, about laughter, and why we laugh at certain things what the mechanics of a joke are, which I find interesting. It's not a very funny book to be quite honest with you, but deeply interesting. He also wrote "Ghost In The Machine" which is really about what we are - are we just machines, are we just a molecular pattern, or does consciousness exist somewhere else? Is the mind different from the brain? I happen to believe it has to be. If you arrange a load of milk cartons in a certain way they don't have consciousness, nor do our atoms. From somewhere else we have consciousness, and I think - it's my only religious belief - that we are more than we seem."
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

On Shakespeare...
"Shakespeare I suppose is the literary equivalent to Mozart. He just seemed to spew out beautiful language like he couldn't help it. And the number of words that are coveted to his name is quite phenomenal. I suppose it's quite like Bob Dylan - he was channelling something - every line of Shakespeare has so much availancy and depth, it's quite difficult to comprehend the talent or whatever it was. So I've taken it upon myself to freely rob Shakespeare whenever I can. There's some wonderful lines that you can just rob him wholesale - he's in the public domain. so it's always good to throw the odd bit of the bard in. I think you're allowed to do that if you're English."
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

On "Treasure Island"...
"The first book I read from cover to cover, when I was seven years old - I remember this - I was very proud of the fact that I'd read "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson. My comprehension of it I'm sure was limited. I read every word on every page. I was very proud of that. I maintain some memories of it, I suppose a sort of sympathy with pirates. I think I've become a modern day pirate in many ways. The idea of hidden gold, the black spot, and life on the high seas has always appealed to me. If I had to choose another period, I suppose that would be it really. The Spanish Main would be for me."
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

On TS Eliot's "The Wasteland"...
"TS Eliot is probably the most English of American poets. He was an Englishman by choice, even though he was born in Illinois or somewhere like that. I think "The Wasteland" is a poem that at school we used to have to learn by heart, but I suppose it's the poetry of alienation and desolation. I think it's closely linked to Samuel Beckett's work - "Waiting for Godot", that landscape of total war. The landscape of total desolation and where does that leave man. I can't point to an influence in my work at all and say 'Well that was influenced by TS Eliot, but I'm sure that all this stuff goes in and comes out somewhere."
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

On Paul Bowles "The Sheltering Sky"...
"Paul Bowles has written very many books but he wrote a book called "The Sheltering Sky" which became a film by Bertolucci, a few years ago. I read it long before it was a film. It's one of those most beautiful, sustained, poetic novels I've ever read. It's about Americans that regard themselves as travellers and not tourists, and I class myself in that category. I'm a hopeless tourist, but I'm constantly on the move. There was a story within that story - that was a sort of Arab legend that was told in the story of three sister who invite a prince to a tea party out in the desert to have tea, tea in the Sahara. They have tea, and it's wonderful, and he promises to come back and he never does. They just wait and wait and wait until it's too late. I just loved this story and wrote a song called Tea In The Sahara. I don't know whether Paul Bowles ever heard it, probably not, but it's still one of my favourite songs."
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

On Buckminster Fuller...
"I'm very fond of the idea of optimism as regards the future. I think it's necessary to be optimistic about the future because the alternative is actually unthinkable. There's a lot of doom and gloom and a lot of people have this idea that the world's going to end in 1999 or whatever, this apocalyptic idea that we're going to be heading for St John's apocalypse, and it's all tied in with basic fear. And not being a fearful person, I feel optimistic about the future. Buckminster Fuller is one of those people who are optimistic, who had ideas about sharing resources and using resources for the whole world, as opposed to just selfishly trying to horde them for ourselves. He's an important author from that point of view."
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

On "Interview With The Vampire"...
"The song was inspired by a book that was just given to me, somebody just handed to me after a gig - I think it was in New Orleans. We were staying in the French quarter, and I started to read this book late one night. It was one of those books I read in one sitting, I was totally enchanted by this story. Not so much by the character Lestat who everybody seemed to like, but by the other character. The Louis character interested me far more, he seemed to be much more reflective and much more interesting in a way, and I wrote Moon Over Bourbon Street based on that one reading. The idea of being a vampire and being a predator, but regretting it all the time knowing that there was something morally wrong with your lusts and your hunger, and I love the struggle that is going on in that character's head. There was a kind of movement of people who thought that Lestat who became a rock star in resulting books was based on me. He wasn't the character I was interested in at all."
All This Time CD-ROM, '95

"I'm a horrible snob when it comes to literature."
Rolling Stone, 5/93

in the January 2001 issue of Rhythm magazine

The following article appeared in the January 2001 issue of Rhythm magazine. The author was Pat Reid.

No breach of copyright is intended through the reproduction of this article/interview. Copyright lies entirely with the original author and publication - it is reproduced here for non-profit purposes only and to share with Sting/Police fans and will be removed immediately upon the request of the author or publication.

Making a Racket.

When punk pioneers Wayne Kramer and Brian James decided to get a new band together, they thought they'd ask a couple of of their drummer friends to help out. The friends in question were none other than stellar sticksmen Clem Burke and Stewart Copeland. They talked exclusively to Rhythm about the past, the future and Mad For The Racket.

The rumours spread like wildfire in the poolhalls and guitar shops of London, New York and LA. The word was out. Someone was putting together a team to do a job: a very special job. Names were mentioned: The Damned, The MC5, The Police, Blondie, Guns 'N Roses. Assembled in a punk rock underworld, the outfit saw rock'n'roll revolutionaries rubbing shoulders with polo-playing movie composers. It had a name: Mad For The Racket.

Wayne Kramer aka "The Guvnor" was the guitarist in the MC5, the legendary (and, yes, they really do deserve that tag) proto-punk trailblazers who blasted out of Detroit in the late '60s. After a drugs-related jail sentence, Kramer released a flurry of critically-respected solo albums in the 80s and 90s. After talking about it for years he finally hooked up with the original line-up of The Damned to record a joint album. Mad For The Racket was born. Kramer says that the idea behind their album was all about 'capturing joy'. Maybe that's why he and James felt the need to assemble one of the mightiest line-ups ever to grace a rock record. Duff McKagan of Guns 'N Roses fame was drafted in to play bass, while drumming duties were rationed out to two of the biggest and best names in the business. We'll be meeting them in a moment. The resulting album, entitled "The Racketeers" and available now on reactivated '60s label Track Records, is a furiously punky effort. If it wasn't for the somewhat weather-beaten lyrics and Wayne Kramer's suitably lived-in vocals (he divides singing and guitar duties with James), you'd think it was a bunch of teenagers, making music for the first time and not particularly caring who gets hurt. Oh, and check out the spectacularly nasty drumming. Obviously, we need to get to the bottom of this:

California Sunrise

It's another beautiful morning in LA, and Stewart Copeland aka "The Professor" is taking time out from his current, highly successful occupation as a Hollywood film composer to talk about punk rock. "Brian James is my long-standing hero from way back in 1977," he states briskly. "When the punk explosion hit, most of the groups were crap. In fact, they were all crap. Except for The Damned, who were so exciting that it would be pretty safe to say that it was The Damned that made me spurn my art-rock group, Curved Air, that I was in at the time, and inspired my whole deal, which became The Police and: er a polo team. I offered to give Brian a ride on my polo ponies but he wasn't interested for some reason:"

Mad For The Racket has to be some of the least-sophisticated recording that the stupendously versatile Copeland has ever done. Was it fun? "Yeah, it was. It was just a day and actually I was a little out of shape at the time. I met Duff that day and he's fun to play with so I went home and practised a bit and it's too bad we didn't record it a week later, 'cos I was inspired by it. I went home and got some of my chops back together. I haven't really played drums in about ten years. I've been a film composer. But with the combination of Mad For The Racket and my other group Oysterhead, I've actually got back into playing in various different forms - heavy metal with Mad For The Racket, art-rock improvisation with Oysterhead. With Oysterhead we've only played one gig and that was is New Orleans. It's the guitarist from Phish and the bass player from Primus, Trey Anastasio and Les Claypool. The buzz on the group was so incredible and the tickets sold out in about 12 minutes and then were scalped for $2000 on e-bay. Anyhow, the combination of these two things got me practising my drums again. I've also been working with a 20-piece orchestra and that's what I'm going to be doing at next year's NAMM show."

So where did he record the Mad For The Racket material, and what kind of gear did he use? "It was a studio that specialises in analogue gear," replies Copeland. "The studio is all about those vintage microphone sounds, valve amps and so on. I spent the day in there with Brian, Duff and Wayne. Wayne has become a major hero of mine, incidentally. MC5, I was brought up on, you know? 'Rambling Rose' and 'Kick Out The Jam, Motherf***ers' - which arrived in England as 'Kick Out The Jams, Brothers and Sisters'. They dubbed it in, you know? But he gave me a bunch of records that he's made since MC5 and they're f***ing great. The man is a real observant poet. His lyrics are are very wry. He's been there and done it. When you talk about the revolution, he's put the time in. A very cool campaigner."

Stewart Copeland is ready to depart. His studio awaits, and in the movie business times equates to astronomical amounts of money. One last question: on the album we couldn't actually work out which tracks were Stewart and which were Clem. Can he enlighten us?

"The ones that are a little bit slicker, those are Clem," he deadpans. "Because I think he probably still plays drums for a living:"

The English Connection

Holed up in Hove on England's genteel south coast, Brian James aka "The Geezer" is explaining how he roped in two of the best drummers in the world to play on The Racket.

"It started with Wayne and I writing an album together," he says, his voice still friendly and boyish after a quarter-century in the music business. "And then inviting friends down. Duff came down to do a couple of numbers and refused to leave, basically. It was done over a two-week period in LA. I've known Wayne off and on since the early '80s. He came down to a couple of gigs by Lords Of The New Church (Brian's post-Damned combo) in New York and I'd go and see him in France when I was touring with his solo outfit. He's one of my old heroes, definitely.. On the album, I sing 'Chewed', 'Trouble Bones', Tell A Lie' 'I Want It', 'I Fall' and 'Ooh Baby', and Wayne sings all the other ones."

Tell Brian that his album sounds like a bunch of 19 year-olds kicking out the jams in a garage and his reaction is thrilled, "Oh Great!" This is not a man lacking in enthusiasm. "Once Wayne and I knew it was working and the songs were coming out fine it was just a question of the availability of the musicians," he explains. Still, getting Mr Copeland out of retirement was quite a coup. It's an honour, really. To me, he's always been one of the greatest drummers around. A unique style. And I've always loved Clem's playing. I was with Clem in the studio in about 1978, with Nigel (Harrison, Blondie bassist) putting down some tracks which never saw the light of day. From that point onwards I thought, 'One day, Clem, we'll do something that's going to be released'. And finally, we've done it:"

So can he tell us which drummer played on which tracks on the album?

"Stewart's on 'Trouble Bones', 'Tell A Lie' and 'Chewed'. We've got Clem on 'Christiana', 'Prisoner Of Hope', 'I Want It' and on 'Blame It' and 'I Fall' and 'Ooh Baby', that's all Clem. And there's a guy called Brock Avery, who's played with Wayne on all his solo albums, and he' plays on the other three songs. 'Czar of Poisonville', 'Nuts About You' and 'All Fired Up'. He's the guy doing that f***ing great stuff in 'All Fired Up'. That reminds me of Dennis Thompson from MC5 - he's like a f***ing machine gun."

LA Confidential

Like his drumming compatriot Copeland, Clem Burke aka "The Cat" is a major hero in the Rhythm office. Indeed, as this issue goes to press, Art Editor Kev Lowery is feverishly learning Blondie's 'Heart Of Glass' for inclusion in the setlist of Britney Speared, his current band project. "It sounds simple enough on record," says Kev admiringly. "But some of those fills are murder." Over to you, Clem.

"Wayne and I have been friends for a few years," he confides in his elegant drawl. "And Brian and I have known each other since the punk rock days of the late '70s. He came to the Blondie show in Brighton last year. The recording was all done very quickly, like a dream sequence really. I didn't know what would become of it, but we're coming over to England to play a few shows, including the 100 Club. I think Stewart plays really great on the record, you can really tell his style. I just walked in and laid down some tracks very quickly, and walked out, and those guys went to work. It's been a good experience."

So was it nice to be playing hard, fast, raw punk rock? "Yeah, it has that energy, those are our roots. I mean, Wayne with the MC5, his music's been really influential through the years, and Brian wrote some great songs. Guns 'N Roses covered one of Brian's songs - I guess that's the connection with Duff McKagen. I would hate to think of it in terms of a 'supergroup'. It's more like a group of friends got together. It has that garage rock energy - I think Wayne as the producer was looking for that."

When it came to gear for the M4R sessions, Clem stuck to what he knows best: "I was using a Premier kit, I think it was one of my old Resonator kits or something. Just my basic set-up with Zildjian cymbals."

Clem is currently getting ready to record a new Blondie album slated for release early in 2001. We can't resist telling him how great it was to see the band back at number one with 'Maria' in '99. "That was a great experience," he says gracefully. "English audiences couldn't have been better and it was a really great reception. I mean, I'm always ready to do more. I wish we'd played some festivals this past summer but I guess we're going to gear up and do some stuff next year. I'm looking forward to playing in Nottingham and London with Mad For The Racket."

While we have the great man on the phone, we can't resist asking him to clear up the long-standing rumour that he was once approached to join '80s indie icons The Smiths.

"I actually got a fax from somebody at EMI when Morrissey was going solo, to work with him, and then I don't know whatever became of that. I was up for it, but then I think maybe he had a nervous breakdown or something. Someone pointed out to me in a book, about The Smiths' first tour of America, that Mike Joyce was ill and they were going to ask me to do the tour but instead they cancelled the tour."

And would he have fancied that gig?

"Yeah, I'm a big Smiths fan. Morrissey and Marr were both really great. Yeah, that would have been a good gig... My friend Zak Starkey is actually playing in a band with Johnny Marr now, The Healers. I saw Zak over here at a bunch of the Who shows and he was playing brilliantly. He's a really good drummer."

Another British drummer who namechecked Clem recently was Robbie Williams sticksman Chris Sharrock. "Yeah, I know Chris. I've met him a few times. He's good. He's a pretty aggressive drummer but he's playing in a pop band, it's kind of like my situation with Blondie." Twenty years after Blondie dominated the UK number one spot with peerless pop classics like 'Sunday Girl', 'Call Me' and 'The Tide Is High', Clem's passion for music remains undimmed. "The main thing for me is to keep playing. I was playing with Wayne here in a little jazz club in Hollywood called The Baked Potato. It's kind of funny because we're listed under jazz events in the local paper but we're a rock band. We've been playing every Tuesday. We play and people get up and play with us. I'm inspired by the drummer Earl Palmer, who you've probably heard of. He was doing a jazz gig around here forever and I really admire him, I've learnt a lot from watching him play. He's in his seventies and he just got inducted into the Rock'n'roll Hall Of Fame. But with Mad For The Racket, it's great to play with Wayne and Brian. They're both real innovators. Mani from the Stone Roses is going to play bass with us on the UK dates. Those guys had a good drummer. What was his name again? Yeah, Reni. He was good..."

Clem Burke heads off into the LA sunshine, his head dancing with great bands, great music, great drumming. And he's entirely happy with who he is and what he does. Because the music business may be a racket but, like Wayne Kramer, Brian James and Stewart Copeland, Clem Burke is most definitely mad for it.

Reuters in May 2001 (USA)

The following article appeared on Reuters in May 2001. The author was Gary Graff (thanks Piú!).

Sting's Pain-Free As He Basks in 'Brand New Day'.

Back in 1983, Sting sang about being the King of Pain. These days, he's pain-free, not to mention prosperous. His most recent album, 1999's Brand New Day, is one of the most successful of his career, with more than 7 million copies sold. It won two Grammy Awards and netted him a spot in the pre-game show at this year's Super Bowl, while his contributions to the soundtrack for Disney's animated feature "The Emperor's New Groove" earned him an Oscar nomination.

And on Saturday in Washington, D.C., the British musician - who co-founded the Police in 1977 and dissolved the group at the height of its success in 1984 to go solo - is kicking off his third North American tour since Brand New Day's release a year and a half ago.

"It's a bit of a risk, really," says Sting, 49, who was born Gordon Matthew Sumner but adopted his mono-syllabic moniker after switching from teaching to music during in the early '70s. "We were just interested to see what the marketplace would yield, and surprisingly, ticket sales have been very encouraging, even in markets we've been to twice before - especially (in those markets), actually.

"So it's kind of gratifying that you've reached a point where you can just tour regardless of what's going on."

Fields Of Gold

Sting always seems to have something going on, whether its music, stage (he has starred in "The Threepenny Opera" on Broadway), screen (credits include "Dune," "Plenty" and "Lock, Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels") or a variety of humanitarian and environmental causes, from Amnesty International to the Rainforest Foundation, which he founded with his wife, Trudie Styler.

"I've always managed to do exactly what I like," he says, "and largely it's collided with popular tastes."

That's certainly the case with Brand New Day, which is currently being represented by the single After the Rain Has Fallen - a song inspired by Sting's visit to India while he was making the album.

"I'd been trekking in India," he recalls, and I walked into a rajah's palace one night, really late. It was the middle of the night. And there were all these guards sleeping with rifles on their chests, in the courtyard, and the first line of the song became, 'The palace guards are all sleeping.' It's a beautiful sight - and that didn't stop me (from) going in."

The album's particular point of pride, however, is Desert Rose, the Mideast-flavored track that became a smash after Sting's video for the song was appropriated - with his full approval - for a series of luxury car commercials last year.

He calls the move into that world "a calculated risk" designed to bring the song to people who otherwise might not hear it, and the fact that it reached No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, he says, vindicates his decision.

"It's an unusual song," explains Sting, who's receiving the Arab American Institute's 2001 Kahlil Gibran Spirit of Human Award for his "efforts to promote cross-cultural understanding."

"It begins with Cheb Mami singing in Arabic, which people were very afraid of at first; they thought it would be an impossible task getting that on the radio. (The ads) opened the floodgates, really; once people recognized the song, radio was much more amenable, and we ended up playing the Super Bowl!

"I know people may feel that you're cashing in, or you're playing the game too ... earnestly. But it just seemed an opportunity I was willing to take, and I'm glad we did it. But I don't think you'd find my songs selling hard liquor or cigarettes or anything like that."

Busy Horizons

With the Brand New Day tour on a kind of victory lap that will end in late July, Sting is starting to turn his attention to the future.

One project is a live album that will be recorded at a pub-style venue in Europe this coming fall, with his touring band and some "old friends" as surprise guests - including saxophonist Branford Marsalis, a frequent collaborator. "It's going to be a small, intimate gig," says Sting, who promises to "reinterpret" the songs he's been playing on the road during the past year and a half. "It'll be the same songs, but with a few curveballs thrown in there; it won't be the polished arrangements we've been working on for the past 18 months at all. We're just gonna try to surprise each other and see what happens.

He also hopes for a quick release - significantly quicker than usual.

"We want to release it the next day," he says. How? "Don't know," he says with a laugh. "I'm not the scientific boffin. We're working on it."

Sting says he expects to be working on some new music before long, likely influenced by his recent immersion in the works of Bach.

"I'm starting to get anxious about it, which is always a key to creativity," he says. "It's the anxiety, really. I finish touring the end of July, and then I'll have a holiday with the family, and then I won't have a job, so I'll really have to sit down and think. That basically is the start; I just sit and think, 'Who am I? Have I learned anything? Do I have anything useful to say?' If the answer's 'no,' I don't say anything. But that usually isn't the case."

Rolling Stone In A February 1991

The following article appeared in a February 1991 issue of Rolling Stone magazine. The author was Anthony Decurtis.

"This is my dog Willie and his brother Hector," Sting explains as his two dogs careen down the road ahead of him, barking wildly, delighted to be liberated from the house. "They actually love each other, but they're tearing each other apart right now. They're a bit crazy - apparently it's the breed. They're springer spaniels. I'm told Willie is very like me; he's my familiar. They want to get him doctored, but I refuse to have that happen."

Sting seems no less pleased than Hector and Willie to be outdoors; when the time came to start this interview, he suggested that we talk while taking a stroll. Wearing a brown suede jacket, brown suede boots and black jeans, the stubbled outline of a beard along his cheeks, he walked at a brisk pace, relishing the cold afternoon air and the physical movement.

The London home where Sting lives with Trudie Styler, their three children and one from an earlier marriage is no secluded pop star's paradise. It sits only slightly set back from a very busy street, with houses right next to it on either side (perhaps appropriately one of those houses was once the home of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet and critic who blazed the trail for British romanticism two centuries ago). Outside the door is the familiar urban world of traffic, honking horns, construction sites, pedestrians and pets. Around the corner and a few blocks down a hilly street, however, lies Hampstead Heath, a rolling, verdant landscape ribboned with walking paths. This balance of the country and the city suits Sting fine. "If you look out the back window, all you can see are trees," Sting says of his home. "And yet we're right smack in the middle of the city."

Sting seems to enjoy the common perception of himself as a man who has everything. A framed New Yorker cartoon in the downstairs bathroom of his home depicts two businessmen calmly chatting at a bar. One says to other, 'Oh, I'm pretty happy - I just wish my life was more like Sting's'. The cartoon neatly encapsulates the degree to which Sting's varied accomplishments - not to mention his looks - can incite envy even among the relatively satisfied.

Sting is the pop idol adults can admire. His infallible instinct for hooks made the Police one of the world's biggest bands, but his ventures into jazz-inflected rock on The Dream of the Blue Turtles", Bring on The Night and Nothing Like the Sun made him an acceptable figure even to the most recalcitrant members of a thirty-something generation that has turned its back on the adolescent excesses of much rock & roll. He is an active and highly visible supporter of Amnesty International and the preservation of the Brazilian rain forest. Now thirty-nine, he is handsome, but no pretty boy, and his movie roles and appearance on Broadway last year as Macheath in a production of Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera attest to a range of talents that is increasingly rare in what often seems the increasingly one-dimensional world of pop culture. Indeed, Sting's life seems charmed.

But the hanging of the cartoon on the wall of a bathroom, like glorified graffiti, demonstrates Sting's ability to acknowledge the perception of his life as ideal and, simultaneously, to mock it. It also shows the singer's self absorption. Sting finds few subjects as intriguing as himself, but that doesn't mean he is uncritical of his own foibles.

Nor do the command and personal control that Sting projects at all times come without a price. While walking along the side street that leads to the heath, Sting begins speaking about the difficulties he experienced writing the songs for The Soul Cages, his first new album since Nothing Like The Sun in 1987.

"It's afflicted me every time I've tried to write something, but never to the extent where I haven't written anything for three years," Sting says about the writer's block that crippled him after his tour in support of Nothing Like The Sun. "Not even a couplet, not an idea. Obviously, if you make your living writing, as you know, and you can't write anything it's over. It's very frightening. Hence you have to really start working out why, and I think once you discover why you're not writing, that's the key to finding out how you ran write."

The search for the cause of his literary paralysis - interestingly, he continued to be able to write music - forced Sting to address some painful emotional issues. "I think it really goes back what I did at the end of the last record, which was done over three years ago," he says. "I immediately went to work and did a mammoth tour. At the same time, I was just getting over the death of my mother and my father died about six months later. I figured the modern way to cope with death is to ignore it, just work through it. It's the modern thing to do - you go to work. Really, I think it's fear. You're scared to actually deal with the enormity of what's happened and you try and pretend it hasn't happened.

"So I did that,", he continues. "I worked my butt off, and I got to the end of the tour, and I went off on some rain-forest project, and I didn't stop. I didn't want to think about it. Then, having done all that, I said: 'Well, I have to make a living here, I have to make a new record. What will I write about ?' Nothing. There was nothing. I was punished, in a way, because I didn't actually go through the mourning process."

The friendship Sting established with chief Raoni and other members of the Kaiapo Indian tribe in Brazil in the course of his rain-forest work bore personal, as well as environmental, results for him and helped him break his creative log-jam. "Having lived and spent a lot of time with these so-called primitive people," Sting says, "I realised that death is something that is obviously important to them, because they mourn. I figured that I'd have to go through some sort of process where I would get this stuff out. Once I'd worked that out, I realised that I was going to have to write a record about death. I didn't really want to."

Sting dedicated The Soul Cages to his father - along with two colleagues from The Threepenny Opera, director John Dexter and actor Ethyl Eichelberger, both of whom died last year - and the album is suffused with imagery drawn from the singer's childhood in Newcastle, a shipping town in the north of England. As it often does, struggling with the notion of death for Sting meant coming to grips with the notion of his own mortality and led to a questioning of his life and its purpose. While many may wish their lives were more like Sting's, Sting's own life, in this sense at least, proved no different from anyone else's.

"I'd reached the age of thirty-eight," Sting says, "and I wanted to assess my life figure out what had gone wrong, what had gone right. I started at the beginning; I started with my first memory. As soon as I remembered the first memory of my life, everything started to flow. The first memory was of a ship, because I lived next to a shipyard when I was young, It was a very powerful image of this huge ship towering above the house.

"Tapping into that was a godsend. I began with that, the album just flowed. It was written in about three or four weeks. Having written all these words in a big burst, I then fitted them in with the musical fragments I had and put it together. I'm fairly pleased with the record. I think it achieved what I wanted it to achieve in that I feel somehow, I don't know, like I've done the right thing."

The ship image sits at the centre of "Island of Souls" - the haunting opening song on The Soul Cages, which depicts a son grappling with his father's death and desperately seeking to avoid following his father's footsteps to a grim life in the shipyard - and it recurs in the album's title track and elsewhere. The memory of the towering ship recalls the earliest years of Sting's life, a working-class life of limited promise that he feared was going to overwhelm him and that he felt compelled to rebel against. His occasionally haughty manner and aristocratic airs are perhaps the last remnants of that rebellion. The ship also encompasses the notion of travel and escape. The memory that freed Sting to write returned him to the deepest source of his identity and at the same time suggested access to a broader world in which that identity could be shed, in which a provincial school-teacher named Gordon Sumner could become the international rock star Sting.

As a younger man, Sting could be merciless in his observations about his background. "I suppose that part of my egocentric drive is an attempt to transcend my family," Sting told Rolling Stone writer Kristine McKenna in 1980. "I come from a family of losers - I'm the eldest of four - and I've rejected my family as something I don't want to be like. My father delivered milk for a living and my mother was a hairdresser. Those are respectable occupations, but my family failed as a family, I grew up with a pretty piss-poor family life. I lived in Newcastle, which would be like living in Pittsburgh, and the whole thing for me was escape."

Two and a half years later - in a Rolling Stone article in which he described Sting, the character that he had invented, a "this monster" - the singer was penitent. "Candidly, that article you wrote quoted some things I said about my childhood that hurt my family deeply," Sting told McKenna at that time. "I learned a big lesson there and had to work very hard to repair the damage done by the article. It wasn't your fault; it was purely my own arrogance and lack of thought. I've become more aware of the possible consequences of what I say to the press."

These days Sting is philosophic about the contradictory nature of his feelings about his past "Well, again, it's the old ping-pong of wanting to escape and then having to go back and face it," he says. "Wanting to escape the idea of death, yet having to go back and face it. Wanting to escape where I come from, yet having to come back and face it I don't think we ever leave; I think everything's a big circle. My relationship with my father was complex, and it wasn't resolved. It needed to be resolved. I think now, through some psychic working it seems to be resolved. I feel as if something has balanced out now, by having done this record. It's the only way I can do it."

All This Time the album's second song and the bouncy first single, takes another long-standing symbol of permanence and departure - the river - as its central image. Like Island of Souls, it is about a young man whose father has died, and it also takes on the religious training that troubled Sting's childhood - he has credited the Jesuits for "my venomous nature" - as its subject. In fact, The Soul Cages is rife with biblical and specifically Catholic imagery, from The Jeremiah Blues (Part 1 ), with its tongue-in-cheek nod to the Old Testament prophet of doom and its allusions to crucifixion, to the title of the instrumental Saint Agnes and the Burning Train.

"I was brought up in a very strong Catholic community," Sting says. "My parents were Catholic, and in the Fifties and Sixties, Catholicism was very strong. You know, they say, 'Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.' In a way I'm grateful for that background. There's a very rich imagery in Catholicism: blood, guilt, death, all that stuff." He laughs. "I'm not sure it goes far enough to explain our situation. At my age, I feel some of it is inadequate to explain a lot of things. So the album, although it has this religious element, is about a deeper religion.

"All This Time sounds kind of poppy," he continues, "but it's a serious attempt to look at ritual and the inadequacy of ritual in our lives. The young guy is trying to deal with the death of his father, and instead of going through the Catholic last rites, he wants to bury his old man at sea. He looks at the river as a symbol of continuity. The song basically says, 'Well, the Romans were here 2000 years ago and their religion was very important, but it went. Then Christianity happened and that seems to be inadequate now. Let's look for bigger systems of continuity, like the river, this old religion.' The song is a kind of black comedy. I'm not really anti-religious. I'm just poking some light-hearted fun and also asking pragmatic questions about it."

Sting's sense of the "pretty profound" inadequacies of Catholicism and Christianity is intimately linked with the passion for the environment that has consumed him in recent years. "I've come to believe that we made a mistake in trying to imagine God outside of nature, that God doesn't exist in nature," he says, emphasising his remarks with gestures that call attention to the natural beauty of Hampstead Heath. "Therefore to find God, we have to destroy nature. I think that's a Judeo-Christian idea, and it's not in any of the other religions of the world. I think that is the key to our disastrous treatment of the world. We don't see God in this tree - God is somewhere else. Therefore why should we respect the tree ? Why should we respect the Earth, the river, the sea? 'Man is the most important thing,' they say. 'The animals are at our beck and call, they're at our service.'

"Wrong! Absolutely wrong. 'We can have as many people on the Earth as we can possibly make.' Wrong. I'm sorry, I just don't agree with it anymore. I think it's bullshit, and I think if we carry on thinking like that, we're doomed. We have too many people - we have to use birth control. We are not the most important thing on the planet, we're part of the planet, and until we realise that, we're in big trouble."

Sting's work in support of the preservation of the Brazilian rain forest has not, however, been universally lauded. Critics have questioned how appropriately the funds raised by the Rainforest Foundation, which Sting established, have been used. In addition, some observers claim that Sting's international jaunts and high-level diplomatic meetings in the company of Raoni are the best public-relations gambits the Brazilian government could hope for. A great deal of world-wide publicity attended Sting and Raoni's meetings with Jose Sarney, who at the time was president of Brazil, creating the impression that the Brazilian government was seriously attempting to address the rain-forest issue. President Sarney failed to keep his promise to demarcate the 19,000 square mile area that Sting and Raoni wanted set aside as a preserve for the Indians who live in the rain forest. Now Brazil's new president, Fernando Collor de Mello, is having similar meetings and making similar promises.

When asked about the charge that he is being exploited by the Brazilian government, Sting first laughs with a kind of glee - a master of control, he seems almost titillated by the prospect of being outmanoeuvred - then bristles. "I think I'm a focus for international attention," he says. "The Brazilian government, if they don't want to change anything, does not welcome any kind of focus on that problem. I don't think I'm being used at all; if anything, I'm an embarrassment.

"I was in the jungle last week, and I took Raoni to a meeting place in the jungle to meet with Collor," he continues. "I didn't want to meet the president particularly, but I wanted Raoni to meet him, because Collor was making a big publicity move by going to the jungle. The military told me I couldn't stay in that village because I was a danger to national security! I laughed at them - I said, 'Are you kidding? I'm so proud of this.' Nonetheless, I had to go spend the night in another village nearby. I left Raoni, who spoke to the president, who promised that he would demarcate the land. I actually think he wants to. There are forces in Brazil that don't want him to - obviously, the military being one of them, because they see the jungle as their last vestige of power. They see it as their personal property."

While Sting is a long-time supporter of Amnesty International, having played benefits for the organisation in England well before it was fashionable, the ardency of his activism in recent years is notable because it represents such a departure for him. This is a man, after all, who, in his conviction about the importance of the spiritual world, declared in one song that "there is no political solution" and titled another one History Will Teach Us Nothing.

"I'm still, in a sense, a believer in transcendent cures for various problems," Sting says. Contemplating your navel will perhaps move the mountain one day. I think people can change one by one. If you work on yourself, you change the world in a microcosmic way - but it's getting a bit late, unfortunately. I feel that with certain issues, for example the environment, for example, you have to be active. You can't just sit there with your legs crossed and hope that the air is going to be fit to breathe tomorrow. I think we don't have very long left, frankly."

Back at his home, Sting starts a fire and sits on a sofa in front of the fireplace in his den. Though it's only mid-afternoon, it is also December in England, and the grey sky outside is already beginning to darken, deepening the shadows that take shape along the room's dark, wood panelled walls. It's warm in the room, and Sting, drinking tea with honey, wears a black T-shirt.

The talk turns to "Mad About You", a brooding ballad on The Soul Cages. "That's another one in the lust-power jealousy genre; Sting says, smiling. "I think it's a fascinating genre." It's suggested that "Every Breath You Take" is perhaps the classic of the idiom. "It's funny, I got a British Music Industry award last night for 2 million plays of that record, which, added up, is about seventeen years of continuous radio play !" Sting says incredulously. "It would be a pretty boring radio station, but the staggering idea is that this song, which is so ambiguous - it's seductive, but it's also quite pernicious... it works. This may sound highfalutin, but it's probably the song of the Reagan years - this idea that you'll be looked after by this patronising, figure. Like Star Wars: You'll be under surveillance but also... protected. That mixture of sex and power is very compelling."

Sting might have added ambition to the list. In the same 1980 interview in which he insulted his family and home- town, Sting declared: "Success always necessitates a degree of ruthlessness. Given the choice of friendship or success, I'd probably choose success." Sting laughs, collapses into the couch and buries his head in the pillows when asked what he thinks about that statement now.

"Well, I was the Sinead O'Connor of the time," he says wearily as he begins to sit up again. "I might have believed it" He hesitates. "I might have believed it. One of the reasons you're successful in many ways is you're burning with this stuff. You're tied to the stake of your own career and you have a match and you set fire to it: 'Awright, I'm gonna make it!' And that's what the Police did. We thought about nothing else but making it - making records and being the biggest group in the world. Even if it only lasted for six months, 'We did it!'

"You come out with polemic statements like that because people remember them and it's a good headline or whatever - and I might have meant it at the time. I wouldn't say that now - friendship's much more important to me than what I thought success was. Luckily, I've succeeded and managed to keep some of my friends. I believe the opposite now - but then again, it's easy for me to say because I've been successful and I have a nice life. When you're struggling, no, success is vitally important."

Sting remembers the early days of conquering America with his mates in the Police - guitarist Andy Summers and drummer Stewart Copeland - with evident pleasure. The three musicians came to this country for a club tour in 1978, very much against the advice of their record company and well before the single Roxanne from their debut album, Outlandos d'Amour, began to attract attention.

"It was right in the middle of corporate rock & roll, where to tour in America, you had to support Foreigner," Sting recalls. "You'd go on as the doors opened, people would be eating popcorn or whatever and would hate you. Instead, we headlined every night - but sometimes to three people. We played to three people in Poughkeepsie, New York, and two of them happened to be DJs, and they added our record because of that show. It was a great show I remember coming off the stage and introducing these three people to each other, who had sat alone in the Last Chance Saloon - it was actually called that, I think it might still be there. That gig has entered legend now - hundreds of people come up to me and say, 'I was at the gig in Poughkeepsie,' and I know they weren't ! "That sort of energy that we had as a band - we did four or five encores for those three people - was what did it," Sting continues. "We were a tough little unit. We carried the gear, we drove hundreds and hundreds of miles, we slept in the same bed. It was like being at war. We were out there fighting a war - and we won ! I'd never been to America - America was a dream for me. The first night I arrived from London, they drove us to the Bowery. The streets were steaming and full of bums - you know where CBGBs is, it isn't one of the best streets. I thought, 'Man, this is incredible, it's like Hades!' And the club is even worse. And we go onstage and we tear the place up. We really thought, 'Fuck it, we've got to survive here.' Stewart and I had a fight in the dressing room after the show - I thought he was speeding up, he said I was slowing down. We were strangling each other, and then we heard the calls for an encore. We stopped strangling each other, did an encore and then came back, had another fight and then back for another encore. That was our first night in America."

Fond and furious memories aside, don't hold your breath waiting for a Police reunion. "In our final year, it was very dear to me that for the sake of sanity, for the sake of dignity, we should end it." Sting says, laughing. "We had the big song of the year, the big album of the year, the big tour of the year. We were it. We'd made it - everything we attempted, we'd achieved to the power of ten. That was the time to say, 'Now we'll go off' - and we did. We haven't made a comeback tour or anything like that. I'm very proud of the legend of the Police - I think it's intact. And I want to keep it intact. I'm very proud of the work we did, and I'm proud of my association with Andy and Stewart. I've no regrets about it - but it's in the past I don't want to re turn to the Police for nostalgic reasons or for money. That would spoil it."

Despite his expressed "grave philosophical doubts about video," Sting is swaddled in elaborate Moroccan-style robes and standing in front of a dark blue desert backdrop to film a dip to accompany Mad About You; one of the four singles - along with All This Time, Why Should I Cry for You and the title track - planned for release from The Soul Cages. In this get-up, Sting looks like a dissipated cleric. He is still unshaven and - bearing out his reputation for scruffiness - beneath the robes he is wearing exactly the same clothes as the day before. When an assistant on the set gently asks, "Are you going into makeup or anything like that?" Sting replies, with slightly offended disbelief, "I just came from there." Meanwhile. a beautiful, enormous white horse has just been led into the sound stage and is being groomed and patted. Like all of England in winter, the set is freezing. "That's why the English set out to conquer the world," Sting jokes while hugging himself against the cold. "Every place else is preferable to here."

Sting will have the opportunity to put that theory to the test when he embarks on a yearlong world tour in February. This time out, he will head up a tough, streamlined, four-piece band in which he will play bass, Kenny Kirkland will play keyboards, Dominic Miller will play guitar and Vinnie Colaiuta will play drums. The band will whip itself into shape during short stands in small theatres in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York before moving into arenas.

"The strategy is that the music can grow in the small venues," Sting says. "If we immediately start in arenas, then it's arena music, so I want to start off small. I think it's your job as an artist to make every basketball arena as intimate an occasion for the ticket buyer as you can. They deserve more than being treated like cattle. A lot of the arena shows I've been to lately had industrial levels of noise without any letup. They were basically just MTV stage shows. It's like a video: wonderful dancing, incredibly loud sound - but no one playing and no one singing ! I'm not making a value judgement here, it's just not what I want.

"What I find entertaining is, instead of trying to reproduce the record, you're saying to the audience, 'Look, there's four guys here on-stage, we can't reproduce the record. We could mime to it, but here's how we'll tackle the problem of reproducing the album, given the limitation that we're only four guys.' I think it's entertaining to see people cope with those limitations, and often transcending the album. The album is just a starting point that you can grow from. You have to trust the ability of bands to interpret music. The album isn't the be-all and end-all of the music. We've got a pretty good little combo. We played in Chile at the Amnesty show this fall and we tore the place apart, so I have no fears."

Nor does Sting, unlike many other rock stars his age, harbour any fears about his ability to carry his music with some measure of decorum into the future. "A rock & roll band is essentially a gang, an adolescent gang," he says. "You get together when you're teenagers or in your early twenties - it's a kind of male thing, even if you have females. It's macho, a tribal thing - which is great. It works, and the music reflects that tribalism, a sense of having to have a rite of passage to adulthood.

"Once you've reached adulthood and you're still in the gang, you tend to be a bit dysfunctional because you're pretending that you're going through a stage which you've already gone through. You know, you watch MTV and you see these reconstituted bands who were successful in the Seventies or the Sixties, and they're getting a bit jowly and they have less hair than they used too, there's a bit of a belly - but there's these beautiful models wandering around, blowing kisses at them. It's not true! In truth, those girls wouldn't look twice at those guys - it's perfectly obvious. I feel a bit sad when I see that. There is a way of getting older and being a performer without embarrassing yourself. It's the gang thing - you don't have to be in a gang when you're an adult. You can be on your own. And that's why I'm not in a band."

On the set, Sting and the horse are building a relationship based on artistic necessity, physical proximity and what clearly seems to be a burgeoning mutual respect. Through at least two dozen takes the duo attempts to walk together on a treadmill to create the impression that the two are trekking through the desert to the stately strains of Mad About You. Sting's training as an actor and innate sense of discipline stand him in good stead. Time after time - as Sting tries simultaneously to maintain his grip on the horse's bridle, lip-sync the song's lyrics, strike suitable facial expressions, walk on the treadmill in time and keep his place in the shot - the horse nuzzles his snout against the singer's face, steps off the treadmill with his hind legs or sends Sting staggering out of the camera's frame with a friendly nudge. The bond between the two appears sealed when, after the horse grinds the proceedings to a halt by abruptly urinating on the treadmill, Sting struts over to where the horse had been standing, hitches up his pants and starts to unzip his fly, as everyone on the set bursts into laughter.

During a break on the set, Sting sits in his dressing room and assesses his attitude about his career to this point, casting a cold eye on the future. "I've tried very consciously to break the mould, to do things that rock stars don't normally do or aspire to," he says. "Of course, you end up being called pretentious. I'm not pretentious. I'm just willing to take a lot of risks, to the extent where I don't mind being ridiculed and I don't mind failing, because I think the process of trying to burst out of the stereotype is worth doing.

"The standard you measure yourself by is, Have you learned something? Often you learn more from failures than you do from success; they're often more interesting experiences in retrospect. You learn to obey your instincts. The logical process will often be the safe one. I tend, when I'm given that choice, to go the way that's not safe.

"I don't really think that people know what to expect from me now," Sting continues. "I don't think this album is going to conform to any of their expectations - I think they're expecting a record about ecology or something. If they're surprised, then I'm pleased. And the next record will hopefully surprise them again.

The Los Angeles Times in a January 1991

The following article appeared in a January 1991 issue of The Los Angeles Times newspaper. The author was Robert Hilburn.

A conversation with Sting.

Sting's new album - his first in more than three years - is a sombre, intensely personal work that grew out of the British rock star's confusion and grief following the death of his father in late 1987.

But Sting seemed unusually at ease on the eve of the album's release last week as he sat, surrounded by his family, in the living room of his spacious, two-story co-op apartment on Central Park West.

Was this the same Sting who has been seen as the quintessential loner, a restless spirit who wrote anxious tales of alienation? The man for whom travel, adventure and work were as much a confirmation of being alive as his heartbeat? The same handsome Newcastle native who has been on the run creatively ever since leaving the Police in 1984, acting in films and a Broadway musical, supporting various social causes and making albums?

He and actress Trudie Styler, his companion since the mid-1980s, have three children together, but for years Sting communicated with her largely by phone or in brief, hectic reunions in London, where the family mainly stayed, or in Malibu, where they also have a home. Not so anymore.

On this day, the couple's two oldest children - Jake, 6, and Mickey, 7 - raced around the room, carrying toys and vying for attention. The youngest child, 5-month old Eliot Paulina, rested on the floor, gazing at a small, brightly coloured toy swing set.

This wasn't just another hectic family reunion. It was a sign of increased closeness in the aftermath of the soul-searching that Sting went through about his childhood while writing and recording the new album, The Soul Cages.

"I don't think I was given a very good blueprint as a youngster for what family life could be," he said, sporting traces of a beard as he sat on a sofa. "I think I was afraid of being part of that kind of family again. I didn't want to be like my father, who was never around and who was never able to show his love. But I gradually realised I was becoming like him anyway. I am my father's son and I saw I needed to make some changes in my life. I was better at expressing my love, but I was never around either."

Q: The most surprising thing about your new album is its ambition and sophistication. Weren't you tempted to come back with a safe, ultra-commercial album to reaffirm your status as a major record seller after the failure of "3 Penny Opera"? (Sting played Mack the Knife in the widely panned and short-lived 1988 Broadway production.)

A: By whose standards was it a failure? I had the time of my life in that show. I learned all sorts of things. People often last on Broadway one night after a bad Frank Rich review in the New York Times. We did 120 nights. That's not a failure - not to me. But even if it were a failure, I'm not sure you have a choice when it comes to the kind of album you are going to make. I can only write what is on my mind.

Q: But don't you have a competitive side that wants to do well on the charts?

A: If you are the kind of person who makes judgements about yourself on the basis of where you are on the charts or how many tickets have been sold to your concerts, you are guaranteed to be in for a big shock the day those figures don't turn up in your favour, and that day is inevitable. You can't measure your work by how much it sells.

Q: Then how do you measure yourself? Take other artists you admire - Bruce Springsteen or Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel. Do you ever ask yourself, "Is this album as good as 'Nebraska' or 'Graceland' or 'So'?" Didn't you once quit racing as a youngster in England because you came in second in a championship race and wanted to find something that you could be the best in?

A: Being a musician isn't like being an athlete. In athletics, you are either Carl Lewis or you aren't. When I found people who were faster, I could see the limits of what I could do. With music, there aren't those same limits. Everyone is doing something different. We are all trying to find the individual, unique voice within us. Bruce has found his, Paul has found his, and I feel I have found mine. Once you have done that, the only measure is how true you stay to that inner voice.

Q: Was there any point where you wrote to be successful commercially? For instance, when you were with the Police?

A: Because of all the success the Police had, it's easy to assume that those songs were very calculated or aimed at a particular pop audience. But they weren't. I am immensely proud of the Police's music. I think I have been fairly lucky in that what has interested me at different times has also coincided with the public's interest. I don't want to have to underestimate the public's taste in order to be able to survive or function. As soon as you underestimate your audience, they leave you. I prefer to make a mistake the other way.

Q: When you were doing "3 Penny Opera," you said you were out of ideas for songs. How did you start finding the ideas for this album?

A: I wrote music during that whole period, but I didn't write any lyrics. I couldn't think of any subject that I wanted to put into a song and that was a nightmare. That happens periodically, usually right after you've made a record because you tend to be a bit empty. But this had gone on much too long in this case.

Q: How did you fight that?

A: I have sort of learned to become my own therapist, which is helpful because it can save you a lot of money in this town. So, I started asking myself why I wasn't writing. Is it because you don't have anything to say or is it because you are afraid of saying something? Once I started to look at that last question, I started to find some answers.

Q: You've gone through therapy?

A: I went through Jungian therapy about eight or nine years ago. I was going through a personal crisis. My marriage was falling apart and there were the problems of adjusting to the success of the Police. It lasted about a year - until I learned enough about the symbols to become self-sufficient at dealing with some of the issues. I don't believe in that school of psychology where you have to have your analyst on the phone all the time.

Q: What were you afraid of dealing with?

A: I started to free associate and it became very apparent after a few days that the thing that was most on my mind was my childhood and my father's death. That's what I had been trying to suppress. I am not the sort of person who demonstrates his emotions terribly easily. I am very English in that regard. I tried to bury myself in my work after my parents died (about six months apart in 1987). I did the ...Nothing Like the Sun tour, then the Amnesty International tour, then I went around the world trying to build support to save the (Brazilian) rain forest, then "3 Penny Opera." I felt like a man possessed. I had avoided the grieving process, but finally I couldn't avoid it any longer. I had to deal with all the repressed feelings and if you look at the first song on the album, you can see the process beginning. I'm talking about where I was brought up - my house next to a shipyard and the memories of the enormous ships and the river. The album was basically written in order. Once I got through the first song (Island of Souls), it literally poured out.

Q: Were you close to your father?

A: I think like all men of that generation, he did not show his emotions or demonstrate love. It's probably more intense in England than in America. Americans seems to be much more open with their emotion. The English aren't - the men at least, and I am that way to a certain extent. I was fairly close to my mother, but my father was a milkman who went to work at 5 every morning and was gone all day, and then he would sleep when he got home. But now I can understand where he came from in an historical context. He was an intelligent man who wasn't given any opportunity to transcend the situation, so you can imagine how frustrated he must to have been, how angry. He was a symbol to me of the whole town, which was always so bleak... Not much promise of opportunity or future. I remember going to the movies and seeing all these people and places in Technicolor and wondering, "Why couldn't our life be like that?"

Q: Did the relationship ever improve?

A: We never really got the chance. Like every kid, you grow up and you reject what your parents did, and them and everything they stood for. You go away and have your own life and then slowly you come around in a circle. I was noticing a lot of similarities between myself and my father. I was getting older and I was a father myself. I could look at myself and see a lot of him in me. I was coming around to understanding him, I believe, and ready to make that journey back and talk, but then he died. It was suddenly too late. That was really at the core of my grief. I never had the chance to make that journey back. So this record is a musical way of making that journey. Dealing with the deaths helped me understand more about myself.

Q: What did you learn?

A: I learned that it was time to stop running. On his deathbed, I had my father's hand in mine and his hand was exactly the same as mine... These big sort of milkman's hands with gnarly knuckles. And I said, "Look, we have the same hands." And he said, "Aw, but you put yours to better use." And that's the only compliment he ever paid me. It shocked me so much. It made me realise how much we missed... how we might have been able to know each other better if we had the time. I do have the time with my children and I want to take advantage of it. I have already lost part of our time. My family can travel at the moment, but there will be a period when they won't be able to travel. They'll have to stay in school and I'll have to deal with it. I'm still a Gypsy. I never unpack, but I used to always have to travel alone. I would come to New York and be on my own - live like a bachelor... suffer alone.

Q: Did you believe that artists have to suffer to make great art?

A: Oh, sure. I had this mythological idea that real creativity came from pain and loneliness. How could you write a song if you were domestically happy? So, you would manufacture situations where you weren't domestically happy. The blueprint for that kind of life is very clear. Look at all the people who have burned themselves at the stake of their own art. In some ways, the media even encourages you to become a victim... Marilyn Monroe, John Belushi, Jim Morrison archetypes. I don't want to be that. Madonna says something very clever: "Marilyn Monroe was a victim, I'm not." I'm not either. I no longer think we have to destroy ourselves to make good art.

Q: The album seems to attack religion in several ways. Do you still consider yourself a Catholic?

A: I was brought up a Catholic and I don't regret the (Jesuit) education and the sense of symbolism... the guilt, the blood, the death. All that is good for an artist, actually. But I don't embrace Catholicism today. In fact, I am against a lot of it. Birth control, for instance. It's ludicrous in this world that you can't have birth control. I also object very strongly to the idea that man enjoys a higher place on this planet. If God exists, He exists in everything. As soon as God is outside of nature, it is no longer a sin to destroy nature and, to me, that is one of the greatest sins.

Q: You turn 40 this year - is that going to be traumatic?

A: Not at all. I want to have a big party when I'm 40... Maybe do a gig with UB40 as the opening act, so that the marquee can say "UB40 and IB40."

Q: A lot of rock artists have had a hard time making the transition from teen hero to adult artist. Mick Jagger is still battling with that. Why were you able to make the transition so easily?

A: It's partly a matter of timing. You've got to make the move soon enough - before people label you. I didn't leave the Police for that reason, but the timing probably helped me. I have always hoped to confuse people and confound people so that they can't put a label on me. That's one reason I like to do different things... go in what looks like wide shifts of direction. That's not the reason to do, say "3 Penny Opera," but it is a (bonus). People don't know what to expect from me. I'm sure a lot of people would have thought this album would be about ecology because I have been so identified with the rain forest, for instance.

Q: So, focusing the album on the environment would have been a mistake?

A: It would have been a terrible mistake because it would have confirmed people's expectations and I don't want to do that. I want people to be constantly surprised by what I do and I want to be surprised as well. Besides, I didn't have anything to say about ecology as an artist at the moment. As much as I am committed to those issues, I don't want to just write slogans.

Q: Do you plan to remain as high-profile on social causes?

A: I have mixed feelings. There is a tendency when celebrities get involved with causes that some people think there is some miracle cure is at hand... that with just a few million dollars, everything can be solved. Then they don't understand when the problems don't go away. On the other hand, I think all the publicity around the rain forest did help. When this campaign began three years ago, the area of Brazil that was burning was the size of Great Britain. It's less now largely because the Brazilian government was forced to stop giving subsidies to the large land owners. But there is still so much work to be done. The key line for me in the album is "Men go crazy in congregations - but they only get better one by one." I don't believe in dogma, be it religion or political. People do have to work together, but change has to start in the human heart."

Выборка:

По сути - сонатная форма

Структура песни из плохого - в нечто символическое, о чем бишь жизнь, потом в середине происходит момент взаимодействия первого со вторым изменяя историю к некоему катарсису, как терапия

"I did a show for VH-1 called Storytellers where you talk about your music. In doing that, I found something out about song structure.

Basically in the first verse the lyric sets up what's usually a negative situation. You're down and low and all alone.

The second verse moves on to something more symbolic: is this what life's about, does everyone feel like this?

Then, if you're obeying the rules, the middle eight forces you into a harmonic change which should be reflected in a thematic change in the story.

In a perfect song, that will lead to a key change which makes you look for a way out musically and lyrically. You can't write a third verse about still being down in the dumps[27]. So the rules of pop song structure will force you into some kind of catharsis, the thing will move. It's therapy. It puts the songwriter and the listener into a state of grace."

I learned from listening to Miles Davis. Some of his finest solos are maybe three notes over eight bars. In fact. I think Kind Of Blue and Porgy And Bess are my two favourite

I'd listen to album after album of Thelonious Monk piano solos and I thought - this must be doing me the world of good

"I actually started on guitar - we had a band down at the local youth club, and I remember learning all of Eric Clapton's solos on John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. When I played guitar on the first Blue Turtles tour, I could still churn out all the cliches on the blues numbers - but I was a much better guitarist at 16 then I am now."
Bass Player, 4/92

On his spatial, economic approach to playing bass...
"A lot of it came from listening to Miles Davis early on. Much of his best work consisted of three or four notes spread over eight bars. Kind of Blue showed me you could use space creatively and still have sophisticated textures. And then Bitches Brew made me realize jazz musicians could play rock & roll and really burn. It was something I could emulate as a teenager. Everybody else was listening to the Stones and Led Zeppelin, but that's not what I was interested in. It's funny - Branford Marsalis can play all those Jimmy Page solos and Yes tunes. While he was learning them, I was trying to figure out Monk and Miles!"
Bass Player, 4/92

I think rock'n'roll is very reactionary and conservative in a way. It decides that there's these three or four chords and that's it, it doesn't grow. I mean, I like rock'n'roll, but it's a closed system."
Interview Magazine, 7/96

On Miles Davis' Bitches Brew..."For me, it was almost as important as hearing the Beatles for the first time. It was a bit like taking acid - not that I've ever taken acid - but I can imagine it's as cathartic as that. Also, 'In a Silent Way'. Most of Miles's work has been influential to me. I learned about space from listening to Miles Davis."
International Musician, '85

Собрано Славой Янко

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update 9/29/01