The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘The Picasso? It’s in the bathroom’
With a new album out, Sting talks to Craig McLean about ageing, rock ’n’ roll parenting – and the perils of downsizing
Iget confused when people say ‘purple’,” murmurs a man dressed in fashionably battered blacks and greys (knackered trainers, distressed jeans, holey jumper). “Anything that’s slightly in the gaps of the spectrum, I can’t really figure it out.”
Sting, it turns out, the artist who sang about “fields of gold” and told Roxanne to turn off her red light, is colour blind. Might this explain his purchase of the bumblebee sweater that gave him his nickname almost half a century ago?
“Well, I knew it was black and yellow,” he says. “But I used to get bashed at school for doing purple skies or brown grass. ‘But that’s what it looks like, miss!’,” he yelps plaintively.
Maybe, I suggest, those were indeed the hues of the industrial North East in the Fifties and Sixties, in the shadow of the Swan Hunter shipyard in which young Gordon Sumner was raised.
“Well, we didn’t have very many colours in Wallsend,” he agrees with a chuckle. “It was pretty monochrome in my memory.”
Over the past decade or so, Sting has given considerable thought to his background. Following on from 2004 and the evocative memoir Broken Music (the book stopped at the point where he had his first taste of success with his band The Police), the singer, in 2014, staged a semi-autobiographical musical on Broadway called The Last Ship, about the decline of the Swan Hunter shipyard during the Eighties.
It was an entertaining, polemical spectacle; Stomp by way of Alan Bleasdale. But The Last Ship didn’t last long in New York, which is perhaps unsurprising. Tyneside accents and the decline of Britain’s industrial heartland aren’t naturally in the wheelhouse of Manhattan’s jewellery-rattling theatregoers.
Sting, as we might expect, is defiant. He doesn’t do disappointment. “Actually, it was triumphant that it went on that long,” he says in a quiet, speedy, get-to-the-point style. “Most Broadway plays don’t make their money back. Just putting it on was a major triumph for me. It ran for exactly the same amount of time Porgy and Bess did, in the same theatre,” he says with another gravelly chuckle.
Is he suggesting The Last Ship might have a similar afterlife to the Gershwins’ classic opera? He ignores the question, telling me instead that he is off next week to see the production in Salt Lake City. He hopes to bring the show home to the UK in 2017.
“I’m very proud of it. But we chose the most difficult task to do – an original musical about a difficult, serious subject, competing with Kinky Boots or Jersey Boys.”
Sting is in London, over from his home in New York, sipping a double espresso in a nice hotel and agonising over the morning crossword. He is here to talk up his new album, 57th & 9th, named after the Hell’s Kitchen crossroads near where the recording took place. His 12th solo release is