Sting returns to songwriting and roots
Debut musical The Last Ship set in his hometown
Sting’s memories of his school days aren’t exactly fond. The son of a hairdresser and engineer fitter’s mate, he had priests to deal with.
“I got a scholarship to a grammar school,” recalls the singer, songwriter, actor and, now, dramatist. “So I was sectioned from most of the people I was brought up with and put in this school uniform, and was sent on a train to Newcastle and taught Latin and physics and all that stuff.”
For a young boy from the streets of Wallsend on Tyneside, the rupture was cataclysmic. The elevation of Gordon Sumner to a better school five miles away would, ultimately, send him all around the world.
“That split was pretty, ah, radical,” he says. “(To) people I’d spent time with in school and the streets — suddenly I was this different creature.
“And that was it — I didn’t really see those people again. I was cut off.”
In fall 2013 we find Sting in New York, his current preferred home — one of seven properties he and wife Trudie Styler own worldwide. But the couple’s uptown-Manhattan apartment is close to his current workplace and in situ project — which, in turn, is closer to his heart than any Sting creative endeavour since his 1991 album The Soul Cages, which reflected the death of his parents.
He might have a lifelong antipathy to revisiting his alma mater, but Sting’s new album-cum-musical-play is, resoundingly and winningly, the sound of him Going Back.
The Last Ship is set in the shadow of the Swan Hunter shipyard of Sting’s youth. In its current incarnation, it is a folk-influenced song cycle featuring characters drawn from the songwriter’s past, and from his imagination. Jackie, the foreman. Jock, the singing welder. Gideon, the kid who fled for the horizon 14 years previously and who, at best, has “an ambiguous” relationship with his hometown and, at worst, “he hates the place.” Adrian the riveter, the yard’s intellectual and agitator, who’s gifted “with rhyme and metre.”
Peggy, the barmaid. Davey, the drunk.
“I don’t think I’m romanticizing very much what I experienced as a child of that community I was brought up in,” Sting says. “It was incredibly hard and dangerous work. Actually most of the men who worked there f---ing hated it. And yet they had this enormous pride about what they built — this palpable example of their handiwork. So there’s this constant ambiguity about the shipyards. They were awful, awful places, and yet they produced the biggest ships in the world, and the whole town was proud of those things.”
The album is released this month, and features vocals from Sting (showcasing a super-strong Geordie accent), actor/singer Jimmy Nail and AC/DC’s Brian Johnson — proud northeast Englishmen all — and folk contributions from uilleann piper and fiddler Kathryn Tickell.
The book of the theatrical production is undergoing a typically lengthy writing and rewriting process. Most of the auditions for the stage show have been completed — Nail, for one, plays the key role of Jackie.
At time of writing, a movement workshop is under way in New York with Scottish choreographer Steven Hoggett. All of which will culminate in the premiere of The Last Ship in Chicago next summer.
The songs are vivid. Together the irresistible melodic efficacy, the stirring folk musicianship and the narrative power, The Last Ship becomes arguably the best Sting album since the ones he made with the Police. His most recent work, the albums inspired by Elizabethan composer John Dowland (2006’s lute-based Songs from the Labyrinth) and by hymns and carols (2009’s If on a Winter’s Night), feel like the height of abstraction and pretension next to the heartfelt Last Ship.
Swaddled in scarf and sweater, he speaks in a low husk, his speech both clipped and rolling. He seems tired, or perhaps distracted by the demands, only two shows in, of marshalling this twohour-plus, multi-character, special show. He’s stated that this brief residency is the only time he’ll ever perform The Last Ship.
Whatever the reason, he barely makes eye contact, preferring to gaze at the stage, or at the 1920 Martin Ditson parlour guitar cradled in his arms. He plays it onstage, too, loving the sound and the compactness of the instrument. Even if he weren’t musclebound, the undersized guitar would look small in his arms.
‘They were awful, awful places, and yet they produced the biggest ships in the world, and the whole town was proud of those things.’
STING
“I like tucking it under my arm.” Lest we need reminding, “I’ve had a f---ing bass strapped over my shoulder my whole life,” he says, smiling.
He says he’d long considered “revisiting” The Soul Cages, “where the demise of the shipyard became a sort of useful metaphor for the demise of my parents. It had a kind of theatrical mood, but there wasn’t a narrative — it was just a mood piece.” Four years ago he decided to “have a go at trying to make a story out of it. And I read a story about some shipyard workers in Gdansk in Poland who built their own ship. I just loved that. I thought it was a really wacko, Homeric idea. And I thought: ‘I’ll weld that idea to my town.’”
He wanted to know: “Why was I born in this place? And why am I here?” Because he regards New York as his main residence, he pitched his idea to a Broadway producer, Jeffrey Seller, who had staged the hit musical Rent.
Impressed, he introduced Sting to playwright Brian Yorkey. Sting also talked “a lot” about the work-in-progress script with Newcastle playwright Lee Hall, creator of Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters.
Further research came via Billy Connolly, who began his working life as a Clydeside welder. Over lunch the comedian/actor told Sting how welders, encased in reverb-friendly metal helmets and breathing in fumes, were “all crazy and they all sang. That really tickled me.” The resulting song, Jock the Singing Welder, “is actually one of my favourite songs in the show,” Sting says. Other songs were written with Nail in mind — although Sting and Nail both splutter at the thought that the no-nonsense Nail is anything as highfalutin as the musician’s muse.
Before The Last Ship, Sting hadn’t written for eight years.
“But as soon as I started this thing, they just came out. It was like they’d been bottled up inside me. It was like automatic writing, almost.
“Ah,” he nods with a sigh and a furrowed brow, “very pleasing.” He describes the “filter” of adopting other people’s voices as “(making) me feel easier with my songwriting ability”.
But if that eight-year drought was writer’s block, what was the reason for it?
“I always say, if you’ve got nothing to say, don’t say anything. I got tired of dredging up stuff from …” He stops. “You know, there’s a lot of inward navel-gazing as a singer-songwriter. It’s part of the gig. But at some point you get sick of it. And then expecting other people to scrutinize it and observe it and comment on it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that.”
But what of a multimillionaire rock star writing a play about working-class people and a destroyed industry and community in the city he’s spent his whole life escaping — that’s a bit rich, surely?
Well, for one thing, the preview performance of songs from The Last Ship was very entertaining, emotional and involving.
Sting led the ensemble with laughter and brimming passion, regaling the rapt audience with explanations of the Geordie dialect and with tales from the play’s difficult gestation. And the album, especially in its full, 18-track “deluxe” edition, is an immersive treat. Just like a good musical should be.
How much of The Last Ship is autobiographical? Sting could be disillusioned exile Gideon — as Nail points out, “Gideon” and “Gordon” are not dissimilar.
And he could be earnest, self-satisfied Adrian, with his “obvious gifts” of rhyming and metre. Sting nods. On the one hand, “It’s not social history that I’m writing. It’s an allegory.” But on the other, “Of course there are bits of me in it. But there are real people there, and people I invented, and composites. But yeah, I’m in a lot of this.”