It’s not your success we don’t like, Sting, it’s your vanity
(not to mention ocean-going hypocrisy)
As singer says he’s moved to New York because we Brits are jealous of him...
YET another immensely wealthy British celebrity has just given an interview to explain why he much prefers living in New York to his stuffy, unkind old home country. It’s the kind of ostentatious anti-patriotism that we’ve grown used to over the years.
This time it’s Sting, possibly the only pop star ever to record an entire album featuring himself accompanied by a lute.
The reason why we Brits are so mean-spirited towards him, says Mr Sting, is because we are envious of his great success. ‘I don’t really belong to a class any more, so it’s better to be in a society like this, which is a little freer,’ he says. ‘I’m divisive in England.’
We’ve heard it all before. Only a while back, Mrs Sting, aka Trudie Styler, said: ‘I don’t want to criticise my country, but there are times I feel that Sting and myself have been treated unkindly. Sting and I need to think what our relationship is to England in the long term.’
If she and her husband have been treated ‘unkindly’ by England, with their incomparably rich and cossetted lifestyle, it’s difficult to imagine how she would describe the lot of most ordinary, hard-working Britons, faced with rising prices, stagnating wages, an endless waiting list at the doctor’s and yet another large gas bill.
But celebs complaining about how they are treated over here is such a cliche nowadays: apparently, we sour-faced, resentful Brits, living in what Emma Thompson memorably sneered at as this ‘cake-filled, misery-laden grey old island’, cannot bear anyone who gets above themselves, makes a lot of money, or possesses some tremendous talent. Allegedly, we love nothing better than to cut down these tall poppies and then jeer over their prostrate forms.
Utter rubbish, of course. A simple test of this theory: think of someone who has become highly successful, whom we have nevertheless continued to adore as a national treasure. Eric Morecambe, Julie Walters, Judi Dench, David Attenborough, Jessica Ennis-Hill, Ronnie Barker … there are thousands of them, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that we Brits do not have a problem with successful people per se.
No, what we Brits really have is not a loathing of success itself, but an instinctive dislike of pretentiousness, vanity and self-regard — things that in the star-struck USA are arguably more tolerated from jet- setting celebrities than they are over here. Hence Sting’s preference for life in New York.
BECAUSE for pretentiousness, vanity and self-regard, few superstars score quite as highly on the ego-meter as Sting himself. He once exclaimed in a newspaper interview: ‘I’m a pretentious w**ker!’ But even this brief flash of self-awareness unfortunately doesn’t alter the fact that most people really do think he’s a pretentious w**ker.
Or, more politely, you could call his condition Galloping Celebritis. It’s a disease that is often accompanied by a secondary infection of Howling Hypocrisy.
In layman’s terms, Galloping Celebritis means that Enough is Never Enough. No matter how much you’ve already got, you always have to have more: more money, more attention, more adulation, more houses! Not only worldwide recognition that you’re a fine songwriter, but also that you’re a fundamentally beautiful and caring person.
This is where the hypocrisy comes in, and contributes to making Sting what the writer Marina Hyde unforgettably described as ‘one of 21stcentury Earth’s most savagely self-parodic entities’. (Her hilarious book, incidentally, Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over The World And Why We Need An Exit Strategy, is an indispensable manual to our strange new world where celebs want not only fame and fortune, but moral authority over us as well.)
Sting and Trudie Styler founded the Rainforest Foundation to protect the Amazon — but how ever does this sit with their own enormous carbon footprint? Or sending their private chef all the way to Paris to bring back some truffles for a dinner party?
Mrs Sting once took a private jet from New York to Washington to attend a White House dinner, along with seven staff and a hairdresser. Defending such extravagance, she snapped: ‘My life is to travel and my life is also to speak out about the horrors of an environment that is being abused at the hands of oil companies.’
Always the oil companies, isn’t it? Never individuals burning the stuff in their cars and heating systems?
Sting and Trudie once guest-edited The Big Issue, the magazine for the homeless — while it’s difficult to keep a count of how many, mostly empty homes they own themselves.
And though they like to appear socially engaged and concerned for the less fortunate in general, their specific treatment of one of their own staff, Jane Martin, was fiercely condemned by an official employment tribunal.
In remarkably strong wording, the verdict found that Sting and Trudie had been guilty of ‘shameful conduct’ towards their former chef, and obliged them to pay the poor woman £25,000 in settlement.
Stories of deluded grandiosity are now legion. Some of them are so spectacular that they can only produce laughter. Sting may take himself desperately seriously, but the trouble is that a lot of people regard him as rather a joke.
There was the embarrassing occasion when an invitation sent out by the Stings came to the attention of the Press. It was for a kind of conference or summit meeting at another of their palatial residences, the Villa Il Palagio in Tuscany — and it was an absolute gem.
‘We are gathering together some of the most creative writers, humanitarians and film-makers we can find, people who care for humanity and the world we inhabit in a conscious and thoughtful way, and whose philosophy of life informs their creative process … The theme for the week is social consciousness and creativity — but I want it to be informal, relaxed, a source of inspiration for some of the brightest creative minds we know...’ and so on and on and on.
But things seem a whole lot less funny when you consider Sting’s dubious new career as a wedding singer. Yes — although down to his last £200 million or so, the pop star has taken to topping up his earnings with appearances at some very tacky weddings indeed.
EARLIER this year he performed at the Moscow wedding of the son of Russian oil billionaire Mikhail Gutseriev. Before that, despite strict security, news leaked out that he sang at the wedding of Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of the vile dictator of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov. Sting’s exact earnings for this few hours of work have never been disclosed, but they are unlikely to have been less than a million.
Islam Karimov, now gone to the same place of eternal rest as Hitler and Pol Pot, was no comedy dictator. The UN found that torture was used routinely throughout his brutal regime. In one reported incident he actually had two of his political enemies boiled alive.
Still, such was his grip on power than Karimov amassed a personal fortune of around £1 billion, so paying Sting a million for an evening’s warbling wasn’t much to him. It would have been rather more, though, to the 16 per cent of the Uzbek population who live below the UN poverty line of £1 a day.
Sting has indeed come far from his humble origins in a terrace house in Wallsend, Tyneside — a world which he once loftily dismissed as an ‘enclave of banality’. The mansions and palaces of dodgy oligarchs and brutal dictators are more exciting, it seems.
And making a fat fee to add to your already vast personal fortune, by cosying up to some of the planet’s most unpleasant people, reminds you unavoidably of another deeply unpopular Brit, now much given to escapist globe-trotting: Tony Blair.
But if Sting feels that he’s better off these days in New York than in embittered and unappreciative old England, with its nasty habit of examining its own rich and famous and sometimes finding them wanting in the ordinary, common decencies — well, good luck to him. I doubt if he’ll be much missed.