As both a solo artist and member of The Police, Sting has sold more than 100 million albums – and snared 17 Grammys - in a career that's spanned more than four decades.
He's touring New Zealand later this month, and tells Jim Mora he can still find something new in the songs he’s been singing for many years.
Photo: FRANCOIS NASCIMBENI
“The tour is called My Songs and it's really reliant on that large group of songs that people know and love... and I love.
“And my ethos is that I always find something incremental in each song that is new to me on that particular night.
“I have a sort of jazz man’s view of songs, you start with a template, and then you find something different.
“So, that's the voyage of exploration I'm on every night with my musicians all understand that.”
He has just finished a successful residency at Caesars Palace with the My Songs show, and Vegas isn’t how it used to be for a performing artist, he says.
“There was a time when going to Vegas was a kind of like a prison sentence, you'd have you'd be there for years on end - never get out.
“But it's actually much more humane than that. You do three shows a week, for a three-week period. And then you're free to go and around the world as we do. So, it's not like it used to be.
“Also, everybody's doing Vegas now, Van Morrison follows me and Adele, so everyone's in Vegas at the moment. But you know, I enjoy it in a kind of absurd way.”
His most successful song ‘Every Breath You Take’ - one of the most successful songs ever written, with over 15 million (and counting) radio plays - was written in 1982 in Jamaica at Ian Fleming’s old house, he says.
“I'm curious really about why that song is so successful. I can't say that it's particularly original, in terms of its harmonic structure or its lyric or its melody, but it does have an ambivalent quality, that is both romantic and quite sinister.
“And I think it's that ambiguity which keeps people guessing that makes it somehow fascinating.
“I wrote it in the house of Ian Fleming, who wrote all the James Bond books. Of course, he was dead at the time, but I sat at Ian Fleming’s desk and I wrote this song.
“So, there's something of James Bond in the song in that, you know, he's our guy, but he's also quite sinister.”
Sting has just completed one of his more unusual musical collaborations with reggae artist Shaggy.
“Last year, we did this album of Frank Sinatra covers in a reggae style, and of course, the idea is completely insane, and yet, it works.”
The reggae style fits many of Sinatra’s standards, he says.
“There is a very strong downbeat in those songs and so surprisingly, it fits extremely well.”
His famous tenor remains in good nick, he says, because he looks after himself.
“Well, I've never smoked anything legal in my life. So that helps. I drink, but not to excess. I look after myself, you know, it's a muscle and like a muscle it needs to be stretched and exercised, but not overused. I just look after myself, which is a combination of vanity and discipline.”
He also tries to maintain an upbeat worldview, he says.
“My strategy in life is to be optimistic about everything. I think it's a better strategy than its opposite, which of course can be self-fulfilling.
“I have to say, though, that the window for optimism is narrowing as the world gets a little older - we need to open it.”
After 40 years in the business and with his career still going strong, he lives in the moment, he says.
“Make the best of it. Everything's a gift and my abiding emotion is gratitude. That's what I've learned, to be grateful.”
