Sting: The Rolling Stone Interview
I‘m quite interested in finding me again,” Police singer and bassist Sting confessed to the press last summer. “I used to be the same sort of person onstage that I was in private life, but now it’s sort of a monster. He looks wonderful with the lights and the crowds, but in the kitchen, it’s a bit much. I’m just trying to find out who is the real me — is it this monster or someone more normal? Right now, he’s a bit worn at the edges.”
The past year has been a stormy one for Sting. In July 1982, his wife of seven years, actress Frances Tomelty, was testifying on his behalf in the court case he’d filed against Virgin Music to regain the publishing rights to his early material. Then, just weeks Later, Sting’s marriage appeared to be finished (though he has since said he still loves Tomelty and that she “transformed my life and was a catalyst in my becoming something completely different”). The grapevine began buzzing with stories suggesting that Sting was beginning to succumb to the perils of rock stardom: Sting, flitting about the globe with a new girlfriend, actress-model Trudy Styler. Sting, attending such questionable events as a party thrown on the French Riviera by Saud arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Sting, having the obligatory “rock star scuffles with photographer” episode at a London airport. Such erratic behavior may be par for the course for successful rock stars, but it is alarmingly out of character for Sting, a man known for his unshakable cool.
Now thirty-one, Sting (Gordon Matthew Sumner), was raised in Newcastle, England, the eldest of four children. “I was brought up on a street of terraced houses, and at the bottom of the street was a shipyard where they built tankers,” he has recalled. His father was a milkman, his mother a hairdresser. He was educated by Jesuits, whom he credits with being “responsible for my venomous nature.” At twenty-four, Sting married Frances Tomelty while still teaching school in northeast England. A self-taught musician, he was playing bass in a jazz combo at night when he was “discovered” by drummer Stewart Copeland. After adding guitarist Andy Summers to the lineup, the Police released the first of their five albums in 1978.
Sting describes himself as a melancholy person prone to radical mood swings, and though that may be true, he presents a formidably tougher face to the world. He is a voracious reader. He says he “cannot operate without a guitar or piano around,” and he’s currently composing a symphony on synthesizer. He’s had parts in four movies — Radio On, Quadrophenia, Artemis ’81, Brimstone & Treacle — and has just finished a role in Dune, a science-fiction film directed by David Lynch, who also did Eraserhead and The Elephant Man. He’s written a script, Gormenghast, which is based on a trilogy by Mervyn Peake and is about a clever kitchen boy who tries to gain control of a castle but is undone by his pride and his sense of evil. The very picture of youthful vitality and health, Sting doesn’t smoke, eats balanced meals, drinks in moderation and works out every day.
All of this activity doesn’t leave him much time to hang out with the chaps at the corner pub, and he is a somewhat solitary man. One gets the impression that Sting finds the action in his own head more engrossing than most of the people he meets and he is singularly self-contained.
Sting spent this past spring in Los Angeles overseeing the final detail work on the Police’s new LP, Synchronicity . In some ways a chronicle of the breakup of Sting’s marriage, Synchronicity is certainly the darkest record the Police have made. Pain is the album’s central theme, and images of loss, separation and longing color every song. “I do my best work when I’m in pain and turmoil,” Sting observes, and this essay in conflict features some of his finest work.
Talking with Sting in the sumptuous hotel suite, overlooking the Sunset Strip, that he shared with Trudy Styler, I found little evidence of the manic frame of mind he’s reputed to be in. Dressed in blue plastic warmup pants and a tight, sleeveless T-shirt, he seemed fit, calm and content — a rich man on a holiday. He was, however, not exactly eager to discuss certain events of the past year and closed the subject by saying, “The important things I have to say are in the songs in a veiled, symbolic form. It’s true there is a lot of damage around me, but I hope it’s not directly because of me. I was warned that any interviewer I talk to at this point is going to ask me the same things, and it’s a challenge to see if I can steer clear of a few areas.”
The idea of angels and demons surfaced with interesting frequency during our talks, and I got the impression that Sting sees himself as both. “I am sort of two people,” he said in a soft, hoarse whisper, “and I do have a dark side.”
It’s unusual to meet someone who genuinely likes himself, but Sting seems not just at home in, but pleased with, the skin he’s in, even while admitting that he’s capable of a certain ruthlessness. He has incredible drive — to excel? to win? for approval? — that I imagine could turn ugly should circumstances back him into a corner, and he has little time or patience for losers. Yet he seems to have the Big Picture clearly in focus, is aware of the absurdity of rock stardom, the arbitrary whims of fate and the role luck has played in his life. Fate dealt him a few whammy cards this year, but his luck appears to be holding. He came to an out-of-court agreement with Virgin, Synchronicity is near the top of the charts, and the Police are in the midst of one of the summer’s biggest tours. Sting plays the winning hand once again.
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