In 2013 Sting declared that he was no longer interested in writing songs for a rock band or in the kind of personal mode he had come to think of as “inward navel-gazing.” He had done a reunion tour in 2007-8 with the band that made him a superstar in the 1980s, the Police, then dismissed it as “nostalgia.” He was immersed in “The Last Ship,” the musical inspired by his childhood in a shipbuilding town. Writing for theatrical characters, rather than himself, had broken through a decade-long block...

 

With a new album out, Sting talks to Craig McLean about ageing, rock ’n’ roll parenting - and being a milkman's son turned Picasso-owning millionaire. "I get 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...”

As Sting took up the refugee crisis for his latest album, he met in Berlin with musicians who fled Syria. The rock legend asked for their permission to record his song. "I felt it was important to have that sanction," Sting told AFP of the track Inshallah, in which he envisions himself on a boat like a refugee desperate for safety...

Prince, David Bowie, climate change and the refugee crisis spark Sting’s first record in 17 years. “57th & 9th,” named after the intersection the 64-year-old crosses every day to get to the studio, was recorded in just four months and features his touring drummer Vinnie Colaiuta and guitarist Dominic Miller, and Jerry Fuentes and Diego Navaira of the Tex Mex band the Last Bandoleros. Metro meets The Police’s former frontman at Cherrytree Music Company in Beverly Hills...

Mylène Farmer doesn't grant many interviews, but for Sting, she'll make an exception. The French pop star, who has sold 11 million albums worldwide and regularly sells out stadiums throughout the French-speaking world, recently debuted a version of Sting's 2004 song "Stolen Car," in which she and the ex-Police man duet in French and English. Last month, the track debuted in France at Number One on iTunes, and stayed there for four days. It's now available in the U.S., to be followed with a video next month...

Rock star Sting is on a mission which is seeing him "paying back his debt" to his Tyneside roots. On a return to the region, he tells Kate Proctor about childhood, fame and where he now calls home. Soaring over the heads of 600 fans and bouncing off the wooden window frames of a school hall, is Sting's voice. His distinctive soulful tone is still quite perfect - perhaps a little deeper now he is in his early sixties, but the audience know they are in on something remarkable...

On the end of one line is Paul Simon, somewhere in New England. On the other is Sting, somewhere in New York. They would be rehearsing together for their joint tour which hits Auckland tomorrow night and New Plymouth on Saturday, but for the fact that the former bassist frontman of The Police has to see off the final shows of his Broadway show The Last Ship - based on the shipbuilding industry of his hometown, Newcastle - before it closes, having been less than a runaway success. Ah well, it happens to the best of them - Simon's 1997 Broadway show The Capeman lost millions. But before Sting headed into theatre land, the pair had been on tour together in the United States, with reviews suggesting the seemingly incongruous partnership worked a treat, with individual sets and shared numbers, which have seen Sting in the Art Garfunkel role on some of Simon's biggest songs...

Night after night, as the lights go down in the Neil Simon Theatre and musicians on guitar and flute and fiddle begin to play, a multiple Grammy-winning international star settles into a seat in a back row and drinks in anew all the Broadway sights and sounds. It's the closest that a guy named Sting will ever get to the life of an average Manhattan commuter. "I watch it every day," says the 63-year-old singer-songwriter, still in possession of the sleek build of a rock sensation half his age. "I'm fascinated by the process and the actors making this story and the songs their own. I'm fascinated by the audience and how they react. I sit way in the back in the dark, sort of a phantom, and l leave before the lights go up."

It's Thursday noon, four days after Sting's semi-autobiographical Broadway musical The Last Ship has opened at last. The famous English rock star, now 63, with the body of a 21-year-old, is loping around his Central Park West aerie mostly grinning. On Sunday morning, Sting tells me, he felt a strange dread he couldn't shake. For months he'd been spooked by nightmares of Ben Brantley coming in and killing his labor of love. Then it was announced that theater critic Charles Isherwood would be dispatched instead. "I always knew we'd come to that day, and everything would turn to shit," he says...

Jimmy Nail was having an out-of-body moment. His lanky frame was folded in an armchair in the low-ceilinged basement lounge of the Neil Simon Theater for an interview, but his tired eyes suddenly searched the room's four corners, as if he were trying to see beyond its walls: back to Newcastle-on-Tyne, back to the shipyards where he and the men of his family once toiled. "I worked on big turbines that propelled the supertankers," said Mr. Nail, the son of a shipyard foreman who plays one in the new musical "The Last Ship," which has songs by another Newcastle native with a sharp-edged moniker, Sting. "You had a turbine shed that might have been four times the length of this room, and in the middle of it was a turbine, and men were crawling all over it like ants, welding it and polishing it."