Sting's a soul survivor

SO MANY summers, so many winters, but Sting shows no sign of slowing down, writes James Wigney

Sting

SO MANY summers, so many winters, but Sting shows no sign of slowing down, writes James Wigney

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LOOKING at Sting in the flesh, it's nearly impossible to believe he turns 60 a week today.

Lean, muscular, tanned and looking ridiculously fit thanks to years of clean living and yoga, he has the body and energy that would be the envy of a man half his age.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the former Police frontman is also struggling with the fact he is about to enter his seventh decade.

"I can't quite believe it," he muses. "It doesn't quite compute for me being 60. I still feel like I am 14½. I think I have maintained my curiosity about the world and my sense of wonder at it. If that is what feeling young is about then I feel young."

As he has done for years, the insatiably restless musician and veteran philanthropist will be working on his birthday weekend, with a star-studded fundraising bash at New York's Beacon Theatre on Saturday for the anti-poverty charity, The Robin Hood Foundation.

Guests will include friends and colleagues such as Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, will i am and Lady Gaga. As you do when you are Sting.

"I thought it was appropriate to be working on my birthday," he says. "I am not very good at not working. I invited a lot of very good friends to come and sing with me.

"The only thing they have to do is sing my songs. They can honour me, they can completely roast me, they can do what they like but they have to sing my words."

Sting was born Gordon Sumner, the eldest of four children, in the working-class city of Newcastle. His father Ernie was a milkman and engineer who gave him no encouragement to pursue his dream.

Indeed, the first and only compliment Sting ever got from his father was on his deathbed.

"He was a man of few words, Ernie, and I think he would rather die than praise me," Sting reflects on his father, who died of cancer in 1987 and to whom Sting dedicated the 1991 album The Soul Cages.

"But on his deathbed we talked about hands - we have exactly the same hands. I mentioned this and he said, `Yeah but you used your hands better than I did'.

"That was a huge thing for him to say to me but at the time I was devastated."

Sting describes his continuing desire to create and perform music as a kind of compulsion, almost bordering on a mania that began at an early age.

"It was more an obsessive compulsive disorder. I used to sit for hours playing scales and riffs," he says. "It was an escape but I didn't know what it was an escape to."

For all his success, awards (11 Grammys from 38 nominations) and vast wealth (he has an estimated wealth of $275 million), Sting insists he is first and foremost a student of music.

A frequent collaborator over the years from Dire Straits to Bruce Springsteen and Nicole Scherzinger, he is always seeking to learn and has always surrounded himself with musicians better than him.

"I want somebody to teach me something," he says of his frequent side projects.

"I sit in a room with a musician thinking `teach me something'. I don't say that but that's how I look at it."

But one thing fans are unlikely to see is another Police reunion.

After years of saying no, the singer and bass player of the top-selling trio of the '70s and '80s finally relented and reunited with former bandmates Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland for a successful world tour in 2007 after more than two decades apart, but Sting says another one is highly unlikely.

"I don't think so," he says. "I don't think there would be a need to do it again. We did what we did. It's difficult to go back when my instinct is to always move forward."

Sting 25 Years  box set is out on Friday