Sting Was Born in Wallsend on October 2, 1951

Sting was born on October 2, 1951, in Wallsend, England. Born Gordon Sumner, he became The Police’s singer, bassist and principal songwriter, with “Roxanne” providing an early example of how his writing could change through collaboration. His career before the band had already taken him through the jazz clubs of northeast England.

He earned his professional name while playing with the Phoenix Jazzmen, when a fellow musician noticed his black and yellow striped sweater. Teaching provided a day job while he developed as a bassist and songwriter. In Last Exit, a Newcastle jazz fusion group, he began writing material of his own. Drummer Stewart Copeland saw the band during a visit to Newcastle and was interested in Sting, even though their music was far removed from the punk group he wanted to form.

Sting moved to London and became part of The Police in 1977. With Andy Summers eventually on guitar, the group had three musicians whose experience extended beyond the punk clubs where they were finding work. That difference became useful when Sting presented “Roxanne,” a song inspired by women working in the streets of Paris. His original bossa nova approach did not fit the band’s existing material, but Copeland heard something worth developing.

In a 2023 interview with WNYC’s All Of It, Copeland explained that changing the placement of the beat helped the arrangement fall into place. The finished recording also preserved an unplanned contribution from Sting. Waiting to sing, he sat on a piano without realizing its keyboard was uncovered. The resulting chord and his laughter stayed on the record. “It was just a spontaneous real moment,” Copeland recalled. Released in 1978, “Roxanne” gained traction after its reissue the following year.

Across five studio albums, Sting’s writing gave The Police room to move beyond their early sound. On 1983’s Synchronicity, “Every Breath You Take” placed a lyric about surveillance and possession inside a seemingly romantic song. When he began making his first solo album, he approached that subject from another direction with “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free.”

For The Dream of the Blue Turtles, released in 1985, Sting assembled a group that connected his songwriting with his earlier jazz experience. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis introduced him to pianist Kenny Kirkland, while bassist Darryl Jones and drummer Omar Hakim also joined the sessions. Recording took place at Blue Wave Studios in Barbados, with Sting and Pete Smith sharing production duties.

The musicians’ backgrounds did not mean Sting intended to abandon pop songwriting. In an interview published by uDiscover Music in 2023, he explained that his collaborators had grown up with rock and pop as well as jazz. “The idea was not really to make a jazz record,” he said. He also revisited The Police’s “Shadows in the Rain,” giving an existing composition a different arrangement with the new band.

His childhood became another source of material. The Soul Cages, released in 1991 after his father’s death, drew on the maritime landscape around Wallsend. Those memories later helped him through a prolonged period of writer’s block. In a 2013 essay for The Huffington Post, Sting described how writing for characters from a shipbuilding community freed him from having to make himself the subject. Once he began considering their voices and experiences, songs came quickly enough to support both an album and a stage production.

The Last Ship album followed in 2013. The musical, with music and lyrics by Sting, opened at Broadway’s Neil Simon Theatre on October 26, 2014. That December, he joined the cast as shipyard foreman Jackie White, performing a character from the industrial world he had once wanted to leave.