“Freaked me out”: the rock god Sting thought was an alien
Sting is a man with many fingers in many pies.
Although his formative group, The Police, emerged during the punk wave, their approach leaned heavily on the trio’s affection for reggae, jazz and funk music. Any comparisons to the punk wave are primarily rooted in The Police’s 1978 debut album, Outlandos d’Amour, which housed the frenetic hits ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ and ‘Roxanne’.
Despite their early punk sensibilities, The Police were always brought a little more to the table than their contemporaries, even The Clash, who had a similar sonic outlook later in their career. Fundamentally, The Police were a little too instrumentally talented for the punk label: Andy Summers is an accomplished guitarist, Sting is a melodic bassist, and Stewart Copeland is a percussionist of jazz-inspired virtuosity.
In a 2021 interview with Far Out, Will Sergeant, the guitarist of post-punk band Echo and the Bunnymen, recalled the punk outlook in the late 1970s and noted how The Police were, in many ways, the antithesis. “Punk sort of enabled you to say, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna do it, and I don’t care if you think I can’t play.’ We were watching bands every week that couldn’t really play, the exuberance and attitude came across enough,” he said “In a way, if you could really play, it was a disadvantage. Some bands we saw at Eric’s Club, like The Police, we thought were shit because they were too good.”
The Police evolved through five studio albums, ending with Synchronicity in 1983. With each successive release, they stepped away from punk and began to define the so-called new wave with eclectic and often complex compositions. While Sting might not consider him an instrumental virtuoso, he is undoubtedly one of the most accomplished songwriters of his generation.
In retrospect, the violent urgency of The Police’s early work appears to be little more than an embrace of vogue. Far from the anarchistic snarl of Johnny Rotten, Sting idolised consummate rock musicians of the late-1960s psychedelic era. Famously, The Beatles were his favourite band as a teenager, and Sting saw McCartney as a suitable role model both as a bassist and songwriter.
That admiration for more sophisticated musicianship would go on to define Sting’s entire career. While many of his peers were content to lean into the raw simplicity of punk, he was already thinking in terms of arrangement, harmony and musical interplay. It’s part of the reason why The Police were able to evolve so quickly beyond their early sound.
At the same time, those influences gave Sting a broader framework for understanding what popular music could be. Rather than seeing genres as rigid boundaries, he treated them as tools to be combined and reshaped, whether that meant incorporating reggae rhythms or jazz phrasing into a rock setting. It was an approach that set him apart from the very beginning.
With a thirst for musical complexity, Sting’s musical education was rooted firmly in jazz. As a schoolboy, he played at Newcastle clubs in jazz bands, most notably Phoenix Jazzmen and Last Exit. At the age of 14 or 15, he stumbled across a pre-fame Jimi Hendrix at a concert that would change his musical outlook forever. “[Hendrix] played in Newcastle before he made it, actually – before he had his first hit in England, which was ‘Hey Joe’,” Sting once told Howard Stern. “He played the Club a’Gogo in Newcastle.”
As a young musician, Sting used to “hear what’s cool” on “the grapevine” and caught wind of this extraordinary guitarist who had just formed a band with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding. Still, nothing could quite prepare him for what he saw that night in 1966. “I thought I was seeing a Martian,” Sting reflected. “I mean, there were very few Black people in Newcastle. He played left-handed Fender guitar with his hair and the clothes and just freaked me out.”
Hendrix’s mind-boggling guitar prowess could easily have demoralised Sting, as it had so many other aspiring musicians at the time. Instead, Sting saw the experience as a challenge and a moment to learn from: “The lesson was that you can be a rock star and a virtuoso at the same time because he was, clearly.”
In 1991, Sting paid tribute to Hendrix by recording a cover of ‘Purple Haze’ at The Hague in the Netherlands. As a bassist, Sting took on Noel Redding’s instrumental duties and Hendrix’s vocals, while his longtime collaborator Dominic Miller gave the guitar parts a faithful revamp. Vinnie Colaiuta also did a cracking job of channelling his inner Mitch Mitchell.
