Was ‘Roxanne’ a real woman?
Although Sting became wise beyond his years as his career evolved, he never lost his knack for in-the-moment fun. ‘Roxanne’ would be one of the moments The Police would look back on repeatedly when thinking about where it all began, a seemingly simple song actually stirred something far more complicated, like where it got its inspiration from.
Growing up, music was a lightning bolt to a very excitable Sting; fodder that satisfied his craving for an escape that took him away from the mundanity of everyday life. It was his mother who introduced him to some of his favourite names of all time, like Elvis Presley, who showed him what it meant to ignite an audience from the stage. Then it was the jazz greats who took this a step further, letting him in on a little secret called spontaneity.
These little sparks that defined music would follow him everywhere, in his own work, especially in the studio, when sometimes planning would go out the window in favour of a more improvisational approach. While things often became difficult because of the usual band tensions and disagreements, the one thing that usually allowed them to overcome this was the push for music that evoked an emotional reaction, no matter what it took to get there.
In the case of ‘Roxanne’, that quest for emotion never left the surface, beyond the obvious reggae-inspired post-punk elements that make it immediately fun to listen to to begin with. It also came from an impassioned lightbulb moment, when Sting saw something that hit home and built a world around, proving both his intuition with creating music that just simply worked and his know-how when it came to crafting stories that were easy for the listener to fall into, even if it was completely alien.
Was ‘Roxanne’ a real woman?
As with most rock songs titled after women’s names, ‘Roxanne’ stirred speculation regarding who it was actually about, and who this mysterious Roxanne woman was to Sting, if anything at all. However, the idea for a fictional woman named Roxanne first came to him when he was out in Paris observing the sex worker scene, when he saw a poster for Edmund Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac. The lead character was in love with a woman named Roxanne, but became too afraid to approach her.
“In the street were all these belles de nuit, you know, ladies of the night,” Sting explained to Howard Stern. “I’d never been exposed to that, and I was kind of fascinated by it.” Recalling the moment to People in 2023, Sting explained: “Those two conflicting ideas – of this beautiful name and this very, very elegant, courtly romance and what was going on in the hotel – just lit a torch under me. I went to my room, picked up the guitar and imagined this woman into life.”
Sting’s version of the story centred around a man with a similar admiration for a woman in the red light district, who tells her she could do with a better profession, observed with the kind of immediate shock someone stumbling into the community might feel for the very first time. For Sting, it’s the exact reason Roxanne was the ideal muse, representing the two sides of a life of hardships: elegance and struggle.
