Why is Sting so easy to mock?
As Brits, we have a proud tradition of ripping the absolute piss out of our greatest exports. A proud tradition that we should cling to as much as humanly possible. Sure, Paul McCartney’s a literal Beatle, but he also brought us the ‘Frog Chorus’. Mick Jagger’s been fielding questions about needing a Zimmer frame onstage longer than he hasn’t. However, few people have got it with both barrels as much as Sting has. Which is just as well; the man deserves it more than most.
Music aside, there isn’t a whole lot about the man born Gordon Sumner that’s typically likeable. I mean, for one thing, he’s got the kind of chiselled good looks you usually find in statues of Greek deities, and it’s rare that we would let that particular crime go unpunished. More pertinent is the absolutely po-faced seriousness with which he has always concerned himself.
Everyone loves The Police and fair play to the lad, so they should. Even then, though, while he was making inarguably the best music of his career, people couldn’t ignore the faint smell of bullshit. Or perhaps that was peroxide fumes. After all, the blonde bombshells who constituted one of the 1980s’ biggest bands only donned their iconic locks for a part in a Wrigley’s chewing gum advert.
That air of fakeness and pretence didn’t go away when he was accused of hiding his natural Geordie accent and Tyneside background. Especially when he began singing those reggae-inflected Police tracks with a bizarre cod-Jamaican brogue. Yet the knives truly came out for the man when he knocked that on the head and went solo.
How did going solo make Sting a bigger target?
The man did not make it easy for himself. He started making preachy jazz-pop albums with Shakespeare quotes in the titles and whole records built around his newfound love of the lute (seriously). He began getting involved with charitable organisations, which, in the eyes of the famously sincerity-phobic British public, might as well have been drawing a massive, neon target on your back.
Above all, though, he was successful. Incredibly so. Perhaps, more than anything, we just hate it when people we consider our own become a much, much bigger deal than our tiny, closed-minded island can handle, and Sting was one of the biggest names in music for decades. Especially when his success went beyond mere numbers, leading us to the part that we really didn’t want to admit to ourselves.
Even in his solo work, despite all the pretension, Sting remains a genuinely once-in-a-generation songwriter, evidenced by tracks such as, ‘Shape of My Heart’, ‘If You Love Somebody Set Them Free’, ‘If I Ever Lose My Faith in You’ and, above all of them, the deathless ‘Fields of Gold’—a genuinely lovely melody, although one perhaps at its best when sung by Eva Cassidy.
If you ever feel bad for the man… I mean, for one thing, don’t; he’s minted. Secondly, take solace in the fact he can give back as good as he’s got. This genuinely, quite charming side of him came out in an interview with Mojo in 1995, when ‘Fields of Gold’ was still one of the biggest songs around.
When discussing its impact, Sting eventually brings up a strange phenomenon that happened when he played the song in concert. He said, “Now the audience has taken to doing this when I sing it [he sways like barley in the breeze], en masse, which is disconcerting. But you can’t stop them, can you? ‘Oi! Stop that f***ing shite!’” Once a Geordie, I guess!
