Tyneside pop legend Sting is at The Sage Gateshead with Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell
Tyneside pop legend Sting is at The Sage Gateshead with Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell
Posted: 01 Jan 1970
Tyneside superstar Sting played The Sage Gateshead with celebrated Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell in December (read about it on our reviews page) and featured songs from his new album If On A Winter's Night
Profile by Michael Hamilton
Pictures copyright Dave Hogan
Gordon Sumner’s life changed forever when fellow North East musician Gordon Solomon spotted his black and yellow hooped sweater in 1973 and christened him Sting.
As a solo musician and member of The Police, the lad from Wallsend has since sold over 100 million records and received more than 16 Grammy awards for his work.
But it was back in the early Seventies that he forged his stagecraft at the coal face of performing – in the pubs and workingmen’s clubs of Tyneside, Wearside and Teesside.
For Sting paid his early musical dues playing bass with local outfits such as The Newcastle Big Band, The Phoenix Jazzmen – Gordon ‘Solly’ Solomon was the bandleader – and the cult band Last Exit, which featured his first efforts at songwriting.
After a string of jobs working as a bus conductor, labourer and tax officer he finally qualified as a primary school teacher and found he could make a wage while trying to pursue his dream.
In his frank and revealing autobiography Broken Music he recounts the gruelling slog of those early days when he was working at St. Paul’s First School in Cramlington by day and taking whatever work he could find playing by night.
In one hilarious episode he remembers The Phoenix Jazzmen ‘running for their lives’ from the Red House Farm Social club in Sunderland when Solly inadvertently broke the bingo machine and sent the numbered ping pong balls spraying all over the audience.
But what shines through is his utter determination to make it on his chosen path – even though in the early days his musical ability in the more complicated, syncopated world of jazz was often found wanting.
‘I always had the idea that I could make a living as a musician. That was my only ambition and is still my only ambition – to make a living out of playing music,’ he says.
‘But I developed a taste for jazz quite early and deliberately because it’s music I didn’t like at first. A taste in jazz music is something that you have to learn. It’s not something that you have naturally.’
When Tyneside entrepreneur and bandleader Andy Hudson was looking for a bass player for the Newcastle Big Band, Sting auditioned. He made a mess of it because of his limited talent on the instrument in those days – but Andy gave him another chance and he eventually got the job after solid weeks of practice at sight-reading.
The band contained several leading players on the Tyneside jazz and rock scene in those days including drummer Ronnie Pearson, guitarist John Hedley and keyboard player Gerry Richardson.
These latter three musicians, with Sting, formed Last Exit in 1974. They were the only band in Newcastle then playing an eclectic mix of jazz and blues numbers ranging from Chick Corea’s Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy to Fleetwood Mac’s Need Your Love So Bad – always their set-closer.
Sting actually wrote The Bed’s Too Big Without You – which later appeared on the Police’s second album Regatta de Blanc in 1979 – during his spell in Last Exit.
Although from the tough streets of Wallsend – he grew up in Gerald Street in the shadow of the Swan Hunter shipyards and came from a family of shipwrights and fitters – he always aspired to literature and music.
His mother Audrey worked as a hairdresser but was also a gifted pianist and it was from her he took his musical cue. Meanwhile his English teacher at St. Cuthbert’s Grammar School in Benwell nurtured his love of words.
After soaking up early musical influences at home, including Elvis Presley and Little Richard, he was left an old acoustic guitar by an uncle. And enthralled by the Beatles – like a whole generation of kids – began learning the chords to all of Lennon and McCartney’s songs.
As a teenager, academic work would come second best to visits to the legendary Club A Go Go on Percy Street, Newcastle where he had his mind blown by American guitar genius Jimi Hendrix.
He says: ‘Being born next to a river and a shipyard was a fascinating and very stimulating background, but I just thought it was somewhere to escape from.
‘I think the shipyard was a perfect symbol for my life. They would build these giant ships for 18 months then launch them into the river and sea, never to come back.
‘I thought that was an image for my life: “I’m building myself up here and I’m gonna be launched out into the world.”’
Last Exit were big in the North East, but their jazz fusion was doomed to fail when punk rock exploded onto the music scene in 1976.
Stewart Copeland, drummer with Curved Air, saw Last Exit on a visit to Newcastle and while the music did nothing for him he did recognise the potential and charisma of the bass player. Within months Sting had left his teaching job and moved to London with actress wife Frances Tomelty. He has a son Joe, now 32, and a daughter Kate, 26, from that marriage.
Copeland and Sting - together with Corsican guitarist Henri Padovani - started rehearsing and looking for gigs. Replacing Padovani with the virtuoso talents of Andy Summers the band also enrolled Stewart's elder brother Miles as manager, wowing him with a Sting song called Roxanne.
Within days Copeland senior had them a record deal with A&M and their first album Outlandos d’Amour was recorded for just £3,000.
Although they jumped on the punk bandwagon they were all accomplished musicians a world away from the likes of Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols and their three-chord din.
Sting recalls: ‘We flew the flag of punk to get in through the door and then we became ourselves.’
‘To be a bass player and a singer and bandleader is a very happy accident. I’m controlling the whole thing. Within that the band can paint their own colours but I’m very much dictating the harmony and top lines.’
If the Police's punk disguise didn’t fool the hip music press it certainly won them a huge army of fans across the Atlantic.
Ever mindful of the importance of building a solid fan base by playing live gigs – a trait of Sting’s Last Exit days – they immediately toured the States courtesy of bargain flights from Freddie Laker's pioneering Skytrain.
They drove their own van and humped their own equipment from venue to venue playing to tiny audiences at the likes of CBGB's in New York and The Rat Club in Boston.
But the sound the trio made was unique – a combination of new wave toughness and reggae rhythms. And Sting's pin-up looks did them no harm at all.
It was a spare style, with a sparse economy of sound, best exemplified in the two chart-topping singles from their second album Message in a Bottle and Walking on the Moon.
‘I think that as a three-piece group we had an in-built limitation you can’t really compete with a larger band. So we started to leave lots of space in the music, lots of holes and that spare approach made any record we released stand out,’ he says.
Between 1978 and 1983 they released five chart-topping albums and won six Grammies. Their last album Synchronicity included their most successful hit Every Breath You Take.
A hugely successful solo career has included a string of hit albums including The Dream of the Blue Turtles, Nothing Like the Sun, The Soul Cages, Ten Summoner’s Tales, Mercury Falling, and Brand New Day.
In 1992 he married Trudie Styler and they have two daughters Mickey, 24, and Coco, 18, and two sons Jake, 23, and Giacomo,12.
In 2003 he was made a CBE – he dedicated the award to his parents Ernie and Audrey who both died of cancer – and the following year was awarded the prestigious Silver Heart from the Variety Club in Newcastle for his services to music.
Proud Tynesider Sting was back again in 2006 when he was awarded an honorary doctorate in music by Newcastle University and marked the event by playing a special reunion gig with his old Last Exit pals at the Gateshead Sage.
Then the wheel finally came full circle last year when he reformed the Police for a 12-month reunion tour playing to a staggering two million fans. It finished on August 7 in New York’s Maddison Square Garden during which Sting’s three daughters appeared with him on stage.
Referring to the band’s famous rows and backstage bust-ups first time around he told fans: ‘It’s amazing we got through this without killing each other.’
The tour was a phenomenal success buoyed on a wave of nostalgia from older fans who saw the band first time around and a whole new generation of younger fans who discovered the alluring blend of Sting’s exquisite songcraft and fine musicianship.
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