¶ Intro / Opening
🎵 Music
¶ Sting's Accomplishments and Influence
Welcome everyone and thanks for joining us for episode one hundred and forty of Soda Jacker on Songwriting. This is Simon here with Brian and what a guest we have for you. Joining us today is one of the all time greats, an English musician, singer and songwriter who to date has sold over a hundred million records. He's a songwriter's and rock and roll halls of fame inductee, Ivan Novello, Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Kennedy Centre Honoree, Polar Music Prize winner, and a CBE.
He's also an Emmy Golden Globe and 17 Time Grammy winner, a three-time Oscar nominee and he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We are absolutely delighted to welcome to the show the one and only Sting.
Just a few weeks ago Sting released My Songs, a collection of new renditions of some of his best known tracks, and we had the great honour of visiting him at his London apartment to discuss that and much more.
As we record this it's about a fortnight since we met him, and I still can't go over it to be honest. I mean we've been doing this show a long time now, but I don't think the experience of meeting these legendary figures will ever get old. And it's crazy that somehow this thing we thought of doing one afternoon at home in Liverpool led to us going round to Sting's place.
But yeah, we've been admirers of the man's work since we were in our early teens, haven't we?
Yeah, I was just starting to learn the bass back then and I think Sting's bass lines were among the first ones I ever learned to play.
And Ten Summoner's Tales in particular was a massive album for us too, wasn't it?
Yeah, and I still don't think that record gets the respect it's due. As successful as it was at the time, you know, it's just fantastic, does not put a foot wrong.
¶ Early Life and The Police Years
Our guest was born Gordon Sumner in Walls End, Northumberland, North East England in nineteen fifty one. He grew up near the Walls End Shipyards, which made a deep and lasting impression on him. Bitten by the musical bug at an early age, he would sit at his mother's feet and listen spellbound as she played the piano. He was later bequeathed the guitar by a relative aged eight, taught himself to play, and dreamt of becoming a songwriter and escaping a life in the shipyard.
He worked as a bus conductor, tax officer, and building labourer before becoming a teacher, performing with jazz bands like Last Exit in the evenings. He got his famous nickname from the yellow and black striped sweater he used to wear at Giggs, which according to his bandmates made him look like a wasp.
Sting moved to London in nineteen seventy seven where he eventually met Stuart Copeland and formed the police, with Andy Summers coming aboard shortly afterwards. Their unique sound fused reggae, punk, jazz and rock elements, and it proved an extremely winning combination. From nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty three, the trio had five chart topping albums, won four Grammys and two Brit Awards. They would reunite for a hugely successful world tour in two thousand seven.
¶ Solo Career Highlights and Ventures
Our guest's solo career got off to an auspicious start with 1985's Jazz-Tinged Dream of the Blue Turtles, which went triple platinum, while his second, 1987's Nothing Like the Sun, spawned two instant classics in Fragile and Englishman in New York.
He won a Grammy for all this time from nineteen ninety one's The Soul Cages and released the Grammy and Mercury Prize nominated Ten Summoners Tales in nineteen ninety three, which yielded several hit singles including Fields of Gold and If I Ever Lose My Faith in You. The former has since become something of a pop standard.
Nineteen ninety six's Mercury Falling was another strong effort, and er I remember the release of that one was accompanied by a fascinating South Bank show documentary.
Yeah, filmed at Lake House, wasn't it his home in Wiltshire?
Yeah.
And he was sort of in the process of making the album.
I think me, you, and our good friend Chris were a bit obsessed by that documentary at the time, to the point where we would quote bits from it.
We still do. Yeah. Our guest has kept up a solid work rate well into the twenty first century with albums like Sacred Love in 2003, Songs from the Labyrinth in 2006, If On a Winter's Night in 2009, and 2016's 57th and 90. He also published his excellent autobiography Broken Music in two thousand four.
Just a couple of months ago, this thing received yet another prestigious honor, when Every Breath You Take became the most performed work in BMI's catalogue of over 14 million works. Overtaking the previous incumbent, you've lost that loving feeling, written by our former guests Barryman and Cynthia Weill, of course.
His stage musical, inspired by his Warzone childhood, The Last Ship, made its debut in twenty fourteen, eventually transferring to Broadway, while his unlikely collaboration with Shaggy, 44876, was released last year and picked up a Grammy for best reggae album.
Our guest has also dabbled in acting, appearing in a number of films down the years, including June, Blue Monday, Lockstock and Two Smoking Barrels, and of course Quadrafenia. Although my personal favourite sting cameo was in the British comedy show The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, YouTube it if you've never seen it.
Aside from all that he hasn't really done much to speak of has he?
Yeah, slim pickings. Not sure why we're wasting our time on'em, to be honest.
You can hear selections from my songs and a generous helping of police and solo tracks if you check out our Spotify playlist for this episode. Head to Sodajerka.com slash podcast, click on Sting's page, and you'll find a link beneath the episode player. Keep up to date with all sting related goings on at Sting dot com, Facebook dot com slash Sting, at Official Sting on Twitter, and at the Official Sting on Instagram.
Find us at Sodajaker.com, Facebook.com slash Soda Jaca and at Soda Jaker on Twitter and Instagram. Welcome to any new listeners joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to check out the other hundred and thirty nine. Also, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you use to receive new episodes as soon as they're published. You can help with the running costs of the show by donating at sodajer.com slash donate.
Before we get to the main event, we'd like to thank Stuart Bell for his help setting up the interview and to David Palmer for his assistance on.
Okay, without further ado, or should that be the doo doo doo, here we are down in London with the man they call Steve.
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¶ Reimagining Songs for 'My Songs'
Thanks for having us over. The uh release of my songs is just a wonderful opportunity really for us to get to ask you about this incredible catalogue of songs that you've amassed over the years.
I'll try and be coherent.
You know, I mean you've made a lot of classic recordings obviously, but the raw material of the song always seemed up for interpretation, we thought. Mm-hmm. Is that the way you think about the material?
Um I don't often think about the material to be honest with you. So I'm gonna just improvise here. Is it malleable I hope so. I mean, I don't think of recorded work as being Holy relic. Or a you know, a sacred artifact, like a museum piece. It's actually just the beginning of a relationship. It's the first date. You know, you you may have written a song on the day you recorded it.
on the day before, the week before, but you really you don't know that song all that well. So there's all the excitement of a first date, but none of the real knowledge or the grit of a relationship. if I can take that analogy, you know. Whereas you sing the song night after night, year after year decade after decade, you know that song in a intimate granular way. And it's a different thing. It evolves every night,'cause every night I'm looking for some little
incremental change that will keep my interest, keep my curiosity about the song. And I'm getting older, and so there's a different meaning perhaps in what I'm singing, the the words My voice is getting older. My voice is getting more texture. I'm not saying it's better or or worse. It's just different. I think there are more harmonics in my voice now than they used to be. So it the My Songs experiment was really just a bit of fun.
Just taking the songs and just re recording them with this voice as it is now, with recording techniques the way they are, with my knowledge of the song. and not treating them as holy relics. And some of them we didn't change much at all. Others we radically transformed, but just for fun. There's no um serious uh agenda here.
¶ Songwriting: Subconscious and Structure
We've heard you describe songwriting as kind of a dreaming process. Do you feel like there's a strong subconscious element to it even when you're actively crafting a song?
I think that a lot of the the lyrics or the stories come from uh just kind of free association. You kinda pluck them out of the air. And it's only when you've written them down you think, Well, where the hell did that come from? Where did that story come from? Why? Obviously somewhere in the subconscious, yeah, what's going on in the world or what's going on in your life.
gets to the page and then in retrospect you say, Oh okay, that's what I was going through at that point. That's why. But really it's not that conscious of a thing. I mean I'm conscious that, you know, the ends of lines have to rhyme with the the line before. In the shape of a song. But the actual meaning of the song i i it reveals itself. And uh I'm always or usually pleasantly surprised by it.
Mae'n hefyd wedi'i dweud yn y ddewis yn y ddewis ychydig ychydig ychydig ychydig ychydig ychydig ychydig ychydig ychydig ychydig ychydig ychydig ychydig ychydig ychydig ychydig ychydig.
Mm. I work backwards. I'd start with a title. Which is usually the same as the refrain, if you like. And then work backwards from that. Well, you have a title like Message in a Bottle. What does that Who sends messages in bottles castaways on desert islands, you know. So that was fairly simple. But um I also write verses backwards. I will start with the last line of four. And that's the the clinching line and so you have to
Go backwards. There's no good having a good first line. Where do you go? But having something in the middle that that kind of clenches the argument. is where I work from. So I tend to work backwards. Reverse engineering is your right.
Mm-hmm. And are you usually describing something that's prompted by the sound of the music?
Um I I hold very strongly that if you structure music
Correctly.
in a form that uh is, you know, time tested. Verse chorus, verse chorus. Middle age keychain coda. Okay? That's the formula. It's worked for hundreds of years. That is already a narrative. It's already a distinct abstract narrative. And the music will then tell you the story. Again by free association, just wandering around with it in your head.
The music tells you a story, it gives you a line, it gives you a mood, creates a character. And it's kind of miraculous process that I don't really understand, even though I've written hundreds of songs. Um but I'm always Yeah. At the end of the day when I have something that's coherent and uh makes sense to me.
Mae'n rhywbeth yn ymwneud â'r hyn, mae'n rhywbeth yn ymwneud â'r hyn, mae'n rhywbeth yn ymwneud â'r hyn, mae'n rhywbeth yn ymwneud â'r hyn, mae'n ymwneud â'r hyn, mae'n ymwneud â'r hyn, mae'n ymwneud â'r hyn, mae'n ymwneud â'r hyn, mae'n ymwneud â'r hyn, mae'n ymwneud â'r hyn, mae'n ymwneud â'r hyn, mae'n ymwneud â'r hyn, mae'n ymwneud â'r hyn, mae'n ymwneud â'r hyn, mae'n ymwneud
Mm-hmm. You know, I wrote a song years ago called uh I Hung My Head and it it's in a compound time. It's a bar of five and a bar of four. It's like uh
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That reminded me of a lame horse. And I just imagined this kind of western scene with a a rider on a horse. and somebody watching him with a gun in his hand and, you know, just to practice his aim he puts a a beat on him and and accidentally shoots him and, you know, this story came out. It was eventually recorded by Johnny Cash, which kind of ratified my ability to write country songs. You know, I'm from the north of England, I'm not from Texas.
Mm-hmm.
But uh when Johnny Cash recorded it I thought, okay, yeah, that's not bad.
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¶ Musicality: Bass Lines and Chord Theory
And does the bass ever figure in your writing process? Because some of those bass lines are so they almost become kind of hooks in the songs themselves. Do you ever kinda start with that?
Uh Walking on the Moon started as a baseline that was just in my head late one night in uh a hotel in Munich, I couldn't sleep. I think I'd had too many beers, but I had this bump d going round in my head, right? Wouldn't leave me alone. So I got up, walked around the room a bit, and looked out and there's a full moon out there. So that became, you know
🎵 Music
It's interesting your use of chords as well, I think, and how that adds a particular kind of atmosphere or space to a song. Like Walking on the Moon you've got that sort of shimmering sound which makes it feel almost like space, doesn't it? And then like for example, Message in a Bottle has that I guess it's extended chords, maybe ninety what you're doing that.
I've got a lot of uh value out of ninth chords. You know, most rock and roll is built on fifth.
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Or four.
But a ninth chord, there's something sophisticated about
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And I you know I built message in a bottle just on a series of nine
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And the same with every breath you take, which is the same.
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So for me it was just a it's more interesting than a fifths. Fifths are very this is it power chords whereas ninths kind of are more open-ended. They also like augmented chords and and diminished chords, which probably are reminiscent of, you know, standards. from an older time in songwriting, but there's something very unstable about um a diminished chord or a or an augmented chord that invites progression. Whereas fifths don't. You know, you you go from one to four to five back to four.
Whereas a an augmented chord or one of those more complex intervals will invite narrative. You know, I I've always loved show tunes from the fifties or Gershwin or whatever. So that informs some of the work I do. But not everything. I can write a a rock song, fifths. I like to do it. But I want a whole palette to play with as a songwriter. I don't want to be limited to a band sound or the limitations of a band, because that tends to dictate what you can do and what you can't do.
¶ Seeking Creative Freedom Beyond The Police
I mean I left the police because the pallet wasn't wide enough. I needed, you know, a keyboard player or a sax player or musicians with a different sensibility and as good as the police were and as great as they were at interpreting the songs and adding to the songs, it was still limiting. And so I don't like to feel limited by the palette I've been given. You know, I want total freedom because the song for me is the currency, not the band.
¶ 'Every Breath You Take' Ambiguity and Origins
That said, every breath you take, it has a whole other dimension in terms of the lyrics as well, doesn't it? I mean, you've got that lovely musical kind of complexity that you just pointed out, but on top of that you've got the sort of ambiguity of the the lyric and how it makes the listener feel, you know. Although I guess a lot of listeners take it at its sort of surface.
No, I never contradict people when they have an interpretation of one of my songs that isn't necessarily mine. I think that adds there's a richness to that. But everybody takes an interesting point, a lot of people get married to that song. Other people will say, Well, it's quite a sinister song. It's about surveillance and control. But it's also about protection and care and I think there's an ambiguity there that is its real power.
Um you know, it's just a major chord followed by a relative minor. It's pretty standard stuff. The rhyme scheme's, you know, moon and june.
Yeah.
But there's something ambivalent and kind of dark about it. And I discovered recently that for some reason I detuned everything below four forty Hz for A. So it's right in the cracks. And I think that adds to the strange ambiguity there. There's something odd. Um, I wrote it in Jamaica. I was staying in uh the house of Ian Fleming. Wow. James Bond's creator. And it was late one night. I sat at his desk.
And uh you know, in hindsight I mean this is probably total bullshit, but there's something of James Bond in it. You know, he's he's a protector, he's he's our man, you know. But he's also dangerous and he's also a spy. So the I think the spirit of Ian Fleming's creation is in there somehow, you know, it's this ambiguous sort of anti hero
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¶ Antidote Songs and Haunted Experiences
I wondered actually if um if you love somebody set them free is kind of a a response to that song in a
An antidote.
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean I'd I'm perfectly happy to do that. You know, often you'll you'll write a song w which seems kind of polemic, you know, and Um, put you out on a limb politically or emotionally, and then you you'll wanna redress the balance somehow because I'm not writing biography. Intentionally, anyway, you know, I'm writing different viewpoints. I think one of the great things about songwriting is it's an empathy machine.
where you can step into someone else's shoes. You can see the world through their eyes and express it. It doesn't have to be your view. But if people get that impression then it's it's incumbent upon me to redress that and do something different. So if you love somebody set them free is yeah, the opposite.
That was the one you wrote in Hampstead, wasn't it, in your haunted house?
Hey, I'm the most rational, skeptical person you'll ever meet, but I saw things in that house and experienced things in that house. I have no explanation for. Um it's very odd. Never seen a ghost before, but I saw some weird stuff. And I'm still skeptical. Someone said, Do you want us to get rid of this ghost? They were like exorcists or something, spiritualists and I said, No. No, I don't mind them. I'm not afraid of the dead. Afraid of the living and not the dead.
¶ The Role of Place in Songwriting
It's a great version on the album as well, isn't it? It's kind of uh you've turned it into a bit of a a banger, as the kids say. Thanks for a banger.
You know, it's um it's actually the original parts and it was just excavated from the original parts by Dave Arday, the producer. And he he just said, you know, there's a dance song in here. It's been covered over with layers of echo and the sound of the drums, but the basic core of it is a dance tune. So I said, Go on, go ahead, explore it. And that's my favorite track on the album actually.
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¶ 'Roxanne' and Paris Inspiration
It seems like place is quite an important factor in your songwriting. I mean obviously you talk about the haunted house, but a song like Roxanne that was written in Paris, wasn't it?
look upon a house as a creative partner. A house will have a mood a spirit, if you like, and when you make music in a in a house, somehow the music absorbs that spirit. I made a lot of songs in Lake House, which are is a house in the country, beautiful house. near Stonehenge. Uh it's very atmospheric.
I made a lot of records in my place in Italy, which is again like four hundred years old. A lot of stuff has happened in those houses, you know, not necessarily ghosts, but certainly s the spirit of the place. Paris has always been very uh inspirational to me. It's such a beautiful romantic city. And uh I spent a lot of time there. One of my sons was born there. I have a connection with the place. I wrote Roxanne there. Um the police were staying in one room in a very seedy hotel behind
the Gas Saint Lazare and we shared the hotel with a lot of ladies of the night. Um couldn't afford one. But was fascinated by that CD world and wondered what it would be like to have a relationship with one of these people. What kind of drama without entail. And so I conjured up Roxanne, who has this wonderful r romantic name from Sorona de Bejerac's the play, Sorona de Bejera, it's his love. And um there's a romance to her name. So it's again it's an ambiguous song.
I think he said in Broken Music that it starts out as kind of a jazz tinge, bossin' over.
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Accent. You don't have to put on the red light Roxy, I owe a lot to Jobim. Most songs can start as bossing over. I love bossing over.
Mm-hmm.
But then yeah, we took it to the police and then we made it uh much more angular and uh a bit tougher. Andy playing the four in the bar and then Stuart said to me, Why don't you play the bass on the second beat to go along with my bass drum? We did that. So it became a kind of tango in the end and that was really just the band process of taking the bare bones of the song and and you know, messing around with it and ending up with something that sounded quite unique.
It didn't sound like anything else on the radio.
Still doesn't really, does it?
Well it still doesn't. No, it's an odd little song. But I sing it every night and uh find something new in it to play with.
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¶ Lake House, 'Fields of Gold,' and Walking
It's interesting to hear you talk about Lake House'cause we kind of I guess we bonded over Ten Summoners Tales as friends and we uh came out when we were at school and we used to trade our VHS of Sting Live in Oslo back and forth. Uh
You're nerds.
Basically. Yeah. But um a song like uh If I ever lose my faith in you, I think that's a really interesting one'cause it's such a long title, isn't it?
I have long title.
Yeah.
But I mean that's the refrain. If I ever lose my faith in you. When the world is running down, you make the best of what's still around. That's probably the longest title in pop music. I'll stand by that. Yeah, Ten Summer's Tales was written in Lake House. I'd just moved there in nineteen ninety and
You know, it's a cliche, but a working class lad from Newcastle, I didn't see a tree till I was sixteen. So to have a a mansion in the country, it is a cliche, but God it's fantastic. It's really great. So I'd wander round the garden, I'd wander round the fields and I wrote fields of gold there, never seen a harvest looking so beautiful. It was very bucolic, but also I was disturbed by what was going on in the world. And still am.
It seems like the lyric writing process happened a lot while you were walking around. There was a South Bank show episode that I think showed you sort of writing songs in a cabin or something.
I think there's something about the binary rhythm of walking, left, right, left, right, that um opens up the creative channel, if you like. I'll hum, hum along as I'm walking, and the only people listening are the dogs. They either wag their tails or not. Yeah, I love to walk. If I get stuck with a problem I'll I'll go out and walk it off.
¶ Literary References and Songwriting Tradition
Yeah. And you can hear kind of a lot of your um literary influence in a line like uh Forty Gays a While or in a lot of the imagery in something like All This Time. Do you spend a lot of time kind of crafting the exact number of sort of syllables and the rhymes?
No, I mean uh that comes naturally, actually. But I like referencing literature. I always, you know, identify the sources of what I'm doing. But it adds an extra layer of something for anybody who's interested, you know, what is that a reference to? What was the line you mentioned? But a gazel Yeah, I mean that's there are old folk tropes, you know, that you can you're allowed to borrow. It is our culture.
Yeah.
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Which is why I was so interested in John Dowlin, because in um the sixteenth century he was the first guy to pack his loot up and take it to Europe and tour. singing his own songs. And so really that legacy is something we all carried on. It's unfashionable as the lute is. It's actually a beautiful instrument. But uh Darlin's music was uh probably the first known English songwriting and uh we owe him a debt. I do.
Yeah.
I'd nick lots of ideas of him.
¶ Discipline, Writer's Block, and Inspiration
Didn't McCartney say Fields of Gold was one that he wished he'd written?
Well there are enough songs on his side of the table that I would kill for. So that was a lovely thing for him to say. But uh yeah, when you've written Blackbird
I got it.
That's a perfect song.
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Do you capture your ideas in any kind of form like a notebook or do you use your phone or anything like that?
Um, I have a notebook with um staves on it. How to write a a melody. Very old fashioned. I can do that just just to remind me. And then I'll uh you know, put it on the phone or go into the studio and put an idea down, but uh I'm on the iPad now.
Right. Using particular apps to kind of draft lyrics and things.
Just word.
Rice.
Mm. And um on the last album, Fifty Seventh and Ninth, I think you um resorted to some quite extreme methods, especially in terms of kind of writing lyrics.
I always feel at my best when I'm not in my comfort zone. So I I used to lock myself outside in New York on the terrace on the window with a cup of coffee and say I would not go in until I finished the lyric. It was pretty grim out there. But uh it worked. It actually worked. I mean th there's no any one method of doing it.
If it was a button to press where I'd get a a banana like a monkey, I'd keep pressing the button. But the button keeps moving or the button keeps changing shape or its location. So you never quite know where it is. You just have to be in a state of openness for stuff to come through. And again, it's kind of mysterious and I don't really understand it.
Is there a certain amount of discipline involved in the sort of a daily practice? Do you sit down for a couple of hours every day or anything like that?
Got a clock on. That's what you have to do. Have a coffee, sit down, look at that blank page, keep looking at it, go for a walk, and somehow you fill it up by the end of the day. But I I do work on a regular basis. When I'm on touring mode, it's the luxury of actually not having to think very much because I I just have to get up in the morning, get on a plane, go to my city, do a sound check, do a gig.
go to the hotel, have a drink, go to bed. And there's no thinking at all involved in that. So I'm always happy. But then when I go home, that blank sheet of paper is, you know, beckoning me, say, come and fill this up.
I mean it must be hard when you sit down to write to not buckle under the weight of past accomplishments.
Ah I always think that the last song I wrote is the last song I'll write. But there's no guarantee that you have anything left to say. You know, there's a lot of noise in the world. do you really want to add to it? So if I have nothing to say, I should have the courage and the patience to say nothing. But the I know I'm processing a lot at the moment. Politically, what's going on in the world seems to be uh a reversal of progress.
So does a songwriter have a a duty to address that or redress that? I'm not sure.
And you you have talked about having periods of writers' block, haven't you, where you felt like nothing was coming through. Is that just kind of a normal thing that writers have to accept, do you think?
I think it'd be strange if you were on output all the time and you know not on input a lot of the time. I I think you have to experience life. And then you can write about it. So I would now say that's not writers block, it's just the natural rhythm, creative rhythm. You can't be expected to do that all the time. That's in a that's a drone's work.
¶ Creative Tools: Guitar and Time Signatures
And will you ever kind of as an exercise, just kind of finish a bad song or will you just kinda chuck it away if it's not working?
Um, I'll start things and if it's not going anywhere if I get to a cul de sack I I'll leave it. But my motto is that good work is actually never waste it. somehow it goes back into the reservoir and gets mixed up with other things and will come out in another fashion. So
Good work.
It just doesn't go away. You know you save it for another day.
And is playing maybe kind of an unfamiliar instrument, is that a good way to kind of prompt ideas?
Um I mean my main instrument is this guitar and every day I sit down with it and I ask it to teach me something. It's my teacher. And my fingers will find things that my brain can't. Or I'll play a bit of Bach. I like playing, you know, easy Bach preludes. The cello suites are great for guitar. The violin partitas are great for guitar. They're dead simple.
the discipline of going through and seeing his choices of harmonic choices teaches you. So y you know, you sit at the feet of the master and you learn composition. But that's a discipline of mine. I'll do that every day.
I suppose that kind of discipline leads you on to those interesting things that you can use to generate material like you mentioned, unusual time signatures, you know, a song like Love is Stronger Than Justice, will that start with the bar of seven eight or whatever it was?
It's seven. Yeah, I love seven. If I just start riffing. invariably I I find myself playing in a compound time signature'cause I find it interesting. And seven seven eight really uh appeals to me. I mean, some people might think it's it's really perverse, but I love it. And so a lot of my work is in seven or five. I love five four times. There's a tyranny about common time, four four. It's kind of military. So I I like to sort of open the bars out a bit.
It's interesting how that becomes normal though once you start listening to that stuff. I mean certainly the way you construct melodies over the top seems to kind of neutralize
Well, I mean I I did a song called Seven Days, which should have been in seven but actually was in five, but it's a pup song. And people know there's something strange about it, but you know, i i it does the trick. It actually tells the story and it keeps my interest. And I think musers like it. A nerd.
Yeah.
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¶ Modular Songwriting and Famous Tracks
We've also noticed that kind of music and lyrics tend to be quite modular in your work and that kind of you'll occasionally reuse things like um like the thousand rainy days since we first met in in seven days, which is also when every little thing she does is magic.
I'm just having fun and uh pointing out th that the system is modular, that you can take something from one song and then m place it slap bang in the middle, but I always do it with a smile on my face. I'm taking the piss really. It's fun.
Yeah. There's one song that's not on the new album which we always loved, um, It's Probably Me. Ah. And that's a song that's had some different versions over the years.
You know, that began as a film piece uh by Eric Clapton and um they asked me to put some lyrics on it for a movie. Uh
Um Lethal Weapon Three it was, wasn't it?
Lethal Weapon. Yeah, which is a buddy cop movie. Danny Glover and Mel Gibson and I thought well Okay, they these guys obviously love each other, but but they're probably reticent about Expressing that, how would you do that? And the line It's probably me. If someone helped you out. And you didn't know who they were, it would probably be me. So they they they're basically saying they love each other in a veil kind of macho male way. And
And uh then I I recorded it with my band for um Ten Summers Tales. And they always like that song. Gregory Porter sang it for me in Sweden. It's a great version of it.
You saw that. Um you also do a a neat line in um in kind of Nile and String guitar songs like Shape of My Heart and Fragile. I think Shape of My Heart was that another one written it Lake House on a on a
So it was. Dominic came in with that riff. It's just a four bar riff and I said, Well, that's a good start. Let's let's shape it into a song. And we worked on it all morning, introducing verses and you know, getting to the normal verse form. And And then I went for a walk and came back later with this song about a gambler who happens to be a a philosopher. You know, he questions what his craft is and what it means.
And uh I brought it back to Dominic and he said, Where'd you get that song? I said, Oh, I found it under a tree, you know.
Mm-hmm.
I sort of did, but I don't know where they come from. Mm-hmm.
How does one come up with a line like the sacred geometry of chance whilst out on a walk?
That's the kind of thing I do.
It's just been sample, that song as well, hasn't it?
The song has been sampled so many times, mainly by hip hop artists who uh um attracted to it. You know, there's a descending minor scale, which, you know, comes from Bach, I'm sure. And there's something reflective about it, which, you know, I I think uh rappers use as sort of anecdotal that anger, that political anger. So when they get reflective they they want something that will feed that mood. And I think recently, uh very successfully with Juice World.
🔊 Chant
You know, we're building on other people's songs all the time. Yeah. So I'm I'm always grateful when people take my work and they uh build on it. I'm always intrigued by it.
🎵 Music
¶ 'Fragile': Inspiration and Social Impact
I think fragile, wasn't that unusually one where the lyrics came first?
I did write the lyrics first. There was a a little poem about a man called Ben Linder, who was a peace corps worker in Nicaragua, American guy from Seattle. And he was murdered by the Contras, who were funded by CIA. I thought that was a terrible irony. This guy's in a little village, he's teaching kids to read And he's murdered by, you know, another American enterprise. And then separately I I wrote uh the refrain.
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So I just added the two together but I I didn't know what the chorus would be and I was on the island of Montserrat recording, but it wasn't sunny at all. It rained for an entire month, like tropical rain every day. And uh I'd go walking. I'm getting drenched every day trying to think of this what the refrain should be. And this rain kept falling on and on and Oh, there it is, on and on, the rain will fall. And um literally Bang, that's it. That's the refrain.
So it was written at three different periods. The first lyric, then the melody and then the refrain came later, but inspired by, you know, nature. And that song's interesting because it it seems to be something that uh is used um whenever something terrible happens. I think you know, radio DJs that you know, there's some atrocity has happened. they wonder what to play. They can't play happy go lucky songs. So they play something like Fragile. Mm. So it has a use and I think it calms people down.
I did a show at the Batterclan a year after the the massacre. I reopened it and so I said, you know, to the audience, This I have a difficult job here. I've got to honour the dead. Some of the survivors, some of the families of survivors. And I'm also celebrating reopening this historic venue and and then how we do it. So we had a minute silence.
And then I I began the evening with fragile, which I normally end it with. And that seemed to create the right kind of mood, and after that we could relax. But it it does have a function that uh I'm proud of.
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¶ 'Englishman In New York' and Political Art
We wondered if we could finish on um Englishman in New York, which is another example of you kinda cannibalising one of your your older songs.
It's just you know this
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So then I just with a synthesizer I just got a uh pizzicato sun.
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Same chord. And I wrote it about Quentin Crisp, who was one of my heroes, a friend of mine, remarkable man, very uh flamboyant man, brave man, writer. moved to the Bowery in New York when he was eighty and uh his big thing was just be yourself no matter what people say. He was beaten up for being gay his whole life. And finally found freedom in New York. So I wrote that song about my friend Quentin. I think he appreciated it.
Yeah. A gentleman will walk but never run, probably the classiest line in pop, I think. It was a synclavia I think, wasn't it, for the uh Piticato strings?
Yeah, I was one of the first people on the planet to actually buy a domestic synclavia. I think only Cambridge University had one in it.
Me and probably Trevor Horn.
Yeah, a fair light. But um it was great to have orchestral sounds at your fingertips. You know, you had this huge orchestra just there. And so that inspired a lot of grand stuff like Russians, you know. Nicked a bit of Prokofiev and made a song about Russians. Which is really about the Cold War, which you know I was born in the fifties, so the idea of Russia being uh the enemy or being this strange uh world of automatons. We were conditioned to feel that.
And then, you know, in subsequent years I visited Russia and played in Russia a lot. I like Russia. I like Russians. I don't like the government very much, but I like Russians. I think they're amazing, resilient people. And uh I don't do that song anymore because it doesn't have that historical context anymore. I hope it doesn't again.
Mm-hmm.
¶ Interviewer Reflections on Meeting Sting
Well, Sting, uh I think there's probably another album's worth of hits we could ask you about, but we'll leave it there. Thanks so much for having us.
It's lovely to talk to you.
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That was Sting talking to us from his home in London and what a cool guy he was, in great spirits, very chilled out.
Yeah, he just looked great, didn't he? I mean, we arrived at his place and walked down this kind of corridor and you could just see him in the distance and he was just sort of bathed in light and
Yeah, he was perfectly framed in the doorway as we approached down a a long kind of dark hallway.
And then uh, you know, he sat with the guitar in his lap for the whole interview, which was basically the stuff of dreams for us.
In fact as we were setting up, he was kinda sat off to one side, just leaving us to it, and he was sat with his guitar, looking out at the view across London and just kinda picking away and and it was like, Oh, there's sting in our peripheral vision. Quite hard to concentrate at that point.
And then afterwards when we were getting our photo taken with him, he suggested we go up to his balcony upstairs and the view across London there was incredible too, wasn't it?
Yeah, it was just breathtaking. And the interview itself was just a a joy, you know, he was as thoughtful about the process as you'd expect from an artist of that calibre.
Yeah, getting the origin stories of all those classics was just so much fun. And he called us nerds.
I consider that a badge of honor. And uh it was interesting how he talked about walking being a big part of his creative process, especially when it comes to the lyrical side of things. Mm-hmm. A couple of our guests have talked about that kind of you know, constitutional being a big part of how they do things. Like Ron Sexmith mentioned it, and uh Don Black talked about liking to go for a walk in the park.
And I think he is influenced by place a great deal too. You know, he talked about the different parts of the world in which he'd written songs and those songs do seem to reflect something of those places.
Definitely. And uh he's also not afraid to refashion old ideas into something new.
Yeah, I mean I guess that was our kind of thesis about the interview really, wasn't it? You know, he takes this sort of organic matter of the song and he he's not afraid to reinterpret them, remake them in the present whenever he wants.
Yeah, yeah. I loved what he said about the guitar being his teacher, that he sits down with it every day and and waits for it to teach him something. I thought that was just a a lovely comment.
He seemed to uh appreciate the questions we asked him, didn't he? I think he could tell that we were also musicians.
Yeah, he said the questions were different from the norm, you know, what's your favourite colour, that kind of thing. But it was just what can we say? You know, we don't take any of this stuff for granted that and I know we You know, we might sound quite calm during the interview, but inside we're we're screaming. Um like like giddy school kids, you know.
So My Songs is available now. Check it out, it's a great listen. There was actually a point at the end, wasn't there, where he brought in a whole stack of booklets from My Songs that he needed to sign.
Oh yeah, he said they've got to stand up under the these fuckers now.
What a great day out. Thanks so much to everyone for making that happen. Thanks to Sting. Thanks to David Palmer for his help on the day and also to Stuart Bell as well. And we'll be back soon with another episode.
Take care.
Bye bye.
🎵 Music
Sting! Dur Stingelhoffer! Making copies. Let me stingster. Sting a tola. Sting. Sting a linga ding ding ding dog.
Thank you.