Eighteen Grammy Awards. Three Brit Awards. Seven Ivor Novellos. Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee. And somewhere out there, a generation of schoolchildren who once knew him simply as Mr. Sumner.
Before he was Sting, he was Mr. Sumner – an English and music teacher at St. Paul’s First School in Cramlington, quietly laying the groundwork for one of the most extraordinary careers in modern music. Today, October 2, that former schoolteacher turns 75.
Gordon Sumner earned his nickname the way all great origin stories unfold: accidentally. While playing bass in jazz groups around Newcastle, he frequently wore a black-and-yellow striped sweater. A bandleader thought he looked like a wasp and started calling him Sting. The name stuck — and so did everything that followed.
It was at one of those Newcastle jazz gigs that drummer Stewart Copeland spotted him, eventually inviting him to London where, alongside guitarist Andy Summers, they formed The Police in 1977. In just five years, the band delivered an era-defining catalog – “Roxanne,” “Message in a Bottle,” “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” – before closing their initial run with the song that would define Sting’s legacy forever.
“Every Breath You Take,” released in 1983, became the most-played song in radio history. It won the Grammy for Song of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals, and by 2010 was estimated to generate between a quarter and a third of Sting’s entire music publishing revenue. It also earned him the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically in 1983 – one of seven Ivor Novellos he would collect over his career. Rolling Stone declared The Police “possibly the biggest band in the world” that same year. They weren’t wrong.
But Sting was never content to rest on that legacy. His solo career, spanning Dream of the Blue Turtles, Nothing Like the Sun, The Soul Cages, and Ten Summoner’s Tales, became a remarkable body of work in its own right, blending jazz, reggae, and rock in ways that defied categorization.
Across his career, Sting has earned 18 Grammy Awards, three Brit Awards and seven Ivor Novello Awards. The Police were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2003.
View this post on InstagramHe composed The Last Ship, a stage musical drawn from his childhood near the Newcastle shipyards, and just this past year recorded an album live inside Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum surrounded by Rembrandt and Vermeer paintings.
And at 75, Sting has no plans to slow down. During a recent appearance on the British television show This Morning, he was asked whether he could ever see himself taking a few months off.
“Stopping? I can’t see myself lying on a beach,” he said, explaining that he and his wife both like to work because it “keeps the brain lively.”
Sting also reflected on his journey from a young boy in Wallsend, England, watching shipyard workers head to work to the international career he has built. “I haven’t done bad,” he said. “But I’m still going.”
Judging by his schedule, he means it. Happy 75th birthday, Sting.
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