Sting biography

Having gigged extensively in Newcastle wherever he could, and eventually quitting his regular teaching job, Sting moved to London on New Year's Eve 1976, with his first wife Frances Tomelty and young baby Joe in tow, determined to forge a career as a rock musician. He formed the Police in January 1977 with drummer Stewart Copeland and guitarist Henry Padovani, soon to be replaced by Andy Summers. The band rehearsed every night in a Mayfair squat secured by Copeland (until a court order had them evicted), and, after three years of hard work, hard gigging and quality music-making, the Police had brought Sting the fame and success he had sought. Ditching teaching and going on the dole now looked a wise move.

The band managed to enjoy the trappings and the spiky attitude of punk, fused with reggae beats, minimalist pop sounds, memorable melodies and choruses and some killer guitar riffs - in short, punk with a whole heap of musicality thrown in. Furthermore, Copeland says that they were able to be well organised where their more dishevelled peers were not - 'we were the only guys who could hire a van and find a venue.'

They had their first hit in 1979 with the edgy ode-to-a-prostitute 'Roxanne' in 1979, propelling them into success on the sales charts and touring. 1980's hugely successful Zenyatta Mondatta album took the band global, and Sting's song-writing seemingly knew no limits. With hit after hit flowing from him, the band increasingly were reduced to the role of session musicians, as he would take on every aspect of the songs' arrangements, not merely penning the odd riff or scribbling some lyrics on a napkin . Perhaps unsurprisingly, tensions mounted in the band, and squabbling, particularly between Sting and Copeland, dogged them constantly.

After several fallings-out, the Police decided to go their separate ways while they were still at the top, after their last tour in 1984. Their last album Synchronicity (1983) had also brought their biggest hit, 'Every Breath You Take', a Sting composition on obsessive love which by the mid-80s had him celebrating a million plays on radio (equivalent to playing the song for five years non-stop). The single is still rumoured to bring in royalties of over £1000 a day, but any level of success was not going to keep the Police together. This same year, his wife to Frances ended in divorce.

Sting's next move was to revert to the jazz he had played in his earlier career in Newcastle, and for the 1985 album 'Dream of the Blue Turtles' he drafted in a dream-team of jazz musicians, including the sax player Branford Marsalis. Featuring the hit 'If You love Somebody Set them Free', it went triple platinum within a year, and also gained Sting a Grammy nomination. The same year, Sting sang the memorable backing vocals on the Dire Straits huge single 'Money for Nothing', and performed this with them at the Live Aid concert - and whilst he was belting out 'I want my MTV', the channel and its record-buying viewers couldn't get enough of him either.

'Nothing Like the Sun' (1987) included yet more hit singles, most memorably the soprano-sax-tinged 'Englishman in New York', about the eccentric writer Quentin Crisp - clearly, a man who '...likes his toast done on both sides'. It was perhaps around this time that Sting's rather luvvy image started to form - the album's title was taken from Shakespeare's sonnet 130, and he followed it up with 'Nada Como El Sol' in 1988, a short collection of songs from its predecessor translated into Portuguese and Spanish.

The 1990s brought with them more album success, and 1991's Soul Cages yielded the top-ten hit 'All this Time' and a grammy for the title track. 1992 saw him marry Trudie Styler, reportedly after a great deal of nagging for this to happen from his children. 1993 brought the release of 'Ten Summoner's Tales', a dual play on words combining his surname, Sumner, with Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'. The album reached no.2 in both the US and UK album charts, and as well as 'If I Ever Lose My Faith' and the seven-four time '7 Days', spawned the track 'Fields of Gold', later to be covered by Eva Cassidy.

As well as some rather regrettable acting roles, Sting's association with the movies also extended to his music. 'Shape of My Heart', a 1993 single from 'Ten Summoner's Tales', was threaded as a theme throughout Luc Besson's 'Leon' in 1994, but in addition a reworked Police single 'Demolition Man' had featured in the film of the same name. Furthermore, the entirely forgettable trio with Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart, 'All For Love', graced the soundtrack of the Three Musketeers in 1994.

'Mercury Falling' in 1996 was not quite as successful in terms of sales as his earlier work, but had two top-forty singles in the US, and he continued his association with Hollywood by providing the soundtrack to Disney's animated film 'Kingdom of the Sun'. Undergoing serious plot changes and overhauling in development, the film eventually was called 'The Emperor's New Groove', and only featured piecemeal contributions from Sting - thought to have been a placatory move by Disney to keep Sting on-side, although they had not wanted to use his tunes at all for the final film.

In 1999 Sting released 'Brand New Day', yielding top 40 places for the title track and the Arabic-influenced 'Desert Rose'. The latter featured a notable vocal performance from the Algerian 'rai' singer Cheb Mami, but garnered criticism for Sting when it featured in a Jaguar car advert - surely it wasn't the done thing for a well-known environmental crusader to promote a gas-guzzler? Yet this perceived conflict was not new to Sting.

His environmental campaigns for the rainforests had taken a serious knock in 1990, when a World in Action documentary film claimed that the 'Rainforest Foundation' he and Trudie had set up had only spent 5% of its funds on its perceived aims, and that members of the tribes they were seeking to protect had started dying of malaria. (Sting claimed at the time to have been 'set up'). Worse still, Chief Paiakan, the poster boy for the global campaign (he of the plate-in-the-lip) brought further ignominy after being accused of a brutal sexual assault on a young woman in 1992.

The papers latched on to further controversies - Sting promoted a holiday complex in 1995 which had been built after the felling of 100000 trees'-worth of Japanese forest, and no amount of well-meant campaigning for Amnesty, Kurdish refugees or Chinese students could knock the gutter press off their determined course to deride a man for trying to 'do his bit'. Arguably, Sting brought some criticism upon himself, as a man who owns six enormous houses around the world and spends a great deal of time flying between them will undoubtedly attract accusations of hypocrisy from those to whom he preaches environmental responsibility. However, he does counter such arguments with the fact that he provides well for his many employees, that he uses all his homes, and moreover that the campaigning he has done far outweighs any of this. To a large extent he has always been slightly mistrusted by the British media, not least for being a bit too 'clever by half', and for doing things his own way.

One example of this was the idea to record a live session in his Tuscan home in 2001, to be released on CD and DVD, featuring reworkings of 'Roxanne' and 'If You Love Somebody set Them Free'. It was actually recorded on the day the twin towers toppled, September the 11th of that year, and was solemnly dedicated 'to all those who lost their lives that day.'

In 2002, as well as being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and receiving a Golden Globe award, he was awarded a CBE by the Queen. He then released the album 'Sacred Love' the following year, featuring duets with the sitar player Anoushka Shankar and the 'R and B' diva Mary J Blige - winning a grammy for the duet with the latter, 'Whenever I Say Your Name'.

Perhaps Sting's most surprising collaboration, however, has been his recent release of an album of 16th century lute music by the composer John Dowland, in the shape of 2006's 'Songs from the Labyrinth'. His interest in the lute originated when his long-time guitarist, Dominic Miller, gave him a hand-made lute as a gift, and, becoming obsessed with the instrument and its music, Sting immersed himself in the works of Dowland, whose laments on lost love and broken hearts led him to describe the composer as 'the first English singer-songwriter that we know of.'

Releasing such an album may well earn him respect from musicians and peers for the breadth of his musical knowledge and ability, as well as his undisputed knack of finding the next, most interesting thing possible to do with his career and talents. However, in equal measure it will probably draw snide comments and accusations of 'luvvy-ism' from his detractors. But that is Sting in a nutshell - while not quite polarising opinion, he has certain facets of his career and fame that are beyond reproach - does anyone not know the words of 'Every Breath...', and is there anyone who's never heard of the rainforest? - and yet there will always be those other facets that simply draw the brickbats and criticism from those determined not to like him.

• Sting Discography