Sting on His Rise from Teacher to Rock Star & Emotional Musical ’The Last Ship’ (Exclusive)

Sting sits down with “Extra’s” Mona Kosar Abdi to dish on bringing a revival of his deeply personal musical “The Last Ship,” to NYC. 

He wrote and produced the show, telling Mona, “Running a musical is the most difficult thing I’ve ever tackled.” 

The story is inspired by his childhood growing up in a ship-building community near Newcastle, England. It was a life he longed to escape when he was younger.

The 74-year-old explained, “I was born next to a shipyard… It’s a noisy hellscape, infernal row, very dangerous work. I wanted to escape that. I watched thousands of men every morning walk to work past my house and I’d think, ‘Is this my destiny? Is this what I have to do?' I did everything in my power to escape it… So, I got a scholarship to a school and I became a musician, a successful one."

He reflected on his hometown and his existence before all the fame, saying, “I had a real life before I had this fairy-tale life that I lead now, the world of show business and success and money and fame and all that stuff, which is I think difficult to cope with if you haven’t had the real stuff before then.”

Sting added, “So, until the age of 25, I was a schoolteacher. I had a mortgage. I paid tax. I voted. I was a citizen. I didn’t just go from school to being a celebrity, which I think is very difficult, so I’m grateful for my normal life because it makes the one I have now... it balances it out.”

The singer and his band the Police started their rocket ride with their hit-packed first album "Outlandos d’Amour" in 1978 and nabbed their first-ever U.K. number-one single with “Message in a Bottle” in 1979.

In 2003, they landed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 

Despite everything that came after escaping Newcastle, his roots were calling to him.

Sting said, “At a certain point in my life, I realized I had to go back to my town and tell the story of my community because a community for me, who I am, gave me a sense of identity, work ethic, and so I wanted to tell the story of my community because it hadn’t been told before.”

Mona asked if it was a gradual realization or a moment that hit him?

Sting explained, “In 1989 my parents died in the same year. I went back to see them, and it coincided with the closing of the shipyard. So, that was like a metaphor for the demise of my parents, and I wove them into an album called 'Soul Cages,’ which is about the death of my parents and the death of the shipyard.”

He added, "I realized then that there was a spark of some theatrical component there that perhaps could be realized one day. "