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He's talking with Sunday Mornings Mark Phillips. You need a clap? I've got a good clap. Tell me when. Go.
Yeah, clap, go ahead. Do it. Yeah, so That's an excellent clip. Do you keep score of any of this stuff? How many awards you've.
One, how many albums you've sold? Do you know these numbers? The answer is enough. I've had more than enough. Success and affirmation and praise and awards.
I don't actually need any more. It's lovely. But it's not something I particularly think about. Is this current show, this last ship show, about which you've been very stubborn in persisting with? You say you don't need any more affirmation, but is this part of an affirmation process for you?
I would like this to be part of my Legacy. Why? Because it's very personal to me. It's about. where I come from and therefore who I am.
in the world. I don't think of myself as a celebrity. I don't like to I like to think of myself as a working Musician with a story to tell and the story is largely My experience in life, where I come from, how I've navigated. life, various chapters of my life to end up. here in a very privileged and fortunate.
position.
So, um yeah, I I would like this play to be a major part of What people think of Uh My work, my life's work. Is this kind of a story of your life? The last ship is not Biographical. It's a sort of analogue of what my life could have been. You know, I saw the alternatives as a young boy of what my town would have offered me.
work in the shipyard and one end of the town. or the coal mine in in the other, or to be the milkman like my father was. I didn't want any of those things. I was kind of vague about what exactly it was. I just wanted a larger life than the one that seemed to be on offer.
And for me, getting an education was important. I won a scholarship to A grammar school, and I suppose the idea was that you'd become a gentleman. I mean, that was only half. Achieved. But it did give me a a sense of a bigger world.
Which I'm grateful for. Did it also distinguish you from where you came from? Yeah. There was quite a painful wrench at the age of eleven after you'd passed this test. And most of the people in your class who you'd been brought up with from your street didn't pass the test.
They would go to a different kind of school.
So I had to get. a uniform. I had to get the train every day into the city. and was sectioned off. Yeah.
um the people I've been brought up with.
So that was painful on both sides. Uh for me, f for my friends. And in a way, coming back to tell the story of my community is a way of trying to. bridge that gap again. You know, because it was quite a profound split.
There's a quote where you said you felt detached, lonely, but driven at that time. Is that what I'm describing? I don't know that somebody quoted you. Detached, lonely, and driven, yes. That was me.
The normal path here would be when there were shipyards to go into the shipyard. None of that exists anymore. Is this show. More about a nostalgia for that time, that kind of sense of community that's nostalgia. I would prefer to call The Last Ship an elegy.
For a way of life that has disappeared, an honourable representation of what that was and what it meant to the people who took part in it. We built in my town the largest vessels built in the history of the world, right at the end of my street. And as hard and difficult and dangerous as that work was, the entire town was immensely proud of those mountains of steel that were built and then launched.
So that pride is is something that I wanted to engender in the play. The palpable pride that this community had in what they built was something that I remember still. Is it the the the values that you learned here growing up as the son of you know, a milkman and they're a working class kid. Is is your point that those values have been lost? The working class works.
and wants to work. I'm one of those people. Work defines me. I love to work. I love to be given the opportunity to work.
Often I work too hard, but I don't know any other way.
So, um, yeah, it reflects my ethic. Why have you stuck with this? Why does this mean so much to you? I'm tenacious. Or if I believe in something.
I will stick at it. and I do not conflate. Mm commercial success. With Excellence. or quality at all.
It takes a while for a play to find itself. For a play to find its audience? And I'm tenacious and patient. And I think this play, even though it's set in the 1980s, has something to say to people now. All of us are in danger of losing our work to AI.
All of us. Everyone, whether you're an artist or a journalist or A lawyer, your job could be replaced by this technology that none of us quite understand. where where it's leading to.
So the play's message really is the importance of community, the importance of supporting the people next to you. And I believe that very strongly. I think community will.
Well is the only thing that will save us, frankly. What about the risk involved? That you've got this sensationally. A successful career as a as a popular artist. Is that a risk?
And and are you di have you taken risks in your career? Risk, I'm not risking my life here. I I'm not on the front line expecting to be to be shot. But without that uncertainty. Let's call it uncertainty.
there's nothing worth doing. You need to put yourself in a slightly uncomfortable position in order to produce something. New. I'm looking for novelty all the time. I'm looking for surprise.
That for me is the essence of art, is surprise. I want to hear a piece of music, and after four bars, if I'm not surprised by what happens next, I'm bored. I want to move on.
So I want to do the same in my life, in my creativity. I want to surprise myself. And for that, it involves a certain amount of uncertainty. With without uncertainty, there's no art. when the show first opened.
and was not A universally acclaimed success. Did you feel a sense of failure out of it? I didn't. No. No, I did not feel a sense of failure at all.
I felt this is part of the process. What I'm doing is very difficult. The you know most Broadway musicals are on a recognizable property. That it's a a Disney cartoon. It's a fairy story or whatever.
So it has an inbuilt, you know, audience. This is something much more difficult, an an original story, a serious story.
So no, I I felt no sense of failure whatever. And I still don't. I don't look upon it that way. It's part of the process. I learned a great deal.
Do you see it now as a success? Absolutely. It's all part of the The journey. Do you want to be taken seriously? as distinct from your pop career.
I think I'm very grateful for the the pop career and it was a certain time in my life when I was of a certain age and looked a certain way and made a certain kind of music but it's it can't be my entire life. I don't want to be justifying from how I was at the age of twenty-five. You know, I'm seventy-four now. I would like to present my entire Life. uh as a musician.
the way I'm doing it now. People look at your history and they divide the your your you know, your police period, the Either it was or was an acrimonious breakup of the of the police. Do you make a division or do you see a continuity through the whole thing? I see a continuity and breakup wasn't really acrimonious. it was just time for me to to move on, you know.
Um I wanted new horizons, new challenge us. It it wasn't acrimonious. Um I was very happy to be in the band and I was very happy to leave it. We'll have more from our Sunday morning extended interview after this break. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much.
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So let's go back to Every Breath You Take. Why is that such a popular song? Um You know, I I don't... think of my songs as being particularly separate Entities. They're all part of one continuous creative line.
In the same way, I don't think of you know, you can't say to me, which is your favorite child? I don't have a favourite child. They all have qualities that I admire and I love. You don't have a favorite song, but the listening public apparently does, given its streaming numbers and its popularity. Can you understand why?
Is it just catchy? There's an ambiguity about that song that is unusual.
Some people interpret that song as being very romantic. Love song, or it's about a stalker, you know, it's obsessive. Watching, I'll be watching you that I'm watching. I don't contradict people in their individual interpretation of the song. I think it enriches the song.
Which I think gives us its power. It's about both things. It's about a stalker, I'm watching you. It's almost big violence.
Some people get married to that song. Yeah. God bless them. Yeah. Does it bug you to have to go when people shout out Roxanne or shout out message in a bottle or any of that stuff, which you've probably sung a.
A thousand times. I'm delighted to sing Roxanne every night. Um m my job It is to sing a song I may have written 45 years ago with the same. curiosity about it that I had the morning I wrote it. I'm still looking for incremental changes, adjustments that can make.
Discovery. It's like a jazz player will play a standard and you'll start and you'll recognize it. Then the jazz player will explore the possibilities. I'm still doing that with my songs that I wrote many years ago.
So I don't feel like I'm. trying to recreate some museum artifact, you know, perfectly at all. It's just the beginning. And so, you know, I sing Roxanne. I always find something different.
And maybe the listener does not detect that. My musicians do. And I do, but that is my search. But you played around with styles. You've gotten Dazzier at times.
There was what, a loot album at one point. Is this an act of? Trying to stir the creative juices, or are you experimenting, or why do you? Music as a large church. That includes Everything.
Um I was educated as a musician BBC Radio. And BBC Radio would play everything. They'd play Beethoven, they'd play Sinatra, they'd play. the Beatles and so I thought of music as being the spectrum of experience. My mum was a piano player and she had a record collection and she loved show show tunes, she loved uh Rogers and Hammerstein, she wrote loved Lerner and Lowe.
I'd play her record collection. You know, repeatedly, and I love. I love my Fey Lady at the age of seven. I kept playing it. I love Carousel.
I loved Oklahoma. And so I'd never seen a show in my life. There was no Broadway shows. This is when you were a kid, but I recognized the quality of that music. The music of Richard Rogers is quite sophisticated.
So that's what I would have aspired to if I was going to write theatrical music. Not uh Not rock. Although you didn't go to the shipyards, you did work on what we'd call some normal jobs before you hit the road as a rocket. I started to play in bands fairly early in my late teens. teens and was looking for a way to To become a professional musician, and at the time the only way would be to get to London.
So I took jobs, I worked in an office for a while, I worked on building sites, I went to sea as a musician on a cruise ship, or I taught in a mining village. all the time while I'm playing in bands. And then I decided, Okay, I have to now I have to go to London. I just had a a child who was a few months old and we got in the car. On what's called the Great North Road, and we headed south.
to London to sleep on a friend's Uh Okay. Living room? I had one phone number. But I had I knew that I had to get through the window at this point, otherwise it wouldn't happen. And I was lucky.
How how old were you? About twenty three? Mm. But the idea was I'm going to be a rock star. No, I wanted to make a living as a musician.
And that still is my How I define myself. I'm not a rock star. You're in a privileged position to live the kind of life that you live now, with, as we've talked about, the properties and the money and what have you. Are you still? telling your kids they're not going to get any of it.
Um I think the worst thing you can do to a kid is to say you don't have to work. I think that's a form of abuse that I I hope I'm never uh guilty of. All of my kids have been blessed with this extraordinary work ethic. whether it's the DNA of it or whether I've said to them Guys who gotta work. You know, this this is I'm spending our money.
You know, and you know, I I'm paying for your education. Yeah you've got shoes on your feet. Go go to work. That's not cruel. I think that's there's there's a a kindness there and a trust in in them that they will make their own way.
They're tough, my kids. Do they ever say dad enough? But hu you know, put your feet up? No. Oh, to me, yeah.
No. Not to my face, they don't. Can we talk a bit about the other work that you're that you're continuing doing? Sting three point zero, this the the this c this tour that you're now doing. How how is it different and why are you doing it?
Um I've had a lot of different configurations of of bands. I've been in mid large bands, sometimes seven, eight piece bands. I sometimes work with an orchestra. Um I thought it would be interesting to Pair the band down back to three, and I had obviously had some experience with the police, it was a trio. and seeing how the songs would fare by taking away a lot of the stuff that perhaps isn't necessary, just down to the bare bones.
To reveal songs that are sturdy enough to withstand that kind of subtraction. And they are. And um it's very satisfying. Shows a year of Sting 3.0 or 2000. In in between the play, the 3.0 go out on tour.
and will continue to do that. I I I love that band and I will keep doing it as long as I can. You don't have to work. You've got houses all over the place. probably more money than you know you have.
Why why are you still doing this? Because I like to work. You know, I I I think Could I retire? I'm not sure I could do it. I I haven't developed that skill to just sit.
and do nothing. Are you afraid of doing nothing? Perhaps I'm afraid of it. I haven't prepared myself for it. But while I'm still fit enough to do my work, I will continue.
At some point, I hope I have the objectivity to say, okay. You've done enough. You know, go and sit on the farm. Could you do that? I'm not sure.
I'm Jane Pauley. Thank you for listening. And for more of our extended interviews, follow and listen to Sunday Morning on the free Odyssey app. or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if your online store converted 36% more shoppers?
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