What's the big idea? Sting on believing in pop, getting vaxxed and not finding Jesus

Sting's new album The Bridge releases on Friday: "Release date is a good analogy. I feel released by it."

At 70 years old, Sting still believes in the power of pop music. Having written dozens of absolute pop classics, first with The Police in the 80s and then as a solo artist, perhaps this shouldn't be surprising. He calls his new album, The Bridge, a pop record.

The thing is, no one writes pop music like Sting. His sophisticated style was called uncopyable by the American producer, music educator and YouTube personality Rick Beato, who ended his half-hour dissection of Sting's songwriting by concluding, "You can't crack the Sting code." During our chat Sting himself will later admit that he finds some of the songs on the album "quite difficult to play".

Not that you could tell by listening. Like all masters, he makes it appear effortless. But you don't need to know your Dorian from your Mixolydian modes to hear that Sting has always walked his own path, musically speaking. The Police famously fused a heavy reggae influence with the spiky new wave sound of his native England to incredible effect on timeless classics like Message in a Bottle, Roxanne and Every Breath You Take.

Sting: "This refusal to take the vaccine, it's baffling to me. I took it without any hesitation."

His solo work kept the reggae but sanded down the punky spike, trading it for an impeccable studio gloss and high-fidelity while adding elements of jazz, funk, world music and giving songs like Englishman In New York, Desert Rose and It's Probably Me a contemporary flourish.

"There's no reason why pop music can't contain bigger ideas than my girlfriend's dress or my new car," he says over Zoom. "I'm perfectly happy to write those too - but I'm interested in ideas. How we progress, how we cope with these crises. How we evolve. I think pop music has a place in that unfolding of the future."

If Sting's music is ageless, so is the man himself. Wearing a simple black T-shirt and sitting slightly askew in a tiny nook of room with wooden walls and fading black and white photos hanging high up near the ceiling, Sting looks pretty much the same as he always has as he expounds on some of those ideas.

Sting: "I was brought up in a pretty religious environment, not that I consider myself religious."

On the themes of the album, he says, "I realised unconsciously that I was writing about people in transition; between relationships, between life and death. And that of course is where we are. All of these characters that I'm writing about are in transition. As I am. As we are."

On climate change, he says, "It's up to each one of us to do something. But also it needs political will. We have to identify that and pressure our politicians that this is serious."

On life in lockdown: "Like everybody, I was in the same boat wondering what the future would be. We obeyed the rules. We stayed in quarantine for a long time. Of course, that's tough. But also very necessary. "

And on vaccinations: "This refusal to take the vaccine, it's baffling to me. I took it without any hesitation. I'm old enough to remember polio. I remember kids in my street who were paralysed by this disease, which was eradicated, totally, by a vaccine. I didn't have any doubts that the vaccine was the right way. I still don't."

Sting on The Police: "That's part of my DNA."

In conversation, Sting's great company, with our chat taking on the feel and rhythm of solving the world's ills during a long lunch down the pub. So when I note that religion weighs heavy on the album, with biblical references scattered liberally throughout, and ask if he's had a literal "come to Jesus" moment recently, he laughs long and hard, before answering, "No. The Bible is something I was fed as a kid, I was brought up in a pretty religious environment, not that I consider myself religious. But the language of the Bible is incredibly rich and full of symbolism. It's full of power for me. It's something that I unconsciously go to. I think the King James Bible is one of the greatest works of English literature, so it's no wonder that I go back to that as a source. I appreciate the language. When we say biblical, we mean 'big' and there are lots of big ideas in that thing."

His childhood also surfaces in the album's first single, If It's Love, a song he describes as a "whimsical, whistling song" and one that's destined to become an easy crowd-pleaser.

"I always think of milkmen when I hear it," he smiles. "My dad was a milkman and he'd whistle."

The Police - Stewart Copeland, Sting And Andy Summers.

But the album's real treat is opener Rushing Water. With its driving beat, jagged riff and reggae overtones, it's a gift for Police fans.

"That's part of my DNA. It's a strain that goes through all of my music," he says, before laughing, "And because I'm a lead singer, it will sound like The Police."

The Bridge explores pure love, adulterous love, personal loss, social disadvantage, therapy sessions, musings on the struggle of life, passing into death and even a modern updating of an old folk song that dates back to the 11th century, called Captain Bateman.
The good captain also surfaces on a grooving jazz-funk instrumental later in the record called Captain's Bateman's Basement. Who was this character who inspired Sting to write two songs named after him?

"Captain Bateman is a very old British song about a noble lord who is captured in some foreign war and imprisoned for life," Sting explains.

"He falls in love with the jailer's daughter, woos her with a promise that he'll marry her and then escapes to England and doesn't do anything about this poor woman who he's promised to marry. He's about to marry somebody else and then she turns up at his castle. In my version of this old folk song, she puts a curse on him and he gets his just deserts."

Then a big grin crosses his face and he says, "My question is: why is he such a noble lord when he's such a s***?"

* Sting's new record The Bridge is released next Friday.