He’s one of the world’s most successful musicians, introduced Guy Ritchie to Madonna and has just been honoured by the Queen with a CBE. He has also written his memoirs — and doing it plunged him into depression. So, why does everyone mock him? And why are we so obsessed by his tantric sex life?

The Guardian

In his memoir ‘Broken Music’ (published by Simon & Schuster), we learn that Sting was tall as a child, so much so that people called him Lurch. We learn that his father ran a dairy and that his mother eloped with a man named Alan, which would forever “colour and distort” Sting’s relationships with women.

When his parents died within a year of each other, we discover that their eldest son went to neither funeral. This was in part, writes Sting, because he had allowed his “emotional evolution to be stunted by the shallow and tepid waters of popular culture.”

Writing ‘Broken Music’ put Sting into a depression for two years. Of his first girlfriend, he writes, “we had explored our first intimacies like children making blood promises in the dark, attempting to secure the volatile cargoes of the future in the fumbling, silent exchanges of our hips and hands.”

Sting asks to be read metaphorically. He is trying, he explains, to “remake the drab prose of my life into some kind of transcendent poetry.”

So the line “we move together effortlessly like synchronised swimmers in a sea of longing” refers not, as one might expect, to his girlfriend, but to Mr Wilson, his boss in the tax office. Before he became a pop star, Sting had worked for the Inland Revenue.

Sting’s approach to fame has always been to big-up his “normality” the fact that he feels like an “impostor” in the world of the super-celeb. He doesn’t take limousines, he doesn’t have bodyguards. When he meets journalists, he says, it isn’t important what the questions are. What’s important is that they connect as human beings.

Sting’s ordinariness has never been in doubt. While insisting that he feels “marginalised” and an “outsider”, Sting’s place in the music industry has always been firmly in the centre.

He admits he has been “perversely unfashionable”, to the extent that the first manager of the Police said of him, “you got this guy in the band, what’s his name, Smig? He’s a goddamn jazz singer.” And his peers are always slating him.

Why do people give him such a hard time? “Maybe because they know I can take it. Everybody has a right to fair comment. I can deal with it.”

In fact, says Sting, he is a lifelong risk-taker. He calls it “following his truth” and it is why he resigned from a secure teaching job to try to make it in a band. His parents didn’t follow their truths, he says, and that is, ultimately, why they died.

“My father couldn’t express his love for his wife. My mother couldn’t express that she needed intimacy and she had the perfect right to find that wherever she could. We were

conditioned as a family not to express ourselves.”

Eventually, when it was “too late”, Sting’s mother made a last-ditch bolt for freedom and eloped with one of her husband’s employees. It didn’t work out and she came home more miserable than ever.

“I think that killed them. I think cancer — I’m not an expert or a doctor — but I think cancer is the result of undigested dreams and forcing yourself to do something that is not distinctively you.”

After blaming them for an emotionally frigid upbringing, Sting made peace with both parents before they died. But he didn’t go to their funerals. “I think I underestimated the importance of the mourning process. I thought I’d said goodbye to them, which was important, but the actual interring of the remains and the sharing of that with the family, I didn’t take that seriously. I thought, I’ll just get on with work. I was deeply afraid. Running away is what I’ve always done, as a matter of course.”

He doesn’t regret it, though. “I don’t really regret anything. Now, of course, I’d go to their funerals. Then, I didn’t. But it certainly had its effect on me. I did suffer because of it. But then I can’t regret that.”

He left his wife and two children to marry producer Trudie Styler, with whom he had four more. They introduced Guy Ritchie to Madonna — a fact Sting brings up. “We’re famous for that one particular introduction and that gets translated as ‘we throw these celebrity parties for people to match make.’ Well, we have friends, and some of them happen to be celebrities. In fact, celebrity is not something I’m particularly interested in.”

Any other matchmaking successes? “Well, didn’t we introduce JLo and Ben Affleck?” Sting is a famous proponent of tantric sex. “I try to be light-hearted about it,” he says, “but at the same time, there is some serious information about couples and how they can relate and sex is only a tiny proportion of it. It’s about ritualising a period of the day with your partner; it can be looking at each other, touching each other, running a bath, a massage, deeper levels of connection. Sex is only the surface. Once you really connect, telling the truth, talking, all of that. Tantra is much too complex for me to discuss. But it’s about reconnecting with the world of the spirit through everyday things. My church happens to be the person I live with. She is my connection to the sacred. I don’t know how that’s going to look in print.”

What exactly is the spirit? “I don’t know what it is. But it’s something I need to connect with on a regular basis and the roots for me are music and my relationships. I don’t know what it is. I only have a limited brain. I’m just a human being.”