Sting Biography

Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, CBE (born 2 October 1951), usually known by his stage name Sting, is an English musician from Newcastle upon Tyne. Prior to a distinguished solo career, he was the lead singer, principal composer, and bassist of the 1970s/1980s rock band The Police.

Sumner was born in Wallsend, near Newcastle upon Tyne in northeast England, to Audrey Cowell and her husband, Ernest Sumner. He is the eldest of four children and has a brother, Philip, and two sisters, Angela and Anita. His father managed a dairy, and as a boy Sumner would often assist him with the early morning milk delivery rounds. Sumner was raised in the Roman Catholic tradition, due to the influence of his paternal grandmother, who was from an Irish family.

Sumner attended St. Cuthbert's Grammar School in Newcastle upon Tyne,later moving to Merchant Taylor's School Crosby for the 6th form, where he befriended John Mchale, Rafille Mir and Thomas Vipond, who soon turned out to be a great influence on his music. During this time, he would often sneak into nightclubs like the Club-A-Go-Go. Here he would watch acts like Jack Bruce and Jimi Hendrix who would later influence his music. After jobs as a bus conductor, a construction labourer, and a tax officer, he attended Northern Counties Teachers' Training College, which later became part of Northumbria University, from 1971 to 1974. He then worked as a teacher at St. Paul's First School in Cramlington for two years.

From an early age, Gordon Sumner knew that he wanted to be a musician. His first music gigs were wherever he could get a job, performing evenings, weekends, and during vacations from college and teaching. He played with local jazz bands such as the Phoenix Jazzmen, the Newcastle Big Band, and Last Exit.

While with the Police, Sting wrote "Driven to Tears," a diatribe against world hunger, and it preceded his work on Bob Geldof's Feed The World project, which included "Do They Know It's Christmas?"-- a hit single with a pop music super-group called Band Aid and eventually led to the Live Aid Concert in July of 1985.

Throughout the 1980s, Sting strongly supported environmentalism and humanitarian movements, such as Amnesty International. With his wife Trudie Styler and Raoni Metuktire, a Kayapó Indian leader in Brazil, he founded the Rainforest Foundation to help save the rainforests. His support for these causes continues to this day, and includes an annual benefit concert held at New York's Carnegie Hall with Billy Joel, Elton John, James Taylor and other music superstars.

His most high-profile contribution to the human-rights cause came in 1988, when he joined a team of major musicians and rising stars—-including Peter Gabriel and Bruce Springsteen—-assembled under the banner of Amnesty International for the six-week world Human Rights Now! Tour celebrating the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 1988, he released the single "They Dance Alone" which chronicled the plight of the wives and daughters of the disappeared, the innocent victims of the Pinochet regime in Chile. Unable to protest against the government about their missing loved ones, the women of Chile would pin photos of their relatives on their clothing, and dance in silent outrage against the government. The Pinochet regime has since fallen.

Sting performed with Don Henley and Billy Joel in New York's Madison Square Garden in the early 1990s at The Concert for Walden Woods. He also took part in the post 9-11 rock telethon to raise money for the families of the victims of terror attacks in the United States.

Sting married actress Frances Tomelty from Northern Ireland, on 1 May 1976. Before they divorced in 1984, the couple had two children: Joseph (born 1976) and Fuchsia Catherine (born 1982). Joe is following in his father's musical footsteps and is a member of the band Fiction Plane.

In 1982, shortly after the birth of his second child, Sting separated from Tomelty and began living with actress (and later film producer) Trudie Styler. The couple eventually married in 1992. Sting and Styler have four children: Bridget Michael (a.k.a. "Mickey," born 1984), Jake (born 1985), Eliot Pauline (nicknamed "Coco," born 1990), and Giacomo Luke (born 1995).

Both of Sting's parents died from cancer in 1987; however, he did not attend either funeral.

Sting owns several homes worldwide, including a 60-acre country estate called "Lake House" located in Wiltshire, England, a country cottage in the Lake District, a New York City apartment, a beach house in Malibu, California, a 600-acre estate in Tuscany, Italy, and two properties in London: an apartment on the Mall and an 18th-century terrace house in Highgate. [1] According to an interview he did for German television broadcaster NDR in 1996 Sting chose a tree on the Lake House estate beside which he wishes to be buried someday.

For Sting's discography with The Police, see The Police Discography.