Do we like Sting?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Good on drag, Ukraine and the Amazon for decades, with a contested royalty fight, a dodgy gig and a denied old allegation holding him back.
Gordon Sumner grew up in Wallsend, near Newcastle, in the shadow of the shipyards. His grandfather was a shipwright and his father worked at a lathe. A scholarship got him out, and he fronted The Police from 1977 to 1984 before going solo in 1985. He's said he tried hard to leave that world behind, then wrote a whole musical about it.
The messy bit right now is money. Police bandmates Summers and Copeland took him to London's High Court over their share of income from songs he wrote alone. Sting has already paid them £647,000 after a historic underpayment turned up during the case. His lawyers argue the streaming claims have no real prospect of success, and the bandmates say far more is owed. When we looked, no final ruling had been reported.
Then there's Uzbekistan. In 2009 he played Tashkent at a festival organised by the daughter of dictator Islam Karimov, with tickets reportedly $1,000 to $2,000. UNICEF said it was surprised to be named as a sponsor. Sting said he knew the president's human rights record, played anyway, and argued cultural boycotts are counter-productive. A fair few people thought that was a bad look, and so do we.
A 2020 civil lawsuit in Arizona federal court alleged he sexually abused a 15-year-old in 1979. His lawyer said he categorically denies it and has compassion for any survivor who speaks out. Our sources don't show how the case ended, and nothing has been proven against him. It's on the file, and it stays marked as alleged and denied.
On the harm check, he comes up clean. He called banning drag crazy and a very important art form. He described the war in Ukraine as an absurdity based upon a lie, on stage in Warsaw. In 2019 he blasted the Amazon fires as criminal negligence. One slightly tone-deaf moment was telling the LA Times in 2024 that allegations against Sean Combs don't taint his song, while saying he didn't know what went on.
The recent work is The Last Ship, the musical built on his shipyard childhood, which played New York's Metropolitan Opera in June. He sings the lead every night, with reggae star Shaggy in the cast. Nothing in the recent projects we checked raised a flag on who he works with, though we found no full list of every collaborator.