“I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.”
—MADONNA, SINGER-SONGWRITER
When Sting was given an old, out-of-tune guitar with rusty strings, he felt as if he’d been given a friend for life, an accomplice to help him get out of Wallsend, England, where he grew up.
He was eight at the time and he’d already decided he didn’t want to build ships like the thousands of men who walked by his house on their way to the shipyard every morning. It was a hard life, he noticed—noisy and dangerous with toxic work conditions.
Although his dad was a milkman, his grandfather had been a shipwright and, as a child, Sting anxiously wondered if that was to be his destiny. There weren’t many other jobs in his hometown on the northeast coast of England.
“But once I was bequeathed that battered old guitar, I quickly realized I’d found a coconspirator to help me escape from this industrial landscape,” he said.
“My dream was to leave this town just like those ships that never came back once they were launched. I wanted to be a writer of songs, to sing those songs to vast numbers of people all over the world and to be paid extravagant amounts of money.”
The dream started one day when the Queen Mother came to his town to break a bottle of champagne on the bow of one of the ships. His mother forced him and his brother and sisters to dress up in their Sunday finest as the motorcade passed in front of their tiny home in the shadow of the shipyard.
“It wasn’t that long ago that the Royal Family were thought to have magical powers. People held up their sick children, hoping to touch the hem of the king, hoping for a cure,” Sting said. “It wasn’t like that in my day, but it was still really exciting when Princess Anne or one of the royals came to give a speech.
“I was standing there waving my little Union Jack and there in a big, black Rolls Royce was the Queen Mother. She seemed to acknowledge me. She looked me in the eye. I smiled. She smiled. We had a moment.
“I wasn’t cured of anything. It was the opposite actually. I was infected with an idea. I realized I didn’t belong in the street. I didn’t want to work in the shipyard. I wanted to be in that car. I wanted a bigger life. A life out of the ordinary.”
And that’s how it begins. When we take the time to listen.
