Sting

Pencil Portrait by Antonio Bosano.

Sting Pencil Portrait
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The quality of the prints are at a much higher level compared to the image shown on the left.

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A3 Pencil Print-Price £45.00-Purchase

A4 Pencil Print-Price £30.00-Purchase

*Limited edition run of 250 prints only*

All Pencil Prints are printed on the finest Bockingford Somerset Velvet 255 gsm paper.

P&P is not included in the above prices.

Comments

Last Update : 26/4/15

Two decades ago, whilst discussing the art of songwriting and the commercial youth market, Sting admitted he no longer had his finger on the pulse. Whilst lamenting the almost predictable consequence of the ageing process – he was in his early 40’s at the time – little could he have guessed that matters would take an even more disturbing turn a decade later.

‘Scraping the barrel of my soul’, as he would be the first to admit, had generated a prolific output – five LPs with the Police and a string of hit solo albums – a run that concluded in 2003 with his eighth solo release, ‘Sacred Love’. Then, abruptly, the songs stopped. Sting would release three non-rock albums in the following decade, all on the ­classical label Deutsche Grammophon; but none would feature original compositions.

Eventually, he realized he was blocked. ‘I thought: Maybe I’ve lost my mojo to write’, he would recall in late 2013. ‘There’s a lot of self-obsession involved in being a singer-songwriter. I’d gotten sick of navel-­gazing. I’d gotten sick of putting myself on the couch’.

And then one day, the songs stopped coming, and while you’ve suffered from periods of writer’s block before, albeit briefly, this is something chronic. Day after day, you face a blank page, and nothing’s coming. And those days turned to weeks, and weeks to months, and pretty soon those months have turned into years with very little to show for your efforts. No songs. So you start asking yourself questions. What have I done to offend the gods that they would abandon me so? Is the gift of songwriting taken away as easily as it seems to have been bestowed? Or perhaps there’s a more — a deeper psychological reason. It was always a Faustian pact anyway. You’re rewarded for revealing your innermost thoughts, your private emotions on the page for the entertainment of others, for the analysis, the scrutiny of others, and perhaps you’ve given enough of your privacy away.

And yet, if you look at your work, could it be argued that your best work wasn’t about you at all, it was about somebody else? Did your best work occur when you sidestepped your own ego and you stopped telling your story, but told someone else’s story, someone perhaps without a voice, where empathetically, you stood in his shoes for a while or saw the world through his eyes?

Well they say, write what you know. If you can’t write about yourself anymore, then who do you write about? So it’s ironic that the landscape I’d worked so hard to escape from, and the community that I’d more or less abandoned and exiled myself from should be the very landscape, the very community I would have to return to to find my missing muse.

And as soon as I did that, as soon as I decided to honor the community I came from and tell their story, that the songs started to come thick and fast. I’ve described it as a kind of projectile vomiting, a torrent of ideas, of characters, of voices, of verses, couplets, entire songs almost formed whole, materialized in front of me as if they’d been bottled up inside me for many, many years. One of the first things I wrote was just a list of names of people I’d known, and they become characters in a kind of three-dimensional drama, where they explain who they are, what they do, their hopes and their fears for the future.

Recommended listening

Ten Summoner's Tales (1993)

After the searing catharsis of ‘The Soul Cages’ (1991), Sting’s intensely private eulogy for his father, ‘Ten Summoner’s Tales’ would arrive two years later, offering copious light relief, despite the portentous album’s title, being lifted from Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’.

Beautifully mastered using DTS Encoding, the album bears testimony to the star\‘s unceasing pursuit of the highest fidelity cutting edge sound techniques currently available at the time. The remastered version, heard today via a 20 bit multi-channel surround playback through a DTS decoder, is breathtaking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTS_%28sound_system%29

Boasting consummate musicianship, linear melodies, and unusual metering – the countryish “Love Is Stronger Than Justice (The Munificent Seven)” motors in 7/4 time – Mr Sumner is also content throughout, to further explore his love of jazz complexities.

Whilst his voice lacks cutting mid-range, the arrangements compensate with padded synths and gut strings, whilst the songs’ subject matter incorporates a gnarly weave of ideas, jokes, mythic allusions and contradictory emotions.

It’s a personal favourite of mine – ‘If I Ever Lose My Faith in You’ with its contrapuntal vocal/bass lines, and the haunting ‘Fields of Gold’ ever present staples in Sting’s concert repertoire – whilst ‘Saint Augustine in Hell’ grapples with the subject of lust.

What more could any listener ask for?…………

Surfing

Sting

http://www.sting.com/

All the latest news, tour information, discography and biographical notes.

Officially sanctioned, rather bland, but eye catching nonetheless.