Source: www.speakup.com.br
Language level: Upper Intermediate
Standard: American and British accent
The Return of Sting
Three years after the release of his eighth álbum, Songs from the Labyrinth, Sting is back. As his follow up, the former lead singer of The Police chose a seasonal theme: If on a Winter’s Night, released late last year, is a selection of songs for the Christmas season. This is a somewhat surprising choice for a former punk rocker and so we began by asking him to explain his views on religion:
Sting: (Standard: British accent)
I’m essentially agnostic. At the same time I’m aware that religion, like literature, like art, like music, is a product of the imagination, the human imagination. So I would throw the baby out with bath water. I think you know, religion is important. Do I accept a lot of things as articles of faith? No, no, I don’t, but the power of the stories is very important and so they’re magical stories, you know, and magical birth is a commonplace in the history of religion. All Gods were born magically, they weren’t born normally! Mithras, Shiva, Dionysis, Buddha – were all born in a strange way. So it’s not unusual. But they’re magical stories, just as, you know, Brothers Grimm…fairy tales! It doesn’t make them silly: they’re powerful.
MY WIFE AND I
So how do they celebrate Christmas in the Sting household?
Sting:
My wife loves Christmas. She is very traditional about the children coming home and the turkey and all of that stuff and the presents. I’m ambivalent about it, but I’ll go along with it: we have a good time. My own memory of Christmas is not particularly happy. Christmas was always a time of tension and strange…happy and the fighting! I remember those times, too.
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY!
Sting, who has sold more than 100 million albums over the course of his career, is a phenomenally rich man. He owns home all over the world, as well as farms in England and Italy. And yet, like many millionaires, his finances took a battering in the recent credit crunch, but he doesn’t seem too worried:
Sting:
It’s true. How many millions do you need? But that’s pathology, I try and get out of that. I don’t like to see this Fortune 500 list of the richest people in the world, you know, the richest entertainers. And you start to get competitive: “Hang on, he’s making more than me!” “ You think:” Well, how many millions do you need to die with?” “Can you take it with you? No, you can’t.” But, you know, I think we spend our money well. We put it back into the land, they put it back into good stuff. There are ways of using money: just having it sit in the bank with interest doesn’t interest me, or stocks and shares don’t interest me, either. I like to put money back into the land because you can see it grow in a real way: we’ve done that.
MY TEAM
It Sting has taken a financial battering, then so has his favourite football team, Newcastle United, who were relegated from England’s top division, the Premiership, to the second division, or Championship, in 2008:
Sting:
That’s a tragedy, that’s a serious tragedy. The people who own the club had no idea what they were buying, and what they were buying was the loyalty and the self-respect of an entire city. It was all bound up with this club. It was not a money-making thing, it’s an identify. And you can’t buy and sell that. It’s…it’s tragic what’s happened.
AND THE POLICE?
And no interview with Sting could be complete without reference to The Police, the group he walked out on in the 1980s. in 2007 they got back together for a massively successful world tour:
Sting:
I refused to do that for 25 years, I think. It was a surprise that I would say yes and a surprise to myself. But, again, it was an interesting experiment, to go back and recreate something that had been so successful then. I think we did that, I think we played to 2,7 million people. No one asked for their money back. So we put on a good show, but I… now I feel it’s complete. I feel that we have done that. I don’t have any desire or plans to repeat the exercise.
Medieval Folk Songs
If on a Winter’s Night (Deutsche Gramophone/Decca) is Sting’s ninth album in a solo career that Dream of the Blue Turtles. Prior to that he released five albums with the other members of thought to have been inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. The music is decidedly traditional: the track list includes several medieval English folk’s songs.
Sting, who was born Gordon Summer in Wallsend, Northumberland on October 2nd , 1951. Since leaving The Police he has had a phenomenally successful solo career.
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