Newcastle

This Month in Newcastle:

Shopping: JG Windows, in the city's historic Central Arcade, is a long-established specialist music shop, stocking not just rock and pop, but an extensive classical selection. It is also one of the best places to source sheet music, instruments and hi-fi equipment.

Sightseeing: Westlife play the Metro Radio Arena for the final time as part of their The Greatest Hits Farewell Tour on 14 May (metroradioarena.co.uk).

Key areas: Less than half an hour from Newcastle lies the extraordinary Victorian house, gardens and woodland of Cragside. Home of Victorian inventor and landscape genius Lord Armstrong, Cragside house was the first in the world to be lit by hydro-electricity and features one of the largest rock gardens in Europe (nationaltrust/cragside).

Newcastle News & Gossip

Sting on Newcastle

Even though he hasn't lived there for years, Sting still calls the north-east of England home. He left Newcastle in the 1970s and now has several rock-star fabulous homes around the world, including an ancient pile in Wiltshire, a sumptuously cosy place in New York where he has based himself for the past year, and a house in Tuscany where he wrote most of his recent songs and where his dog Compass prefers to be.

Sting (born Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner) likes to be nomadic: "I've lived in hotels all of my life. I'm a gypsy. I love being on tour and I love Newcastle Airport." That might be because his sister Angela is a manager there.

A lifetime on the road, however, has made him feel that coming home now is about coming full-circle, reconnecting with his roots, his family, his friends, forgotten places and the people that helped make him who he is.

At 58, he still has the body of a rock star - yoga arms, a sculpted torso. He's looking good in slim black trousers. His mind is lively with metaphors and paradoxes.

"There's always a gravitational pull towards your roots. It's like a homing instinct. You look for your own family." Yet this was a place he was once desperate to escape. "I did have a particular relationship with the cold days of the north-east when I used to deliver milk in the mornings with my dad."

That seems a few lifetimes ago, but now Sting feels he can almost touch it. As we speak, I notice the Geordie inflection more in his voice. "It's not as if I'm putting it on. This is my accent." Certainly he has the Geordie persona: someone who loves to express sentiment and does so readily, but someone who does not enjoy revealing emotion; somebody who can cry easily at the TV, but less easily at something that's personal.

He nods. "I cried like a bairn [baby] when I watched Cinema Paradiso last week. I'm quite ashamed of that. But my parents dying: I didn't cry." His parents died in 1987 of cancer, within months of each other. He didn't go to their funerals. Perhaps he was trying to escape the reality. Or perhaps refocus it; come to terms with it in his own way. "I do regret that. I didn't mourn in the proper way and I was emotionally paralysed. Instead I spent a long protracted period in mourning in much more extravagant ways, mostly through music. I'm still in touch with my parents in a psychological way, so when I flew into the airport the other day it was a bitter-sweet return. I have friends and family still here. I seem to have lived three lifetimes since I left, so it's important for me to really deal with it. Returning home is important because it injects you into something real. You see your old friends, see what they've done and how they relate to you.

"When I sing at The Sage Centre the people at the front row will all have their arms folded. They'll know exactly where I came from. My dad delivered their milk. I have no mystique here. I'm just Gordon from Wallsend."

When he plays at The Sage Centre, Gateshead on 5 October, he will be performing his album Symphonicities, touring with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra reworking fan favourites like Roxanne and Englishman In New York. It's his way of moving forward - the rock star and the classical artist cohabiting. He has a passion for bringing together different musical genres. His music is folk meets rock meets jazz meets classical.

He'll be joined on tour by his long-term guitarist Dominic Miller, who has worked with Sting for 20 years, and describes him as "like an older brother".

"We don't always agree," says Dominic, "but in the end I see he's usually right. Sting is still growing. He's a man who wants for nothing: fame, success, money. But he's still hungry. That part of him hasn't changed at all."

He must have seen a lot of his friends from the north-east grow up with limited opportunities, perhaps not realising their potential. That makes him grateful. "Going back to your roots, realising what gifts you've been given from your environment and from your culture is important at this stage in my life."

He's also honouring his parents. "My mother was a romantic woman and her hunger for romance was never really satisfied. That was her tragedy. She needed a much wilder life to be who she was."

What kind of a parent has he been to his six children? "It's not easy because I'm travelling all the time and I don't have a normal parent/child relationship. At the same time my kids have had advantages. They've seen the world and been to the finest schools."

His second-youngest, Coco, 20, is signed to Island Records. Her voice is haunting, like a female Sting, yet she tries to distance herself from him as much as possible. "I don't think I'm a natural parent," he says. "For me it's not a terribly natural thing." Perhaps that's because he was never nurtured by his parents. He was never read stories at night. "My parents were just kids, but they certainly loved me. I never had any doubts about that. They just didn't express it very well. I was part of a transitional generation between nurtured and un-nurtured. Music became my saviour, my best friend."

As a result Sting learnt how to express his emotions articulately through music and lyrics, but he was not as good at conversations. For instance, when The Police played their last gig in 1983, Sting never told the band it was over. He just ran away from it. But a few years ago he realised he should start addressing these issues. In 2007, The Police reformed for a world tour.

"You can abandon something, but you can never finish it. Relationships are never finished." He could be talking here about The Police, his parents, or his ex-wife actress Frances Tomelty.

The Police were a phenomenon - the most successful rock band of their generation. But for Sting it was sometimes a painful experience. "Everything you thought would make you happy was given to you, and it did not make you happy. It's a wonderful lesson to learn, where real happiness comes from."

When his first marriage ended it produced a lot of guilt and some great songs. "I am settled now. I am with a good woman [producer Trudie Styler] who loves me and I love her. My real home is wherever she is. That's what keeps me sane. I'm not running away from anything at the moment. I'm tying up the loose ends everywhere, and that's why I'm here."

He admits his appetites are pretty extreme. "All or nothing." Right now he's all about home, but he'll never give up his love of travel. He has a huge carbon footprint, but has planted 100,000 trees. He's often mocked for these twin desires, to be indulgent and to be worthy. Does he mind?

"It's part and parcel of being in the position I'm in. People are going to have a go at you. Either that or they ignore you." Is it better to be attacked than ignored? "Yes, of course, because you also get positive attention and feel nurtured by it." Just now his nurturing is coming from smaller, nostalgic journeys. "Last week on Sunday we went to the Quayside market in Newcastle. My dad used to take us there on Sunday mornings after church. It was a big treat to go there to buy something small and see the ships docked. It's a spectacular spot. Last week I bought secondhand books: the history of Newcastle United, a tragic book, and a picture of the Tyne Bridge being built in 1928."

He also went to the street of his childhood home in Wallsend. "The only thing left is the pub, The Ship In The Hole. The streets are knocked down and they turned up a Roman camp. The Hole is a fantastic pub. We played there."

Are there any other special northeastern landmarks? "Tynemouth Priory." There's not much left of the priory. Its medieval ruins lie on a cliff-top overlooking the North Sea. But it's special to Sting.

"I lost my virginity there. It's a pretty romantic spot. It's famous for lovers' trysts, so I was just following the footsteps of the great and the good." Did you go there because it was romantic or because you were living at home and it was the only place to go? "It wasn't the generation where you could go shagging in your own house," he grins. "So I went there, a few times, with varying degrees of success. It was probably in the summer but it felt like winter - always cold."

The places where he used to play still remain: the University Theatre, and some pubs along the Quayside - although instead of sawdust-on-the-floor dives they're smart and frighteningly fashionable and serve cocktails. In Tynemouth his favourite pub is the true-to-its roots Royal Sovereign.

Sting seems comfortable now in his own skin, at ease with his Geordie self. He's looking forward to touring with an orchestra across Europe, starting this month. And what else? "I'm just looking forward to the ride, the curiosity of what happens next."

Symphonicities (Deutsche Gramophon) is out now. Tour dates: Copenhagen, Royal Theatre, 5 September; Tallinn, Saku Suurhall, 11 September; Zürich, Hallenstadion, 28 September; London, Royal Albert Hall, 1 October; Newcastle, The Sage Gateshead, 5 October; Milan, Teatro Arcimboldi, 2 November; Rome, Santa Cecilia, 10 November

Newcastle Trivia

• May: In 1239, Newcastle became the first coal port in the world.

• April: In 2011, surgeons at Newcastle's Freeman Hospital performed open heart surgery on a baby just 17 hours after her birth, setting a new world record for the youngest person to undergo the procedure.

• March: Starting in Newcastle and winding a 73-mile route across North England, Hadrian's Wall remains the UK's largest freestanding structure.

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