Gordon Sumner has spent two years touring as a three-piece rock band and the past four months resurrecting the musical that failed on Broadway. On 22 September 2026 both jobs collide at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, while a London High Court works out what he owes the other two members of The Police.

Wallsend, and the yard at the end of the street

Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner was born on 2 October 1951 in Wallsend, on the north bank of the Tyne, to a milkman and a hairdresser. The Swan Hunter shipyard stood at the end of his road, and the hulls went up high enough to block the daylight — an image he has been circling in song for forty years. Before music paid, he worked as a bus conductor, a building labourer, a tax officer and a primary school teacher, which is a longer apprenticeship in ordinary work than most players of his standing ever served.

The nickname came from a black-and-yellow striped jumper worn in a Newcastle jazz band. The jazz did not leave him: the bass playing that carried The Police, and still carries the current trio, is closer to a rhythm-section musician's idea of a pop song than to a frontman's.

The Police, and the argument that reached the High Court

The Police formed in January 1977 with Stewart Copeland on drums and, from later that year, Andy Summers on guitar. Sting sang, played bass and wrote almost all of it. Five UK number one albums followed, six Grammy Awards, and a final studio record, Synchronicity, in 1983 that was nominated for five more including Album of the Year. The band stopped in the mid-1980s and came back only once, for the 2007–08 reunion tour. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2003.

The songwriting split made at the start is now being litigated. Copeland and Summers sued Sting and his publishing company in September 2025, arguing they are owed roughly two million dollars in unpaid royalties. The case reached London's High Court in January 2026, where it turned on an oral agreement struck when the band formed in 1977 and on written deals in 1997 and 2016 that gave the non-writing members about fifteen per cent as an arranger's fee. The hinge is streaming: Summers and Copeland say it falls under the manufacture of records, Sting's lawyers say it is public performance and therefore outside the arrangement. The court heard that Sting had already paid the pair some 870,000 dollars since proceedings began, a figure the claimants say excludes accrued interest. No resolution had been announced when the hearing closed.

The records that hold up

The solo career began in 1985 with The Dream of the Blue Turtles, made with a band of jazz players rather than a rock rhythm section, and hardened into...Nothing Like the Sun in 1987. Ten Summoner's Tales, in 1993, remains the most durable of the run — Fields of Gold, Shape of My Heart and It's Probably Me sit in the live set to this day. Brand New Day arrived in 1999 and dragged Desert Rose onto radio worldwide.

The later work is more scattered but more interesting. The Last Ship, in 2013, was the Wallsend record: shipbuilders, closure, a community with nothing to launch. 57th & 9th, in 2016, was deliberately made as a guitar band album in a fortnight. The Bridge followed in 2021. The totals behind all of it — more than 100 million records sold across the band and the solo work, seventeen Grammy Awards, a CBE, Kennedy Center Honors in 2014 and the Polar Music Prize in 2017 — are the reason Universal Music Group bought his entire songwriting catalogue in February 2022.

Three people, no safety net

The current touring project is called STING 3.0 because that is all there is: Sting on bass and vocals, Dominic Miller on guitar after more than three decades in the job, and Chris Maas — of Mumford & Sons and Maggie Rogers's band — on drums. It launched in Detroit in September 2024, trailed by a single, I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart), cut with Miller, Maas and Martin Kierszenbaum on organ over a Bo Diddley beat. A live document followed: Sting 3.0 Live, a nine-track LP released worldwide on 25 April 2025, with a 17-track deluxe double vinyl of 3,000 copies for Record Store Day on 12 April.

What was pitched as a short experiment has not stopped. The European leg opened in Zagreb on 18 June 2026 and ran through festival season — Nice Jazz on 23 July, Francofolies de Spa on the 25th, the Roman theatre at Vienne on the 28th, the Arena in Pula on 1 August, Untold in Cluj-Napoca on the 6th, Villa d'Este at Cernobbio on the 9th. On 2 March 2026 a fall North American leg was announced, opening with two nights at Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Theatre on 5 and 6 October and running through Seattle, Minneapolis, St Louis, Indianapolis, Montreal, Cincinnati and Tampa, including a six-night residency at Brooklyn Paramount with Fiction Plane. An extra Hard Rock Live show in Hollywood, Florida was added on 17 August for 25 November, and on 21 August Chance Emerson was announced as support on multiple autumn dates.

The Last Ship, refloated

The Last Ship opened on Broadway in 2014, earned Tony nominations for its score and closed early. Sting has spent the years since rebuilding it. The new version has a fresh book by the novelist and playwright Barney Norris, direction by Leo Warner, and set and video design by 59 Studio, and it puts Sting himself on stage as Jackie White, the shipyard foreman — a company of more than fifty around him, with Island of Souls, All This Time and When We Dance folded into the drama.

It played the Metropolitan Opera House for nine performances between 9 and 14 June 2026, with Shaggy co-starring as the Ferryman. Reviewers described a staging that put what looked like a whole ship on the Met stage, welding sparks cued to the orchestration, and a lead performance that carried the show's emotional weight rather than coasting on the name. From there it returned to the Koninklijk Theater Carré in Amsterdam from 29 August to 13 September, and on 22 September it opens at Theatre Royal Drury Lane for a limited run to 3 October — the full London cast was confirmed on 12 August, with Shaggy taking the Ferryman for the first two nights. Sting appears in every performance, in every city, while the 3.0 tour continues around it.

Where he stands in September 2026

Two things are true at once. The catalogue is sold, the honours are collected, and a court is deciding how much of the money from the most-played song in the world belongs to the men who played on it. Meanwhile he is doing the least comfortable work available to someone in his position: standing in a three-piece with nowhere to hide, and acting eight shows a week in a musical about his own town that already failed once in public.

Nothing about the autumn diary suggests winding down. Drury Lane closes on 3 October; Vancouver opens on the 5th.

The show, now

A STING 3.0 show runs around two hours with no support act on most dates — the autumn North American leg is the exception, with Chance Emerson opening multiple shows from October and Fiction Plane on the Brooklyn Paramount residency. Setlists average about an hour and three-quarters of music and run long: at Chastain Park in Atlanta on 15 May 2026 he played twenty songs plus a two-song encore, opening with Message in a Bottle and I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart), then moving through If I Ever Lose My Faith in You, Englishman in New York, Fields of Gold, Wrapped Around Your Finger, Driven to Tears, Shape of My Heart, Walking on the Moon, Desert Rose, King of Pain and Every Breath You Take, before Roxanne and Fragile to close. Deeper cuts rotate — The Hounds of Winter appeared at Wolf Trap on 22 May. The staging is deliberately bare: three players, no backing tracks, arrangements rebuilt as a power trio, with Dominic Miller's pedal work doing the job an absent keyboard player or second guitarist would otherwise do. Reviewers of the May 2026 shows at Wolf Trap, The Woodlands and Mohegan Sun made the same two points — the sound is far fuller than three people should manage, and the voice is essentially intact — while noting that the extended instrumental outros are what stop the night becoming a hits revue. The banter is sparing and dry; in Texas he introduced Fields of Gold with a joke about his "modest home", a castle near Stonehenge, and invited a member of the audience round for tea.

Researched from sting.com · sting.com · sting.com · setlist.fm · setlist.fm · stageandcinema.com · houstonmusicreview.com · guitarplayer.com

Born: Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, 2 October 1951, Wallsend, Tyne and Wear
Genre: Rock, pop, jazz-inflected songwriting; formerly frontman and bassist of The Police (formed January 1977)
Current band: STING 3.0 — Sting (bass, vocals), Dominic Miller (guitar), Chris Maas (drums)
Key records: Synchronicity (1983, with The Police); The Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985);...Nothing Like the Sun (1987); Ten Summoner's Tales (1993); Brand New Day (1999); The Last Ship (2013)
Latest release: Sting 3.0 Live — 25 April 2025 (Record Store Day deluxe double vinyl, 12 April 2025)
Awards: 17 Grammy Awards; Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2003 (with The Police); Kennedy Center Honors 2014; Polar Music Prize 2017; CBE
Catalogue: Songwriting catalogue sold to Universal Music Group, February 2022; over 100 million records sold
Also on stage: The Last Ship, Theatre Royal Drury Lane, 22 September – 3 October 2026, as Jackie White

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