On Friday, July 9, 2027, Sting will perform at St. Peter at Sunset in Kestenholz. By then, he will be 75 years old, will have sold over 100 million albums, and will have won 17 Grammys. Seven facts about the man whose real name is Gordon Sumner.
Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner was born in 1951 in Wallsend, near Newcastle, the son of a milkman and a hairdresser. He worked as a bus driver and on construction sites, played music on a cruise ship, and taught in a mining town. He owes the name “Sting” to a striped sweater.
It wasn’t until 1977 that he gave up his teaching job and founded The Police with Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers. He never wanted to be a rock star, he said in 2026 on U.S. television. He wanted to make a living from music.
In September 2026, *Rolling Stone* ranked Sting No. 32 on its list of the 50 greatest bassists of all time. He taught himself to sing and play bass at the same time. To do so, he listened to Beatles records at 78 rpm to hear Paul McCartney’s bass lines more clearly.
Stewart Copeland saw him on stage for the first time in 1976. He recalls noticing only the bassist; the fact that he was also singing had escaped his attention.
His best-known solo song is about Quentin Crisp. The British author lived openly as a gay man in New York and had to fight for acceptance there. In an interview with event. in 2017, Sting said: “Since Quentin passed away in 1999, I’ve been the Englishman in New York.”
He lives near Central Park and walks through Hell’s Kitchen. “I don’t have bodyguards; I don’t have limousines. I just walk.” His album “57th & 9th” is named after the intersection he crosses every day.
Sting estimates he’s been to Zurich twelve to fifteen times. A good friend of his lives here, who, like him, is from Wallsend. In 2017, he told event. that he’d walked along the lake one morning in a T-shirt and jeans. Two or three people recognized him. “You can move about freely here—that was nice.”
Switzerland also held political interest for him at the time. The United Kingdom had just voted to leave the EU. In Switzerland, Sting saw a country that stands on its own yet still maintains ties with its neighbors.
Today, Sting sings songs he wrote over 40 years ago. They never sound the same. In 2017, he told *event.*: “Every evening, something unfolds that didn’t exist before.” His songs aren’t meant to be static works of art.
In January 2026, he performed with guitarist Dominic Miller at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, directly beneath Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch.” Arte filmed the evening; the album is titled “The Night Watch.” The museum gave him a 17th-century guitar, once owned by Louis XIV. Sting passed it on to Miller. A professional should play it.
Sting has six children. Eliot Sumner and Joe Sumner make music. As early as 2017, he told *event.* that he had encouraged them to become musicians. “But I never said, ‘Become stars!’” For him, music is a spiritual path.
In May 2026, he was more explicit in an interview with CBS. He pays for their education, but after that, the children have to earn their own money. That’s what trust is all about. He comes from a working-class background and loves to work.
In 2017, Sting turned 65. When asked about retirement, he replied: “I simply can’t afford it.” His crew and band had to pay their mortgages. “I’m not a workaholic, but I am a worker. Work makes me happy.”
Nothing has changed in that regard. In 2026, he toured the U.S. and Europe with “Sting 3.0,” performed in Montreux for the ninth time, and opened the Stars in Town festival in Schaffhausen. He brought “The Last Ship” to the Metropolitan Opera and to London, where he was also on stage on his 75th birthday. How does it feel to be 75? Better than being dead, he told the German Press Agency.
On July 9, 2027, he’ll be coming to Kestenholz. Anyone who hears him there will hear “Roxanne” and “Fields of Gold” just as Sting rediscovers them that evening.