A conversation with Sting and Paul Simon at the launch of their On Stage Together tour... Their tour is called On Stage Together, but right now Sting and Paul Simon are side by side backstage at Houston's Toyota Center after a long opening night sound check, exuding both confidence and a sense of "what-have-we-wrought?" excitement. The trek will take the duo to 21 North American cities through March 16 and is far more than a mere you play/I pay co-billing; in Houston the two played 10 of the seamless two-hour and 45-minute show's 30 songs together, while their 14 combined band members floated in and out of Simon and Sting's individual sets...

Former Police frontman Sting is finally comfortable with the fact he is no longer able to write pop songs. He tells Julia Molony how a self-penned play helped him beat writer's block, and explains just who he sees when he looks in the mirror. Sting walks into the hotel boardroom bundled in a high-collared grey coat against the cold. His hair is tightly shorn, his clothing muted, his skin a soft beige. He only lives around the corner, he says, from the hotel in Westminster, and presumably has walked here. Except for the crop and a few more lines, he looks like he could have stepped out of the black and white video for Englishman in New York...

Sting's memories of his school days aren't exactly fond. The son of a hairdresser and engineer fitter's mate, he passed his 11-plus and was promptly set on the path to great things. But first he had priests to deal with. "I got a scholarship to a grammar school," recalls the singer songwriter, actor and, now, dramatist. "So I was kind of sectioned from most of the people I was brought up with and put in this school uniform, and was sent on a train to Newcastle and taught Latin and physics and all that stuff." For a young lad from the streets of Wallsend on Tyneside, the rupture was cataclysmic. The elevation of the boy born Gordon Sumner to a better school five miles away would, ultimately, send him all around the world, with the multiple domiciles to prove it...

There's an eerie truth to a song on Sting's new album, "The Last Ship." "Dead Man's Boots" tells the story of a father passing a job to his son that the boy simply doesn't want. In a way, that story parallels the musician's life. Born in the English shipbuilding town of Wallsend, Sting clearly wanted no part of the industry, instead attending university to become a teacher. But that wasn't enough, so two years later he made an even bolder move: to pursue a career in music. "There were no clues in my environment that you leave that environment and fare well and be successful. My parents didn't really understand what my dreams were, they just thought I was crazy, because I had just given up a job with a pension and the security, in their eyes," he said...

With a run of concerts at the Public Theater, Sting is putting more pieces in place for the launch of a Broadway musical called "The Last Ship." To compose the score, the former Police frontman drew on characters and imagery from the doomed shipyard in his hometown of Wallsend, England. The musical, which Sting is developing with a squad of theater elite, starts a tryout run this summer in Chicago before opening on Broadway next fall. Sting is hoping to prime interest in the musical with his 10-concert series at the Public, which ends on Wednesday. During the intimate show, which also features vocalists such as cast member Jimmy Nail, Sting plays acoustic guitar and sings in a thick brogue, voicing various characters. He is accompanied by a small band that includes fiddle and accordion players. Between songs that blend Broadway anthems with folk sounds from the British Isles, he tells anecdotes from his childhood and the process of creating a musical...

Sting's new album and first stage musical turned his thoughts to Wallsend. David Whetstone caught up with him in New York. It seemed a long way to have come to meet a lad from Wallsend and I'm not just talking air miles. Peering down on Manhattan's road grid from a high-rise hotel room and listening to the sirens, Tyneside could have been light years away. But it is a small insight into the fabulously successful career of Sting that people can be whizzed from all corners to assist with his projects. I was here for my passing knowledge of the North East and because words like "hadaway" don't make me go "Eh?" I was here to ask questions about The Last Ship. This is Sting's current major enterprise which is due to hit the shops as a new album on Monday and Broadway next year as a musical play...

It's the early Sixties and to a small boy born Gordon Sumner the giant ship at the end of Gerald Street, Wallsend, looms frighteningly large. The vessel is about five times as high as his home in the row of back-to-back terraced houses stretching down to the northern bank of the Tyne. But the boy, like the rest of his proud community, is dressed in his Sunday best the day the Queen Mother sweeps by in her black Rolls-Royce, flanked by outriders, to launch this huge testament to the hard graft of the Swan Hunter shipyard. "I was standing with my mum holding a Union Jack," he remembers today. "And the Queen Mother waved at me! I felt chosen." That boy grew up to be Sting, the singing superstar who came to recognition in the late Seventies with The Police and journeyed far from home to become An Englishman In New York...

The singer-songwriter, whose album "The Last Ship" will be released this week, says his favorite novels are really extended songs: "What is ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude' if not an opera?" I enjoyed Hilary Mantel's "Bring Up the Bodies," almost as much as I enjoyed its predecessor, "Wolf Hall." Her portrait of Thomas Cromwell is complex and largely sympathetic to a character that is usually cast darkly and exclusively as Henry VIII's "muscle." I enjoyed Nathaniel Philbrick's treatment of the American War of Independence in "Bunker Hill" for similar reasons, a well-researched story proving to be more nuanced and compelling than a well-established myth...

He happily admits to being a pretentious yogic high-flyer who wound people up with talk of his tantric sex life. Now he's back with his first album in nearly a decade and a musical on Broadway. What a pretentious wanker I am!" shouts Sting loudly. We are on the French Riviera, sitting at a quiet table on the balcony of the house - now a hotel - where F Scott Fitzgerald wrote Tender is the Night, and I have just reminded Sting of a remark he made in 1987. Then a 36-year-old superstar promoting a new album, Nothing Like the Sun, he declared: "I don't want to be a pop star all my life. I'd quite like to be a balding, rotund, Jungian analyst between 40 and 50..."

Early in May, a few hundred people received hush-hush invitations to the Signature Theater in Midtown. They arrived for a staged reading, a spartan workshop production assembled in under 29 hours of rehearsal as a preview for potential backers and other interested parties. On a crowded stage, with scripts in hand, cast members played out a story set in an English town whose shipbuilding industry was in its last throes. The plot intertwines a love triangle, reckonings between fathers and sons and a labor uprising (workers seizing a factory to build a last ship before the factory shuts down) with crosscurrents of economics and faith. The songs bridge show tunes and British folk traditions. The presentation received a standing ovation, something that doesn't always happen at staged readings...