The fact many men no longer use their hands and physicality on a daily basis may be driving some of the toxic traits in modern masculinity, according to Sting.
The singer, who on Wednesday announced that his musical about the last days of a shipyard was coming to the West End this autumn, told the Guardian that one of the byproducts of deindustrialisation was the loss of physical productivity for men.
He said: “I work with my hands every day as a musician, and I’m lucky. It’s a rare thing for modern men to actually use their hands and use their strengths to do anything. We’ve lost something there.
“I don’t have any answers, but maybe the toxicity in society at the moment is [a result of the fact] that we’ve lost that direction for our energy, that male strength. It’s rare we have to use it.”
The Last Ship, which debuted in Chicago in 2014 before a run on Broadway, focuses on the fate of men who work at a shipyard similar to Swan Hunter’s in Wallsend where Sting grew up, before the yards closed during deindustrialisation in the 1970s and 80s.
Sting, who wrote the music for the show and will star in a run at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in September, said the closure of the shipyards began an era when the north of England was failed by successive governments.
“Britain’s wealth was created in the coalfields and the steel towns and the mill towns and the shipyards,” he said. “All of those skill sets were thrown on the scrapheap … for Thatcher’s dream of a service economy.”
Lots of male characters in the musical are in a moment of crisis as their identity is being taken from them. One asks: “For what are we men without a ship to complete?”
But Sting says the production isn’t an attempt to romanticise what could be a brutal industry where there were hundreds of accidents a year and fatalities were not uncommon.
“I’m the guy who didn’t want to work there and for good reason,” he said. “They were working in asbestos, all kinds of toxic chemicals. At the same time, I’m nostalgic for the sense of community that I was brought up in.
“That environment was so rich with symbolism. The town, although it was depressed a lot of the time, was extremely proud of the ships that were built there. The work was awful and dangerous and hard, but those guys could look back and say: ‘Well, I built that.’ The civic pride was massive.”
When The Last Ship opened on Broadway it had mixed reviews and wasn’t able to emulate the success of other British musicals rooted in regional stories, such as Billy Elliot and Kinky Boots.
But it has since toured all over the world and has been revised since it debuted more than a decade ago, with some characters being cut and a new book, written by Barney Norris.
When it played in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2018, the Guardian’s Michael Billington said it featured “the most thrilling choral writing I’ve heard in a British musical since Howard Goodall’s The Hired Man”.
Looking back at the Broadway run, Sting said he made life hard for himself by writing something wholly original rather than something based on an existing story or choosing to create a jukebox musical based on his own songs.
“Those are the easy routes, but I chose the most difficult one and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. It’s been incredibly difficult and challenging, but also the most rewarding exploit of my life,” he said. “I think it needs to find its audience. It needs to find its voice. It’s taken this long, but I think we’re pretty close to it right now.”
The singer is embroiled in a high court battle over alleged unpaid royalties with his former bandmates in the Police. Sting, whose real name is Gordon Sumner, was the band’s singer, bassist and principal songwriter.
The high court in London has been told that Sting has paid more than £500,000 to his former bandmates, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, since they brought the legal action.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he said when asked about the case. “That’s all I’m willing to say.”
