STING: DEMOLITION MAN

by Christopher Sandford

From the biographer of Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Kurt Cobain comes the definitive account of rock’s most admired and most resented star.

‘Absorbing, sympathetic new biography’ Publishers Weekly

In the mid-1970s Gordon Sumner was a Newcastle primary school teacher who played jazz bass at night and asked his class of eight-year-olds to call him Sting. Within five years The Police were the biggest band in the world, and ‘Roxanne’, ‘Message in a Bottle’ and ‘Every Breath You Take’ had made him one of the most recognisable men alive. Behind the records was a group at war with a seven-year struggle between Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland over songwriting and control that ran from studio brawls to obscenities daubed across the drum skins, and ended with Sting dissolving the band at the height of its success. What followed was a second career of equal scale and far greater controversy — Nothing Like the Sun, Ten Summoner’s Tales, films, Amnesty tours, the Brazilian rainforest campaign — alongside a reputation as one of the most derided men in accused of taking up punk and reggae for convenience, of sanctimony, of trading Wallsend for a Wiltshire manor house.

Drawing on interviews with bandmates, schoolteachers, lovers, business associates and old adversaries, many speaking on the record for the first time, Christopher Sandford tests every one of those charges. Sting declined to take part. Neither an apology nor a hatchet job, Demolition Man is the fullest account yet of a performer who has been loved and loathed in almost equal measure — and who has spent a lifetime ensuring that nobody sees him whole.

PRAISE FOR CHRISTOPHER
‘A comprehensive and readable account of Clapton’s troubled life’ Observer
‘Well-written, full of insight and spiced with telling little details’ Q
‘A compulsive portrait of one of rock’s most enigmatic figures’ Guitar Magazine

429 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 6, 2026

About the author

Christopher Sandford has published acclaimed biographies of Kurt Cobain, Steve McQueen, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, and Roman Polanski. He has worked as a film and music writer and reviewer for over 20 years and frequently contributes to newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. Rolling Stone has called him "the preeminent author in his field today."

His latest project, MASTERS OF MYSTERY (forthcoming November 2011, Palgrave Macmillan) explores Arthur Conan Doyle's and Harry Houdini's incredible friendship and fascination with Spiritualism.