Midlife High Pop Musician Sting Happy About What He Has Achieved In Rise From Childhood Of Poverty

Midlife is no crisis for Sting.

At 44, the song-writing pop star, actor, father of five, human rights and environmental crusader wouldn’t change a thing.

“This is the high point of my life, getting here,” he says. “It’s lasting this long, surviving the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to be alive, to be reasonably sane and healthy and happy when everything I’ve gone through could have ended up entirely, entirely different.”

Slouching into a soft black leather sofa in a Manhattan high-rise, Sting’s heavy eyelids betray his jet lag. He just popped over from England, where he’s finishing up studio work for his next record, “Mercury Falling.”

“A lot of late nights,” he says with a sigh, fixing the upturned collar of his ash-gray woolen jacket, adjusting his rumpled gray shirt, smoothing his multihued gray tie. “New York has a way of waking you up, though.”

Fatigued or not, the former schoolteacher once known merely as Gordon Sumner is attentive and articulate, genuinely interested and completely at ease.

“I don’t feel like Greta Garbo,” he smirks when asked about the costs of superstardom. “I can’t really tell you that being famous is all that unpleasant. I don’t live a particularly cocooned or sheltered life. I don’t have bodyguards. I’m not afraid to go walking in the street.”

When Sting isn’t off performing or making a movie, most days at home at his English country estate are much like the next.

“I don’t sleep late. I get up and have breakfast with the children. I do yoga for an hour and 50 minutes,” he says. “Then I’ll walk around my garden. Think about music, think about ideas. And then I have lunch and start work in the afternoons in the studio.

“Sometimes the work goes very easily. Other times it doesn’t flow at all. Then I come out, watch the news on television, have a glass of wine, dinner, then go back in the studio.”

Sounds kind of serious. What about fun?

“I play a lot of chess,” he says. “I play every day, with musicians in my band or anybody who plays.”

It might sound kind of modest for a pop icon, but it’s been a long time since he caught fire in the late 1970s as lead singer of the Police, a long time since he went solo, a long time since he felt he had to prove anything.

“I write music first and foremost to amuse myself, always have,” he says. “After I amuse myself I have to amuse my family, my wife, my children and my band. Then I have to engage the record company and eventually down through to an audience, you know, which I suppose goes into the millions then. But initially it’s just there to amuse me.”

Making a technological leap to amuse himself further, the multiple Grammy winner allowed a team of multimedia computer gear heads from Starwave Corp. to poke around his house for months on end, exposing him as never seen before in an interactive CD-ROM.

“When they came to me with this idea, I didn’t know what a CD-ROM was,” he says of the newly released tribute, “Sting: All This Time.”

Going beyond similar rock star computer packages, Sting reveals private personal stories about his life and career, takes visitors into his home studio for unplugged jam sessions and discusses his innermost feelings.

“I think I went too far,” he says. “They were really in my life, that whole year, asking the most intrusive questions. I went along with it. Your guard comes down, you lose the mask and you reveal more of yourself than perhaps you normally would. I don’t normally drop the mask very much.”

It’s an interesting peek at a complex artist, his music, his acting, his 12-year-old springer spaniel William - as well as the tale of his rise from a bleak impoverished childhood to riches so great he never even missed the millions a now-imprisoned accountant once embezzled.

Still, Sting is quick to insist his head isn’t completely in the clouds.

“I quite enjoy balancing the artistic side of my work with the commercial side,” he says. “I like selling a lot of records. But I’ve been lucky in that I’ve never had to tailor my music to satisfy that market demand.”

But he knows it can’t last forever.

“I’m sure one day the music will move into an area that’s not readily accessible to a mass public. Believe me, I’ll willingly embrace that position,” he says.

“The older I get the more set in my ways I get. You can’t expect to be a mass-market artist all of your life. I don’t.”

In the meantime, the longtime advocate for Amnesty International and Amazonian rainforest rescue groups sees far greater challenges beyond art.

“We need to find a tool pretty quickly in order for us to evolve into the next stage of our consciousness,” Sting says. “I think in the distant past we were apes and somehow managed to trip ourselves into a higher level of knowing. And I think we’re ready for another level.

“We need something. Otherwise, I don’t think we can survive as we are,” he continues, shaking his head. “I see that as a personal challenge because I want to evolve. I’d like to evolve to a higher level of understanding, of consciousness. I’m trying.”