Finally, you'll be impossibly grateful to learn that Sting has thrown you a bone, in the form of an interview with the New York Times.
As is traditional in such cases, we must congratulate the interviewer for enduring the company of one of Earth's least self-aware humanoids. It appears there were moments during which exposure to Sting's personage began to grate.
"Ask Sting about the 19th-century aluminum double bass he keeps near his bookshelves," we learn, "and he will say he uses it to play 'one little piece of Purcell every day and that's it'." Other exquisite decor details? "Mention the two chess sets he keeps on his coffee table and he'll tell you about the matches he played against the grandmaster Garry Kasparov. ('Of course he beat me every time. But you know, he can't sing.')"
Not unreasonably, perhaps, those tired old charges of pretentiousness drift into the discussion, causing Sting to inform the interviewer that pretentious comes from the same root as the word pretend. (You'd never have guessed, would you?) "I'm not pretending anything," counters Sting. "I'm curious, I'm finding out . . . What am I supposed to do, stay in my box?"
By "my box", Sting is presumably referring to the Ark of the Covenant, which he doubtless uses as the very coffee table that now bears the chess set with which he humoured tuneless old Garry Kasparov. But the idea that he should stay in it is, of course, completely unthinkable.
