The Sting Trivia Quiz

Answer: Sergei Prokofiev

To be precise, it's the 'Romance' movement from 'Lieutenant Kije', Prokofiev's score for the film of the same name, about a fictional lieutenant made up by Tsar Paul I's officials. Prokofiev himself based the tune on a folk song, 'The Little Grey Dove is Cooing'. 'Russians' was inspired by the Cold War and the arms race between the Soviet Union and the USA, namechecking both Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and US President Ronald Reagan, and also features a sample of Russian newsreader Igor Kirilov.

'Terminator' director James Cameron has stated that the character of John Connor was inspired by 'Russians'.

Answer: Anne Rice

'Moon Over Bourbon Street' was the fifth and final single to be released from 'The Dream of the Blue Turtles', and features Sting playing double bass. Bourbon Street is a historic street in the French quarter of New Orleans, the setting for many of Rice's books, and Sting was inspired to write the song by 'Interview with the Vampire', which would be made into a film eight years later.

He composed the song while in New Orleans. It is one of the more jazz-influenced songs on 'The Dream of the Blue Turtles', and the single included a cover of 'Mack the Knife' as a B-side.

Answer: We Work the Black Seam

Sting's hometown of Wallsend, Newcastle, was a mining town like many areas in the north-east of England, and 'the black seam' refers to coal. From 6th March 1984 to 3rd March 1985, led by Arthur Scargill of the National Union of Miners, British miners went on strike in protest against planned pit closures under Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. The lyrics of the song focus on the transition from coal to nuclear energy as a source of electricity in the UK ('one day in a nuclear age/they may understand our rage'), as nuclear energy was supposedly 'cheap and clean' compared to coal. Carbon-14, which Sting mentions in the chorus ('deadly for 12,000 years is carbon-14') is a nuclear isotope with a half-life of 5730 years; the fact that nuclear waste takes so long to decay is an often-cited downside of nuclear energy.

As an aside, my parents were supporters of the miners' strike, and this song got a lot of airplay in our house.

Answer: Poppy

In the UK and other Commonwealth countries, the poppy is associated with the First World War because it grew plentifully on the battlefields in Belgium and France, and the Canadian surgeon John McCrae wrote 'In Flanders Fields' as a tribute to those who had died in the war. It is customary to wear a red paper poppy on Remembrance Day (11th November). However, the poppy also has another dark association: the fluid of opium poppy seeds is used to make opium, which is in turn converted into heroin.

The line 'poppies for young men, death's bitter trade/such bitter trade' refers to both the First World War and the source of heroin. Sting compares the deaths of young men in 1914, when the First World War began, to the deaths of young men seventy years later from heroin overdoses in 1984, when the use of heroin was on the rise in the UK.

Answer: Tintin

'Orpheus' is based on the Greek myth of 'Orpheus and Eurydice', set in modern-day Paris. Sting's video for 'We'll Be Together', which is filmed in black and white, features a brawl breaking out in a Parisian café. Sting plays both Orpheus, a poet (played by Jean Marais in the original film) and another poet, Jacques Cégeste (originally played by Édouard Dermit). As Orpheus, Sting wears a knitted jumper with Tintin and his dog Snowy (Milou in the original French) on it. Captain Haddock is Tintin's friend, a former sailor and on-off alcoholic, who accompanies him on several adventures.

Trudie Styler, who would later marry Sting, also appears in the video and slaps Cégeste/Sting after he gropes her. She plays the role of the Princess, who was played by María Casares in the original film.

Answer: Chile

'They Dance Alone', like other songs on the album such as 'Fragile', features classical guitar. As well as Eric Clapton and Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler, American jazz guitarist Fareed Haque also played guitar on the song, while Panamanian singer Ruben Blades provided Spanish vocals. Sting recorded versions of the song in both English and Spanish.

The Cueca is the official dance of Chile. Although it is supposed to be danced in groups, women, led by the example of activist Violeta Zúñiga, danced the Cueca solo as a non-violent protest against Augusto Pinochet, who was in power in 1988 when the song was released. They would hold photos of their missing loved ones, or 'desaparecidos'. Sting performed the song at a concert for Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday in London in 1988, and at a benefit gig in Argentina that same year, with the Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo, an Argentinian human rights group.

Answer: The sea

Sting's father died in 1987 and Sting (who is a Newcastle United fan, incidentally) subsequently suffered from writer's block. He eventually made a breakthrough by writing 'Why Should I Cry for You' in 1989 and the rest of album began to follow. As Sting's home town of Wallsend was an area with a long history of shipbuilding, and he lived next to a shipyard as a child, the sea and ships are recurring themes throughout the album. For example, 'Island of Souls' is about a working-class boy called Billy whose father is critically injured in an accident at work, and who dreams of escaping Newcastle on a ship.

The Wallsend shipyard was closed in 2007 and Sting wrote a musical about it, 'The Last Ship', which made its debut in Chicago in 2014. Some of the songs from 'The Soul Cages' were featured in it.

Answer: Melanie Griffith

'All This Time' is from the perspective of Billy, the boy from 'Island of Souls' who dreams of sailing away from Newcastle, and the death of his father. In the song, priests come to Billy's house to give his father the last rites, but Billy wants to bury his father at sea. Sting also wrote about shire horses, geese and the river Tyne, all memories from his childhood, and said that he deliberately paired the lyrics with an upbeat tune as a contrast.

The video is set on a cruise ship, with a pair of creepy priests in black frightening a boy in a bath (presumably Billy) and the ship becoming increasingly crowded with guests (a nod to the Marx Brothers' 'A Night at the Opera'). Griffith appears during the second verse of the song and tries to give Sting a manicure while he plays his bass, and lightly slaps him when he brushes her off. Sting's wife Trudie Styler also appears as a French maid.

Answer: 'Fields of Gold' and 'Shape of My Heart'

'Ten Summoner's Tales' was released in 1993, as were both 'Shape of My Heart' and 'Fields of Gold'. American singer Eva Cassidy, who died of cancer aged just 33, became famous posthumously when her covers album 'Songbird' was released in 1998, featuring songs by Christine McVie (whose song 'Songbird' provided the title), Curtis Mayfield and Pete Seeger. Her cover of Sting's 'Fields of Gold', which originally appeared on the 1996 live album 'Live at Blues Alley', gained traction in the UK when it was played on Radio 2. Cassidy's version was covered by Katie Melua for Children in Need in 2017.

Sugababes repurposed 'Shape of My Heart' as 'Shape' for their 2002 album 'Angels with Dirty Faces'. They wrote their own lyrics for the verses rather than using Sting's, but sampled the repeating classical guitar motif and kept the chorus. Sting re-recorded his vocals for the chorus and sang it along with the group. Incidentally, it was the last Sugababes song to be released on cassette tape.

Answer: 7/4

The full title of the song is 'Love Is Stronger than Justice (The Munificent Seven'). Not only is it an homage to both 'The Magnificent Seven' and 'The Seven Samurai', but it is recorded in 7/4 time, a rather unusual time signature in popular music (Radiohead's 'Paranoid Android' is another example). The album does feature a song in 5/4 time, 'Seven Days'.

On the subject of numbers, the album's title is inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer's 'The Canterbury Tales' . 'Summoner' is a play on Sting's real name, Gordon Sumner.