Toxic masculinity 'caused by loss of manual jobs', claims Sting

The Police bassist and songwriter has claimed that deindustrialization led to the loss of physical productivity for men, which triggered toxic traits of modern masculinity.

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 singer announced that his musical, The Last Ship, was being opened on the West End. The show followed men who work in a fictional shipyard based on Swan Hunter's in Wallsend, North Tyneside, where Sting grew up.

The play tackles the closure of the shipyards in the north of England in the 1970s and 80s.

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Sting will star in the run at the Theatre Royal Drury in September.

“Britain’s wealth was created in the coalfields and the steel towns and the mill towns and the shipyards,” he told the Guardian.

“All of those skill sets were thrown on the scrapheap … for Thatcher’s dream of a service economy.”

He said many male characters in the musical are in crisis, as one says: "for what are we men without a ship to complete?"

"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."

Despite earning mixed reviews on Broadway in 2014, when the play was shown in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2018, Michael Billington said it featured "the most thrilling choral writing I’ve heard in a British musical since Howard Goodall’s The Hired Man".

Sting, whose real name is Gordon Sumner, is currently embroiled in a high court battle over alleged unpaid royalties with his Police bandmates.

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."