In 2018, Leith Dockers Club had never seen the like. On the tiny stage of their function room, perched on a bar stool tuning his guitar, was a bona fide pop legend, Sting. The Police frontman, real name Gordon Sumner, was about to give an intimate performance at the launch of a UK Tour of his Broadway musical.
Passing Leith’s docklands on the way to the club had, the singer admitted, made him feel at home, but then he did grow up in the shadow of a shipyard, in Tyne and Wear. He said, “It does feel like home, when I caught sight of the ships in the water as we came in, I got emotional. There is something about a ship that excites me, a symbolism that is very powerful. When I was a kid growing up, looking at the end of my street, I’d see this massive cathedral of steel, to see it launched with such noise was a very powerful symbol, and not all positive; the demise of the shipyard was also symbolic of the demise of my parents health.”
Born and brought up just yards from Wallsend’s shipyard, The Last Ship is consequently a musical very close to his heart. Semi-autobiographical, it tells the story of Gideon Fletcher, a merchant seaman, who returns home from sea to discover the ship-building life he left behind in chaos. The yard is closing and no one knows what will come next. With a half-built ship towering over the terraces, picket lines are drawn as foreman Jackie and his wife Peggy fight to hold their community together in the face of the gathering storm.
The musical opened on New York’s Broadway in 2015, having premiered in Chicago the following before, some decade and a half after Sting had first been inspired to revisit his early days musically. He explained, “I wrote an album in 1990 called The Soul Cages, which was about the shipyard and about my parents dying, so yes, I have lots of mixed emotions about the shipyard.”
If The Soul Cages was the starting point for The Last Ship, it was the Gdansk shipyard strike and formation of Solidarity by Lech Walesa in 1980 along with the Clyde shipyard work-in of the Seventies led by Jimmy Reid that provided the meat for the story.
“The Soul Cages always had a theatrical component but it wasn’t until I read about the guys in Gdansk who, though out of work, started to build their own ship just to get themselves back together, and the stories of Jimmy Reid that I thought, ‘If I can weld those stories to my town, we have an allegory for that time and can give a voice to people who had never had their stories told before. Not in my time anyway.
“They had such pride in their work. That is what I wanted to bring to this piece. It was hard, awful work and yet they could look back down the hill every night and say, ‘We built that thing… one of the biggest ships ever built, and we built it’. In modern society we don’t make much with our hands anymore, so what do communities do when they are suddenly told they are irrelevant to the economy.
“For me that’s a terrible poison to live with. I don’t know the answer, but I know that the story has to be told and that maybe, within that narrative, there is some way out… what they do in the musical is they occupy the yard, finish the ship, and sail it off themselves. It’s a grand gesture to say, ‘This who we are. We are proud of who we are. Deal with us’, but it is no more than a gesture.”
Researching the piece brought Sting home to Wallsend, a visit it was clear he found traumatic as he described the emotional turmoil it evoked. After all, like all docklands, life was hard and poverty rife.
“I wanted to escape, I really did,” he confessed. “The only rich people we saw would be the ones who came to launch the ships. I remember very particularly that once a year the Queen Mother would come along in a big Rolls Royce with out-riders and everything. I would think, ‘I want to be in that car. I want a life outside of these streets. I don’t want to work in the shipyard or in the coal mine at the other end of town.’
“I had a bigger dream. I dreamt I would be a musician and I must have dreamt it awfully hard because that is what happened and I am eternally grateful for that. But I also feel the need to honour where I come from, to pay a debt, because those people, that community, made me who I am. The ship, again, is a symbol, those ships left that town and never came back, they were too big to come back. I said ‘I want to be on that ship, in that car. I want a bigger world. I deserve a bigger life as much as anybody’. It was a seed planted in me, an ambition to escape where I came from, but there is guilt attached to that too, a survivor’s guilt; the ship yard is just a hole in the ground and there is nothing else.”
After pausing for thought, he continued, “I went back, it was like going on a ghost train. There was a lot of hurt there for me. It really wasn’t an easy thing to dredge up but I’m really glad I did. It is good therapy to accept who you are, where you come from, to forgive your parents; my parents were really young. My mum was 18 when she had me, my dad, maybe 22, and they died young, so I never really got the chance to thank them, or forgive them, or go back to them. In a way, this work is my rather extravagant mourning for my parents.”
On Broadway, Sting became even closer to his creation when he found himself taking over from Jimmy Nail (“He was my muse, I bounced ideas off him,” he shared) to star in the production as foreman Jackie, something he had never envisaged?
“It was a tough subject for Broadway audiences to embrace. Most Broadway shows are plays or musicals they know already. The hardest thing to do there is an original piece with a serious core, although the people that saw it, loved it. The producer said, ‘You need to go on, we need to sell more tickets’. I asked who I could play and he replied, ‘Take Jimmy’s part.’ I replied, ‘I’ve got to throw my friend under the bus? Is this what showbiz is about? ’He said, ‘This is Broadway kid, you do it’.”
He laughed, as he added, “I made sure he told Jimmy, and I loved it. I only had half an hour with the stage manager before I went on but I already knew it. Jimmy said he’d give me notes every night. After my first night he said, ‘I’ve just got one note for you; be taller’.”.
The 2018 touring production was directed by Lorne Campbell and due to star Jimmy Nail reprising his Broadway role. However as things transpired, Nail never did return to the role of foreman Jackie, perhaps his no show at the press launch should have been a clue, instead, Joe McGann successfully stepped into the role.
