Loss of manual jobs could be driving toxic masculinity, says Sting

Sting: '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.' File photo: James Manning/PA

The fact many men no longer use their hands and physicality on a daily basis may be driving some of the toxic traits in modern masculinity, according to Sting.

The singer, who on Wednesday announced that his musical about the last days of a shipyard was coming to London's West End this autumn, said one of the byproducts of deindustrialisation was the loss of physical productivity for men.

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 Last Ship, which debuted in Chicago in 2014 before a run on Broadway, focuses on the fate of men who work at a shipyard similar to Swan Hunter’s in Wallsend in the north of England where Sting grew up, before the yards closed during deindustrialisation in the 1970s and 80s.

Sting, who wrote the music for the show and will star in a run at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in September, said the closure of the shipyards began an era when the north of England was failed by successive governments.

“Britain’s wealth was created in the coalfields and the steel towns and the mill towns and the shipyards,” he said. “All of those skill sets were thrown on the scrapheap … for Thatcher’s dream of a service economy.” 

Lots of male characters in the musical are in a moment of crisis as their identity is being taken from them. One asks: “For what are we men without a ship to complete?” 

However, Sting says the production isn’t an attempt to romanticise what could be a brutal industry where there were hundreds of accidents a year and fatalities were not uncommon.

He said:
I’m the guy who didn’t want to work there and for good reason. 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.”

The singer is embroiled in a high court battle over alleged unpaid royalties with his former bandmates in the Police. Sting, whose real name is Gordon Sumner, was the band’s singer, bassist and principal songwriter.

The high court in London has been told that Sting has paid more than £500,000 (€576,700)  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.”

The Guardian