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Academy Fellowship Sting

The Ivors Academy fellowship is reserved for the best of the best, the songwriters and composers whose impact on the art and craft of music creation is utterly indelible. But even by those sky-high standards, Sting’s career achievements are something else.

The man that no one calls Gordon Sumner began his career, of course, with The Police, one of the most popular and important bands of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Sting’s songwriting was at the core of their success, crafting classics such as Roxanne, Invisible Sun and Every Breath You Take, the latter recently hailed as the Most Performed Song of all time within BMI’s 14 million-strong catalogue.

That would have been enough for one lifetime for most people. But Sting has also gone on to enjoy one of the most wide-ranging and fruitful solo careers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Over the years, he has collaborated with everyone from Shaggy to Mary J Blige and Melody Gardot to Eric Clapton. He has made albums of neo-classical lute music (2006’s Songs From The Labyrinth) and gentle winter sounds (2009’s If On A Winter’s Night…), alongside superlative pop-rock records, from 1985’s The Dream Of The Blue Turtles to 2021’s The Bridge. And he has sold 100 million albums while picking up awards the way Glastonbury’s clean-up crew picks up litter.

He won six Grammys with The Police and 11 elsewhere in his career. He’s been nominated for four Oscars, been inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame and been made a CBE for his services to music.

The Ivor Novello Awards, meanwhile, retain a very special place in his heart, having picked up the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002 and winning an additional six gongs over the years.

Throughout all that, Sting remains the most open-minded ambassador for songwriting, forever open to cover versions, samples and interpolations of his storied catalogue.

And so this year The Ivors celebrate Sting: the best of the best looking to inspire the best of the next generation.