Brand New Day: The world according to Sting.

JAKARTA (JP): He was born with a cool enough name, Gordon Matthew Sumner, but he prefers to go by the monosyllabic Sting.

He was the bassist, lead singer and principal songwriter for one of the world's most famous bands, The Police, but disbanded it at the peak of its success in the 1980s.

He has come a long way from a restless, working-class Brit with a shock of wild blond hair, to a modern renaissance man clad in dark "trench-coatey" clothes, roaming the streets of Paris and India and slipping deep into the ponderous and sagacious side of himself.

His music gets more artsy, his lyrics more literary and he proudly soars above his superficial pop and rock music peers. But that is just one opinion.

More often, this born-again conviction is an object of scorn. Since the Police days, Sting's …