Sting has so many strings to his bow – and his lute! – that it’s easy to forget how his bass guitar was what first powered him into our lives.

That iconic intro to Walking On The Moon definitely deserves that most overused of adjectives, making it the first Police song I think of when their name is mentioned.

It’s an odd thing that The Police, the biggest band in the world in the mid-Eighties – and surely the most successful of the New Wave bands to emerge from punk – have slightly slipped from memory.

Their songs don’t tend to turn up on random mixtapes in pubs, bars and restaurants, and you rarely, if ever, encounter music fans reminiscing fondly about their golden age.

I first saw them, dressed in matching yellow boiler suits – supporting Cherry Vanilla at The Roxy in 1977 – no one would have predicted they would become superstars with their punky reggae fusion.

Yet they went on to have a string of hits – ten Top Ten singles and  nine albums – and fill arenas all over the world, while Sting became a high-profile celebrity, as famous for his yoga and tantric sex sessions as his music.

Not that the music ever took second place: he has 17 Grammys and record sales of more than 100 million to his name as both Police man and solo artist, with a personal fortune of alamost £400 million.

His latest endeavour is a stage musical, The Last Ship, that is about to open in the West End. A labour of love, it’s about Thatcher’s destruction of the shipyards in Wallsend, the Tyneside town where Gordon Sumner grew up.

He wrote the music and lyrics and has taken over the onstage role of the shipyard foreman originally played by Jimmy Nail. Perhaps the chance to get into that boiler suit 50 years later was just too much to resist.