He has won a whopping 12 Grammys thanks to his musical talents – but some Sting fans still have no idea how he got his iconic stage name.
Sting, whose real name is Gordon Sumner, was the frontman and bassist for The Police from 1977 until their breakup in 1986.
In 1985, he launched a solo career and has sold more than 100 million records throughout his musical career. But despite his fame, some people still have no idea how and why he became known as Sting.
Commenting on his name, one confused fan asked: “Is Sting called Sting because he was in The Police and it’s just a pun on police sting? I had this thought the other day I’ve blown my own mind. As if the answer to this little mystery has been right there in plain sight all along.”
In a 2011 interview with Time, he said: “[My wife] Trudy calls me Sting. I was never called Gordon. You could shout Gordon in the street and I would just move out of your way. My children call me Dad.”
It turns out he earned the nickname when he was in The Police – and it all came down to his choice in clothing.
He previously told the Daily Star: “He [a bandmate] made me sing a song which was awful. So, in protest I began to wear a black and yellow top. He started to call me Sting as a joke. I’m grateful for it now as when you have to sign something, it’s short!”
Adding to this, he told CBS Sunday Morning in 2016: “I used to play in a traditional jazz group when I was 16 with much older guy.
“I used to wear these yellow and black sweaters. And they thought I looked like a wasp. They joked, they called me Sting and they thought it was hilarious – they kept calling me Sting and that became my name.”
One fan said on Reddit: “I had always hoped it was because of the Hobbit.”
Another added: “The story back in the mid 80s was that he had a black and yellow striped sweater that someone said made him look like a bee, hence the name ‘Sting’.”
A third fan said: “Before forming The Police in 1977, in the early part of that decade he was in a group called the Phoenix Jazzmen (like the rising fictional bird, not the city).
“He had a habit of wearing a yellow and black jacket most of the time. The black stripes went left to right on the jacket.
“One of his band mates said he resembled a wasp insect and the joking obviously led to them nicknaming him Sting.
“Gordon could take a joke, looks like, and kept it. Yes, it did kind of come in handy, being in a group called The Police.
“Pretty gutsy thing to name your band, knowing what a great sense of humour law enforcement sometimes has.