Captain Haddock's Beard

If you were to try and name a good song that Sting has done as a solo artist I bet most of you would struggle. Police songs don't count as they were a lighting-in-a-bottle collaboration of Copeland and Summers and Sting.

No, I mean the stuff he has done since then. Englishman in New York sounds like elevator music, Fields of Gold is the sort of dirge that people play at funerals and The Russians contains the line 'Believe me when I say to you' which is the sort of line an amateur songwriter would cram in to make it rhyme .

Yet he is still around, knocking out laclkustre songs that bimble in one ear and out the other, leaving no discernible trace of their passing, sung in an annoying nasal whine with no range.

A couple of years ago he managed to climb new heights of pretension when he released an album of folk music and to show his commitment he had a suitably folksy image update by growing a beard of Captain Haddock proportions that looked like a Welcome mat wrapped around his neck.

But this is not enough for The Stingster, he accompanies the album with an hour long concert filmed in Durham Cathedral and shown on the BBC over Christmas called 'Stings Winter Songbook'.

Not happy with a full orchestra he also surrounds himself with choirs, Morrocan percussionists, throat singers and people playing instruments so bizarre they look like something from a Dr Seuss book.

Despite all of this back up it still manages to sound like a load of meandering, tuneless cack

Interspersed with the concert footage we get to see His Stingness wandering around a street market in his hometown of Newcastle, looking all 'back to his roots' in his big coat and scarf and regaling the viewer with tales of how his dad took him to the same market when he was a kid.

He then engages in some awkward banter with a market trader and buys a book on Newcastle United which he doesn't even pay for, having to borrow ten quid off the cameraman.

I suppose if he is this skint it might explain his desire to push his new album so much.

I'm sure Mr Sting has a good reason for calling himself Sting but I don't care and can't be bothered finding out, such is the lack of passion the man arouses. I don't know anybody who goes to his concerts or buys his albums, I know the Police reunion was popular but the attraction for people there was the band as a whole, not Sting himself.

However Sting is a rich man and will carry on doing what he likes, churning out songs that are tolerated rather than enjoyed, much like Paul McCartney.

And before anybody says it I am fully aware that Sting is a highly successful musician who is so rich that he didn't even notice when his accountant syphoned five million quid out of Sting's account and I have just done four night shifts in a row and feel like I ahve been punched in the brain.

So yes, I am bloody jealous of him.