But my hands were at that point lifting themselves away from the keyboard in shame and dropping slowly into my lap, where they remained for the next three minutes.And then, completely without warning, we were into “Every Breath You Take”. But then something terrible happened: Kenny Kirkland took a solo.It was during “Nothing ’bout Me”. For the most part, Kirkland had stuck with an organ sound, which meant we weren’t competing for the same space. But now he hit the piano button and took off fast and fluid and tuneful I looked down to check it wasn’t my hands making that noise. I was even beginning to feel free to rock slightly on my stool.

I had ceased trying to hide by gradually diminishing the volume of my own instrument. Instead, we played the old Police song “When the World Is Running Down” (4/4, three chords, laughably easy actually) and “She’s Too Good for Me” off the last Sting album (complicatedly stop / start; I was starting where I should have stopped and stopping where I should have started) Still, I felt easier now. With Colaiuta flicking randomly at cymbals, there was little to do but cling on tight and hope not to get bucked.Following this, my slightly high-voiced request for a slow blues in E went unanswered. Kirkland sat opposite me, offering warm smiles of encouragement. He did not, it occurred to me early on, look like a man afraid for his job. Next to him was Dominic the guitarist and, behind some screens, Vinnie Colaiuta on drums. Sting was on bass on a stool to my right, doing that pursed lip thing he does when he plays, managing to concentrate on the job, even with random keyboards going off in the background.”Seven Days” is in the devilishly tough 5/4 time signature – although, in the two run-throughs we gave it, I like to think my contribution brought something of the more dependable 4/4 to the song.

“It’s neither,” he said.Sting, of course, already has a perfectly good keyboard player – the jazz musician Kenny Kirkland Actually, make that perfectly excellent. “Is this F sharp a major or a minor?” I had asked him, bravely. Many of them contained flattened fifths and sharpened elevenths and looked more like chemical formulae than chords. Just prior to lunch, Dominic Miller, the guitarist, had patiently written out the chords for me, along with those for “Seven Days”. Achingly beautiful, we thought, though Sting’s lawyers might have been less enchanted.Instead we played “Hounds of Winter”, the opening track from Sting’s new album.

Sting possesses no Cleaners from Venus records and thus has never heard “Mercury Girl” (on the Going to England album, Side 1, track 4) It was the Cleaners from Venus’s “Every Breath You Take”. It was also, quite substantially, Sting’s “Every Breath You Take”. I nodded knowledgeably, trying to affect the manner of someone entirely used to having his equipment silently and efficiently made ready for him, rather than having to hump it through the door and bolt it together himself.Apparently, Sting had the idea early on that we would learn and perform something by the Cleaners from Venus I was quietly relieved when this notion died out. That’s where my self- worth lies.”I had an opportunity before I became famous to develop a life I was a schoolteacher until I was 24. It’s very important to me that I did that – that I had a mortgage, that I had a pension plan I could still be that person. I could lead a perfectly normal life in my flat in Newcastle, playing my songs to my cat, if that was it.”After lunch, we went through to the old dining hall, where Sting and his band were rehearsing for their upcoming world tour. An engineer gestured to where a keyboard was already set up for me and pointed out the headphones I would need to wear and the miniature personal mixer with which I could adjust the sound balance to my own taste.

My wealth is my family and my close friends and my ability to play music You can’t steal those things. I don’t read my bank statements and I don’t suppose you do either. What you have to remember is that I had 160 bank accounts at the time.”The whole business was very sad. Someone who worked for me for l5 years is now in Wandsworth Prison on a six-year sentence It made me redefine what my wealth is. “I like the freedom it gives you, but there are responsibilities attached to it too But I can’t sit at home every night and count the money I couldn’t do my work.