On the streets of Newcastle, Sting's home town and mine, the taxi drivers love him. They like him because he doesn’t take himself too seriously. They can joke with him, they say, and reminisce. He's a generous tipper, too. Match that with the multimillionaire whose life revolves between homes in Wiltshire, New York, Tuscany and Malibu. The rock star who likes to talk about the intricacies of Tantric sex and pose topless with Trudie Styler, his wife and mother of four of his six children. The environmentalist famous for saving rainforests and offsetting his rather large carbon footprint. You get a picture of a complicated individual...

"InTheStudio: The Stories Behind History's Greatest Rock Bands" hosts an in-depth conversation with Sting spanning his enduring solo career, from his 1985 debut 'The Dream Of The Blue Turtles' to his latest box set collection STING: 25 Years. To stream the interview online, please visit: www.inthestudio.net/this-week-in-the-studio/sting. This program will also be available on 50+ radio stations throughout North America. To listen in on a station near you, visit: www.inthestudio.net/radio-stations...

TIME magazine ask Sting ten questions...

On a bright, crisp mid-September morning, Sting - singer, songwriter, actor, environmental advocate, yoga and tantric sex enthusiast - strides into his record company's Midtown offices looking, predictably, fit as a fiddle. Under the altogether sunny circumstances, it's surely not too early to wish him a happy birthday...

The thing about Sting… is that he is arrogant, stubborn, hypocritical and pretentious. Or is he? As he approaches his 60th birthday, Elizabeth Day joins him in France and discovers just how wrong you can be. Sting is sitting on a bar stool in a white T-shirt and grey camouflage-patterned combat trousers, playing a harmonica. In front of him, a 20-piece orchestra is half-way through a classical arrangement of one of his songs, producing a swelling crescendo of sound that fills the stage. Behind him rise the steep, stone-hewn seats of a Roman amphitheatre in Lyon where, later tonight, Sting will play to a packed crowd of French fans as part of his Symphonicity world tour.

Looking at Sting in the flesh, it's nearly impossible to believe he turns 60 a week today. Lean, muscular, tanned and looking ridiculously fit, he has just returned from a bike ride around his adopted home of New York City. Years of clean living and yoga have left him with the body and energy levels of a man half his age. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the former Police front man is also struggling with the fact he is about to enter his seventh decade. "I can't quite believe it," he muses from his apartment balcony overlooking Central Park. "It doesn't quite compute for me being 60. I still feel like I am 14..."

Classic Sting - Sting is now venturing into classical pop for his Symphonicity tour. All but one of the 60-plus musicians have made it to rehearsals at the Zenith, a cavernous concert venue on the outskirts of Nantes in western France. With the evening's sold-out performance due to start in a couple of hours, the sound check is going ahead without him...

Man in Motion: Sting sits at the dining-room table of his modest apartment on a rainy day in New York City's Upper West Side, overlooking a not-as-breathtaking-as-one-might-wish area of Central Park. "It feels a little bit detached from the city," he says, gazing through the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows. "It's kind of Blade Runner." The English pop icon and his wife, Trudie Styler, have kept a place here since 1984, but this is only a temporary accommodation while he moves from one permanent apartment to another. "This is a stop," he says...

A symphony with Sting: "I love a challenge," says Sting with a cheeky sideways smile. The 59-year-old singer, who touched down in Australia this week ahead of his national Symphonicity tour, says he thrives on new experiences and couldn't resist the appeal of reworking his most loved songs for performance with an orchestra...

After almost 30 years together, one of rock's most famous couple isn't afraid to spice things up. Sting and Trudie Styler are nursing a double gin and a vodka tonic, respectively, after spending the day cavorting sexily for photographer Terry Richardson. But they really should be having a cigarette. In a cheeky nod to the couple's boudoir infamy, Sting says, "That was like tantric filmmaking..."

Tuscan Paradise - For Sting and Trudie Styler, landscape designer Arabella Lennox-Boyd plants a heavenly garden near Florence. Great gardens are made, not born, and usually with protracted effort - vast quantities of earth are moved here and there and back again, mature trees are arranged with the help of forklifts, hills are bulldozed into terraces, and, occasionally, rocky outcrops are blasted into submission with strategically placed explosives. By some point in the creative process, the land seems so distressed that the dream it represents to the landscape architect can look like a nightmare to the homeowners...

It's a brilliantly sunny - and blazingly hot - afternoon in the leafy Chicago suburb of Highland Park, and Sting is idly walking around on the stage of the Pavilion, an outdoor theatre that extends onto an expansive lawn. In a few hours, Sting and his band, with the support of the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra of Britain, will perform the first of two sold-out shows as part of the town's prestigious Ravinia Festival. The Pavilion's 3,200 seats will be filled, and the lawn will be crowded with thousands of picnickers content to hear the music from afar while dining on gourmet fare lit by candelabras...

At 59, Sting is only too aware that you can't please all of the people all of the time. In fact, he says, he can't even please himself. He's also been very kind to me. When my father was in a nursing home with Alzheimer's, my mother wanted to put up family pictures, but there were none of me because I hate having my picture taken. She found one of me and Sting from an old newspaper article. My father thought that Sting was a relative, maybe a son...

"In the spring of 2009, I was approached to perform a concert of my songs with the illustrious Chicago Symphony Orchestra. While I had worked with orchestras before on various album tracks and special live performances like the Grammys and the Oscars, I had never been asked to put together an entire evening in such a refined format..."

Sting knows his latest crossover project will annoy his detractors. And, he tells The Daily Telegraph's Neil McCormick, he couldn't care less. "I don't need everyone to love me," says Sting. "I really don't." The 58-year-old superstar is preparing to go on stage with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, augmented by his own four-piece band, to perform orchestral rearrangements of songs from his back catalogue...