(Credits: Far Out / Apple Music)
Wed 31 December 2025 6:00, UK
Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita certainly isn’t a book that any celebrities are lining up to associate themselves with at the moment, particularly given its apparent popularity among Jeffrey Epstein and his mates. For many years, though, Lolita was required reading among legions of art school kids looking for a high-brow entry point into erotic literature.
During his own school days in Northumberland, Gordon Sumner missed out on the whole Lolita phenomenon, but by the time he did pick up the book in 1980, Gordon had become “Sting”, 29-year-old lead singer of the biggest band in the UK, the Police. This meant that any piece of media crossing his path was now at risk of being absorbed into his songwriting and churned back out into the world, references and rhyme schemes be damned.
“When I read poetry or see a play, I reach for elements in it that I can adapt for my own use,” Sting told the New York Times in 1985.
By the mid-1980s, the Police had already reached the apex of their fame with the release of their biggest hit, 1983’s ‘Every Breath You Take’, a beautiful but undeniably disturbing song told from the perspective of a stalker. Sting was already an old pro at putting on his creep hat by that point, though, as he’d managed to score a number one hit in 1980 with another tune that probably wouldn’t be so well received in 2026.
“The song ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’; it’s about a teacher and his feelings for one of his students,” Sting explained to the NY Times. “I was reading Nabokov at the time. See, rock music is a sort of wonderful mongrel that takes from everywhere. That’s its genius.”
Sting faced at least a little back of blowback after ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’ was released, especially when snoopy reporters noticed that he’d spent a few years working as a teacher himself, leading some to conclude that the song was inspired by events from his own life. As Sting repeatedly made clear, though, ‘Don’t Stand’ wasn’t autobiographical, but merely an example of his “work backward” songwriting method.
“I pluck a title from the air, just free-associating, and then try to figure out a story that it could apply to,” he explained in Lyrics By Sting.
In the case of ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’, Sting said that he took on the influence of Lolita and “transposed this idea to a relationship between a teacher and his pupil.”
The lyrics aren’t exactly subtle, as he sings: “Loose talk in the classroom to hurt, they try and try / Strong words in the staffroom, the accusations fly / It’s no use, he sees her, he starts to shake and cough / Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov.”
Weirdly, because it was 1980 I suppose, Sting was criticised more for the sloppy pronunciation of Nabokov’s name than for casting himself as a hunky school teacher with a teen girl throwing herself at him.
“Wanting by this time to identify whatever my sources were,” he wrote in his lyric book, “I conspired to get the author’s name into the song with one of the loosest rhymes in the history of pop. Well, I thought it was hilarious, but I caught some flak.”
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