Sting says he’d stop performing onstage if he was ‘overweight or wearing spandex’

For a guy who’s 73, Sting looks pretty good. But he says if he ever stops looking good, he’ll stop performing onstage.

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Sting says his fitness regimen includes yoga, swimming, working out and walking, but admits that 55% of the reason he does it is vanity — the other 45% is discipline.

“I don’t look at pictures of myself. But you need enough professional vanity to go onstage in the first place,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to go on if I was overweight or wearing spandex. If that happens to me, I’m not going onstage. So the vanity is somewhat essential, and it’s not particularly harmful.”

“I’m not spending hours of the day looking in the mirror or getting made up … or wearing a wig or a corset,” he adds.

While Sting isn’t getting any younger, his music is finding new, younger audiences, because so many artists continue to sample it. Last year, Pink and Marshmello reworked his song “Fields of Gold” into the song “Dreaming,” for example.

“[W]hen somebody wants to interpolate or whatever it’s called, I never object because I always learn something about the song that I hadn’t known or anticipated. And I get paid, so why not?” he says. “It keeps them current.”

Sting also denies that the allegations against disgraced hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs have somehow “tainted” the way he thinks of his most famous song, “Every Breath You Take.” Combs famously sampled that song in his #1 hit “I’ll Be Missing You.”

“I mean, I don’t know what went on [with Diddy],” he says. “But it doesn’t taint the song at all for me. It’s still my song.”