"All This Time" is a song by English musician Sting. It was released as the first single from his third studio album, The Soul Cages (1991), on 31 December 1990 by A&M Records. The song was a chart success, especially in North America, reaching No. 5 on the US Billboard Hot 100, topping the Billboard Album Rock Tracks and Modern Rock Tracks charts, and peaking at number one on Canada's RPM 100 Hit Tracks chart.

Lyrics

The lyrics provide a reference to the death of Sting's father, symbolized by the image of a young boy, Billy, who, at the death of his father, wishes to bury him at sea instead of going through the Catholic rites: ""Two priests are at Billy's father's deathbed—he's been injured in a shipyard accident—and Billy doesn't want the ritual that's being served up, he wants to take his father and bury him at sea.""

• Sting Despite the dark lyrics, the uptempo tune of the song foils their macabre undertone: ""It's about the death of my father, so it's pretty dark as a record but on this song the words are foiled by this fairly jolly tune. That's something I like to do quite a lot, combine dark subject matter with up music. No, it's not based on a dream. The lyrics seem surreal, but they are all images I remembered from my home town: ferries, priests, shire horses. I grew up by the shipyards. I just wanted to escape. I suppose it was quite a surreal place, though. It is the landscape of my dreams""
• Sting The imaginary character, Billy, is also referred to in the lyrics to the opening song on The Soul Cages, "Island Of Souls".

History

"All This Time" opened the set on The Soul Cages tour. After this, the song was not performed again until 2000 during the Brand New Day tour. The song lent its name to the ...All This Time live album which was recorded on September 11, 2001, at Sting's villa in Tuscany. The music video depicts the wry, black humour of the song and is set aboard a cruise ship that constantly tilts from side to side. It features Melanie Griffith as a manicurist and Sting's wife Trudie Styler dressed as a French maid, and recreates the overcrowded stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers' 1935 film A Night at the Opera. As Sting's stateroom slowly fills with people, the two priests mentioned in the lyrics emerge from a bathtub, to the terror of a boy who is using it at the time, and the antics on the ship prompt a man on a dock to abandon his effort to drown himself and come aboard instead. The last verse is punctuated by a vaudeville performer attempting to do a dance routine while the spotlight keeps moving away from him; he finally gets fed up and storms off the stage. At the end of the video, when the priests enter the room, Sting throws his luggage out of the stateroom's porthole, jumps after it, and sinks slowly into the ocean as a lifebuoy is thrown toward him.

Track listings

Charts

Weekly charts

Year-end charts