AT Leith Docker's Club in Edinburgh, not far from Leith links and within a stroll of the docks, Sting was singing some songs yesterday afternoon.

Then an emotional memory of his shipbuilding father suddenly intervened.

Sting, was strumming an acoustic guitar and crooning one of his tunes, Dead Man's Boots, from his musical about Tyneside shipbuilding, The Last Ship, which is touring to Scotland next summer, when he faltered.

He lost his words to the song for a moment - but managed to gather himself and finished, to warm applause from the small audience gathered to hear his songs and learn more about this show.

The musical, he said, was inspired by several things - his boyhood next to the Tyneside shipyard, Jimmy Reid's leadership during the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work in 1971, but also his relationship with his father, Ernest, who worked with turbines.

Sting was born Gordon Sumner, in Wallsend, Tyne and Wear - a stone's throw from Swan Hunter, the iconic Tyne shipbuilders.

He said: "This show is not autobiographical, it is not about my life, but there are elements which have seeped into the story.

"My relationship with my dad was pretty tense: he wanted me to have a technical education, instead I passed the 11 plus and went to Grammar school, and he couldn't figure out why I wanted to learn Latin, and he never really understood what I ended up doing either."

The former singer and songwriter of The Police added: "My old man has been dead for 25 years, he just paid me a visit, which is why I lost my way a bit.

"My dad did come and visit me there, and I lost it.

"It's a very emotional subject, and when I see footage of a ship being launched in my town, the vision of that massive mountain of steel going into a river makes me cry.

"It is the nostalgia, it's the regret, and the pride those men and women had in the ships they made."

The musical, which is touring the UK for the first time, has already been on Broadway, and will star his 'good friend', Jimmy Nail.

Leith Docker's Club was chosen as a venue - as was Govan, earlier in the day - as it is reminiscent of the kind of community Sting grew up in.

Sting, dressed simply in dark jumper and jeans, said: "I never forgot where I came from or the people I grew up with, and about seven years ago I began to write a series of songs inspired by those early days in the shipyards, writing about people I knew.

"I was influenced two events, the shipyard in Gdansk, where the Solidarity union was formed, which helped bring down the Soviet Union...the other inspiration was what happened in Govan in the 1970s with Jimmy Reid.

"That was an amazing, inspirational story, and largely the engine of that was Reid's eloquence, he was an honourable man, so he was a hero of mine in the 1970s."

He added: "I wanted to tell this story about my home town, with the folk music from the Northumbrian folk tradition mixed in with the Scots and Irish who emigrated there, so the music is very much a mix of that, plus what I have nicked from Rodgers and Hammerstein and musical theatre."

The Last Ship will be on stage at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh from June 12-16 and the Glasgow Theatre Royal, from June 18-23 next year.