"Englishman in New York" is a song by Sting, from his 1987 album ...Nothing Like the Sun. The "Englishman" in question is the famous eccentric and gay icon Quentin Crisp. Sting wrote the song not long after Crisp moved from London to an apartment in New York's Bowery. Crisp had remarked jokingly to the musician "...that he looked forward to receiving his naturalization papers so that he could commit a crime and not be deported."
The song was released as a single in 1988, but only reached #51 on the UK Singles Chart. In the US, "Englishman in New York" peaked at #84 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in April 1988. The song reached #32 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart that same month. Branford Marsalis played soprano saxophone on the track and Manu Katche the percussions. However, "Englishman in New York" was a hit in 1988 in several European countries, reaching the Top 40 (and sometimes the Top 20) in France, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, etc.
In 1990, just prior to the release of his third studio album The Soul Cages, Sting's record label licensed Dutch DJ and producer Ben Liebrand to remix "Englishman in New York" and subsequently release it as a single. The remix played around with the introduction and some of the instrumentation, but the essence of the song remained the same. The new version was commercially successful, reaching number 15 in the UK charts in mid-1990.
The video was directed by David Fincher, and featured scenes of Sting and his band in New York, as well as the elusive Crisp. At the end of the video, after the song fades, an elderly male voice says: "If I have an ambition other than a desire to be a chronic invalid, it would be to meet everybody in the world before I die... and I'm not doing badly."
The song was used in the mid-1990s by Rover Cars in the UK, in a television advert for the Rover 200.
The sequel to the Crisp biographical film The Naked Civil Servant is titled An Englishman in New York after the song.
In 2012, the song was featured in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who in the episode "The Angels Take Manhattan".
Famous quotes containing the words englishman and/or york:
“It is not that the Englishman can’t feel—it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks—his pipe might fall out if he did.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The gay world that flourished in the half-century between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War, a highly visible, remarkably complex, and continually changing gay male world, took shape in New York City.... It is not supposed to have existed.”
—George Chauncey, U.S. educator, author. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, p. 1, Basic Books (1994)