Trudie: I won't let Sting swing

I would imagine that Sting choked on his organic boiled egg and soldiers yesterday as he opened the morning papers. Headlines like "Wife-swapping, we're for it" and "Sex and drugs and Sting" accompanied quotes from his wife Trudie Styler stating the couple enjoy kinky threesomes, that she and her husband are into swinging "big time, honey", and that, just for good measure, she is an ecstasy-taking lesbian on the side.

Trudie Styler, fortunately, finds all the fuss rather funny. "I think it's fascinating that people take an interest in a middleaged married couple and what happens behind our closed front door," she says. "The idea that we are going at it like rabbits makes me smile, really. Sting was laughing his head off. They published a picture of him in a sex shop, which was supposed to prove what a perv he really is, but he was only in Hustler with my best friend Natalie buying me a Valentine's Day present.

"Look, we are very much in love, we have a wonderful physical married life, a great sex life, and we've never hidden that - and I count myself lucky that I am as much in love with my husband as I was 22 years ago."

The stories came about after Styler's appearance on the notorious " shockjock" Howard Stern's radio show in New York. She went on air to promote her upcoming Save the Rainforest show at Carnegie Hall, something she has done for the past 10 years. "It's the same conversation year in, year out; it doesn't change. You play Howard Stern at his own game. I know the conversation was all pretty much on one level but I wanted to sell tickets. I was joking, for goodness' sake, and if you had listened to the show you would have known that. I said I was into boys, girls, cats, dogs ..."

So she's not a lesbian then? "I love women, I have women friends but I'm definitely a heterosexual."

And you don't swing, big time? She laughs. "No! Maybe we should spend more time at home in the countryside. I hear they do it more there because they get bored."

Doesn't it annoy her that people think of her only as Sting's wife, a bit of a goer, when she is in fact a respected film producer (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is one of her successes)? "I don't really mind that people think we are having wild Tantric sex in our Wiltshire mansion all the time because it is so far from the truth. The people who matter in my life know that it isn't so."

But what about the accusations she has taken ecstasy? "That is totally made up. I like juices and antioxidants, I'm a health nut. I absolutely didn't say that."

She gives me an example of how the press have managed to twist her relationship with Sting into something it is not. "They said yesterday that there is a recent dirty video tape that I made for my 'raunchy husband'. Let me tell you, 12 years ago, when Sting turned 40, he played the Hollywood Bowl, and lots of us were asked to record greetings for him, to be shown to the audience before he came on. I thought it would be hilarious if I got together with some of my male friends, and lay on my bed saying, 'Hello, darling, happy birthday. Sorry I can't be with you, it's so lonely when you're on the road,' and then the camera pans down to three of my mates putting on their trousers. It was harmless, totally."

But you can't blame us for imagining them constantly having sex, twined like pretzels, for hours on end. Sting has always spoken about how "the whole secret behind Tantric sex is making your stomach go as near to your spine as you can while still allowing you to breathe. That way, you never lose control ..."

Isn't it a bit boring when men do it for hours on end? Isn't Sting any good at a quickie?

"He is, yes!" she yelps. After all that Ashtanga yoga (which they took up "after we gave birth to Coco, 13 years ago"), is Sting very bendy? "Yes, he is very bendy indeed for a 52-year-old. He is very healthy and very strong. He really is a wonderful person."

She says there have been so many stories about their Tantric sex marathons and Ashtanga yoga sessions that "they have all got mixed up into one rather large, steamy pudding. Ashtanga yoga is a wellknown practice for keeping yourself fit and healthy. Yoga is good for my body.

"Of course, approaching 50, I'm thinking about getting older, and the thing that worries me most is not being healthy. I eat organically where I can, I encourage my children to do the same, I take my daily regimen of yoga, which is an hour and a half, and I try to get eight hours sleep."

She refuses, though, to go down the Hollywood route, and says she would never resort to plastic surgery just to keep Sting happy. "I don't feel I need it, to be honest, as I am largely a film producer and not an actress any more, and I'm a mother and a wife. When we are seen together in public, of course I want to look my best, but I don't bend over backwards to try to look 25."

It must be hard, though, I venture, being married to a wealthy rock god. Don't younger women throw themselves at his feet all the time? I remember seeing Sting and Trudie in the front row of a Versace fashion show in Milan a couple of years ago, and as the likes of young Gisele Bundchen and Carmen Kass sashayed past with their spherical brown breasts, I could see Trudie hanging on desperately to her husband's arm as if he was filled with helium.

"In the early days, when he was at the height of his career with The Police and we were spending much more time apart, it was a lot harder for me. I am, contrary to what the papers said yesterday about threesomes and voyeurism, a very possessive person.

But now we are both so much older. We share everything, we talk about where we are in our marriage a lot and that dissolves a lot of stuff that could be negative."

Styler just thinks she has been really, really lucky to spend her life with a man she loves. She has never thought of herself as a great beauty. When she was two-and-a-half, growing up on a council estate in a small village on the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, the daughter of a factory worker and a school dinner lady, she was knocked down by a van and spent a long time in hospital. Most of the injuries were to her face, and when she went to school she was ostracised because she looked different. Her best friend had a birthmark; Trudie was known as Scarface, her friend as Beetroot.

Despite suffering from dyslexia, she got into grammar school, appeared in the school play and, after her mum had paid for her to have plastic surgery, gained a place at the Bristol Old Vic to study drama. She met Sting in the summer of 1977. He was a struggling musician living in a basement in Bayswater. She lived in a basement a few doors down. Sting was already married, to the actress Frances Tomelty, with whom he has two children, Joe and Kate. Trudie and Frances were friends. It was "complicated".

Styler and Sting became lovers in 1982, and were married in 1992. "It has all come right for me in my later years," she says. "I have a wonderful family. Neither Sting nor I came from privileged backgrounds, but now we are so, so privileged. My children say, 'Oh mum, you look good,' and kids say what they think. Just having that amount of love in a family - I feel very fortunate."

Her children - Mickey, who is 20 and paying her way through art school by modelling, Jake, 18, and Coco - are all "way more conservative than Sting and me. The children have never dabbled, they have never even smoked, and although we are very open with them we have always made sure they put school and work first," she says. "Mickey and I are like best friends. Sting is a great dad. Drugs and alcohol have never been taboo in our household so have never been an issue."

She says the children used to blush when they were early teenagers and all the Tantric sex stories were in the papers, but now, "they all just have a good laugh about it. Their poor old mum and dad, at it again. They thought yesterday's stories were a real hoot."