Imagine your next high school reunion. You spend most of the evening reconnecting with an old friend you haven’t seen in years. You two reminisce about the old days and laugh at all the memories. The event ends and you drive home smiling. When you arrive, you go on Facebook and find this same person publicly trashing you and trashing the entire experience.

That’s pretty much where The Police are at. In this metaphor the backstabbing friend is, you guessed it, Sting, who in a recent interview took great pains to state the obvious: there won’t be a second Police reunion.

“There was nothing new in it, no new songs, no new energy, no desire to take that as a platform and move somewhere else,” he told The Telegraph. “It was purely an exercise in nostalgia.”

A $340 million exercise, but who’s counting? He even worked in digs at his bandmates and fans, because he’s a classy guy like that.

“People reacting to the Police coming back as if mum and dad had got together, you could see that emotion in the audience,” he said. “But who really wants to go and live with the wife you divorced?”

Yes, because enjoying a concert by your favorite band is like being the child of a broken home.

Sting’s latest album Symphonicities rearranges a bunch of old hits, which sounds like — what’s the phrase he used — “an exercise in nostalgia.” For anyone who prefers their “Next to You” with cello and glockenspiel, it drops July 19th.