"My memory of winter was of a much more extreme climate," said the singer born and brought up in cold, grim, industrial northern England - not everyone's dream place to spend Christmas.

"If the seasons are becoming flat then I think we lose something important for our psychology. I would regret that. I look forward to the winter, I like putting on my sweater and walking in the wind and the snow."

In the suite of an upmarket hotel a stone's throw from the equally swanky Champs Elysees avenue, Sting quietly mused about music, Christmas, climate change and the world. But most of the talk was about his first album in three years - "If On A Winter's Night."

The just-released disc, which entered U.S. charts at number six, grew from a suggestion a year ago that Sting put together a Christmas special - an idea he rejected as "commercial and boring," not to mention disliking Santa Claus and his red-nosed reindeers.

"Then I thought if I did an album about the winter it would be more interesting, because for me the season is rich in ideas, it's a season of the imagination, of stories and ghosts," he told reporter.

Fit and looking younger than his 58 years in black sweater and tight striped pants, the former frontman of seminal band The Police said that for months he researched music from over the centuries - folk songs, sacred songs, carols and lullabies - before coming up with 15 tracks.

Best known for 1980s new wave pop, Sting surprised in 2006 with an album of Elizabethan songs accompanied by a 16th century lute, "Songs of the Labyrinth."

"For the past five years I've immersed myself in music of the past," he said. "I hope it's a conscious strategy to be able to compose music for the future. Sometimes you have to go back and study, become a student again."

The songs from across history he chose for the wintry album had magic and mystery, he said, and were ambiguous and ambivalent - "because Christmas is not all joy and happiness" and "I wanted a balance between the light and the dark, a sense of strangeness, a spooky quality."

Joseph jealously shouts at Mary on one track, while babies burn and hounds howl in others.

Born Gordon Sumner but known as Sting due to a striped stage sweater, or so the story goes, the singer-songwriter said the album's haunting tunes and lyrics were inspired by the ghosts of his own past - in particular his pre-dawn winter rides with his milkman father as a child.

"He'd get me up at five when all my friends were still asleep and I'd complain bitterly because I was cold and had to work, but it was a great opportunity to daydream. It really sparked my imagination.

"I often say I dreamt my future on those mornings with my old man. He didn't speak very much but it was dark and if the snow fell it was a magical environment. This grey little town suddenly became an amazing magical landscape. So winter there was ambivalent."

His Christmas day memories too were divided, he said, marked by family rows around the middle of the afternoons.

"I have a very ambivalent attitude towards the season, I'm haunted actually by the past," he said. "I know that is very simple psychology, but I think it's the season where we are meant to reflect, where we're asked to face the ghosts of the past and by facing them we are about to move into the spring. It's very simple, it's what our ancestors did.

"The songs I think are about regeneration. You know animals hibernate, we become reflective and recharge our batteries in the winter."

So what are his plans for the spring then?

"No idea," said Sting, whose immediate future includes trips to Sao Paulo, New York and Paris. "After Christmas I face a blank sheet of paper, a white snowfield. There's nothing. That's good."

Sting was adamant, however, that The Police, which by the early 1980s was probably the world's biggest band, notably scooping six Grammy awards in a decade, had absolutely no plans to reform.

"Police is complete," he said. "We reformed two years ago to create a piece of nostalgia, that was very successful but we don't need to do that again. That is complete."

Despite his new directions in the last years, his own pop career was not over, he added. "I seem to be able to reinvent myself now and then, to keep people intrigued," he said.