Growing up, Joe Sumner wanted to be the usual things young guys dream of being: A ninja or a video-game tester. He definitely didn't want to be a rock star - even if his dad did happen to be Sting.

A presumably disappointed Sting kept his distance from little Joe thereafter for many years, touring with his chums in the Police for a time until he struck out on his own to become the king of chick rock.

And just as surely as anything like a Police reunion tour is possible, so too it must be that a father and son can mend their ways.

The 30-year-old Sumner and his band, Fiction Plane, are playing the Starlite Room tonight and will open for the Police at Commonwealth Stadium tomorrow night.

OK, OK. Maybe Sting wasn't all that disappointed, though Sumner does say that he and his dad have probably gotten to know one another better since taking up his stock and trade.

Part of the reason Sumner says he resisted the idea for so long has partly to do with wanting to be recognized as an artist on his own terms - a stigma of living in Sting's shadow, let's say.

And even though Sumner's voice is a dead ringer to that of his dad's on Fiction Plane's new album, Left Side of the Brain, he says the similarities between their talents are hardly equal.

"I'm not technically proficient at anything, really," Sumner confesses, "but I just had a sense of how things should go together. The other guys (in my band) are much more technically adept than me, but I can kind of influence how things are played in a broader sense. That kind of came easily to me. It's hard to explain."

It isn't a sensibility that came from listening to work from his old man's back catalogue of hits, either. Truthfully, Sumner says he didn't know many Police songs except for the most obvious of hits like Roxanne.

Besides, everyone knows real rock stars would sooner burn twice as brightly half as long, anyway. That's where Kurt Cobain came in for him.

"After a while, I got into Nirvana and picked up a guitar. I'm sure some people in my family were going 'Oh great. He's doing that,' and I'm sure others were saying, 'This is going to be a real nightmare - very disappointing.'

"I was going for the Kurt Cobain thing for a long time, but it's just too hard to sing that way and I like to keep fit. I can't smoke like that and have whiskey and heroin for breakfast.

"I sort of blazed my own trail, as it were, which is sort of a self-trumpeting thing to say. What I mean to say is that I was just into my own thing for a long time."

His band's first recording as Santa's Boyfriend, Swings and Roundabouts, was released as a demo in 2001, and after signing a deal with the majors switched over to Fiction Plane.

Sumner switched from guitar to bass with the departure of Fiction Plane founding member Dan Brown in 2006. It was amicable, says Sumner; nothing approaching the monumental heartache of a Police breakup. And it's been good in a way, too.

"We became a three-piece and I actually feel like it's a brand new band just this year. It feels like this is our debut album, which is not true, but that's how it feels."

And playing in front of crowds upwards of 20,000 people (and many, many more as he will tomorrow night at Commonwealth Stadium) for his dad's big return hasn't hurt the ego any, admittedly.

But Sumner says he's just as glad of getting radio play in places like Windsor, Ont.

"At first, I didn't really want to do this at all; I wanted to be completely separate from it. I didn't really feel like I deserved it, that I was kind of a sellout," he says.

"I'm not interested in being in (my dad's) position. The TV stuff, for instance. I'm not interested in being as famous as he is.

"After a little bit, I thought that was stupid, because this is such a unique opportunity to do something. Everyone in the band was kind of like, 'Yeah, we really want more people to hear us.'

"I'm taking one for the team. You only live once."