Broken Music: A Memoir
by Sting
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Book Summary Information
Author: StingEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-10
ISBN: 0385336780
Number of pages: 337
Publisher: The Dial Press
Book Reviews of Broken Music: A Memoir
Book Review: Sting the Busy Bee
Summary: 5 Stars
"Broken Music" is Sting's autobiography, covering his early life up to his first American tour with the Police (plus a couple recollections from the 1980s and 1990s). As a fan of the Police, I decided to pick this up, and while it doesn't cover everything about Sting's later musical career, it covered all I could have hoped for about his early life.
Over 15 chapters and an epilogue, Sting recounts growing up in the grey and dreary Wallsend, his school life, his dead end jobs in offices and construction sites, his reluctant life at teacher's college and later as a teacher, and his endless gigging in jazz bands, fusion bands all over Europe. He certainly was a busy bee, in more ways than one. He speaks of his mother's affair with another man, and how it devastated his father, and of the many love triangles he himself found himself caught up in, including the one he had just as he became a father. His writing style is rather wordy, and took a little while for me to get used to, but it does capture his personality perfectly, and that's the most you can possibly ask for in a memoir, I think.
For a fan of the Police, the last half of the book is most interesting. Sting reveals the inspiration behind such songs as "Walking on the Moon", "Roxanne", "Bed's Too Big Without You", "Landlord", and "So Lonely". He makes a lot of references to early songs, some that didn't make it onto the official albums. It helped that I'd heard a lot of the material he was describing from the Police's "Message in a Box" set. He also reveals how he met drummer Stewart Copeland and guitarist Andy Summers, and Sting's impressions of the "fourth" member of the Police, Corsican punk guitarist Henry Padovani.
There are many fascinating, shocking and amusing anecdotes here. There's how Sting got his nickname. There's his son Joe's embarassing habits as a toddler. There's Sting's painful recollection of the strap, and of his first impressions of the Beatles, and of his time playing music on a cruise ship. Plus there's Curved Air being asked by Stewart Copeland's Dad to kick a squatter out of a Mayfair flat by playing annoying, atonal music, which was as strange a story as it was funny.
Speaking of the 1970s music scene, Sting name drops so many fascinating groups who he came close to, many of which I've been interested in checking out. Stings runs into the Sex Pistols on the way to pick up the dole. He gets taken to a Gong reunion festival, which turns out to be just as weird as the band. Back in the 1960s he goes to see Jimi Hendrix, and is blown away. Later in life he'd meet Miles Davis and shout some French at him for a recording session. With the various group he'd play with in his youth, Sting would open for artists such as Osibisa and Cherry Vanilla, and be part of festivals that also featured bands like the Clash and the Damned. I can't believe he got so close to so many figures as an "unknown". This autobiography was a great piece of music history, in my opinion, even though it doesn't have that many anecdotes of when Sting was "famous".
It was funny. Even though it isn't a "full" autobiography, ending just before the Police hit it really big, it felt right that it ended where it is. Through the book, I now understood where Sting was coming from, both creatively and as a person, and I didn't really need to hear about him getting famous or what his inspiration was behind his later hits. I mean, I can kind of figure it out, anyway, now that I've read his worldview, his obsessions and his upbringing in his own words. Sting covers fame briefly, as if his friends and his family are far more important, and I think that it was a refreshing stance to take, personally.
All in all, it was a very fascinating look at a musician, his strengths and his weaknesses, which got more complelling the further I got into the book. If you're at all interested, I recommend you pick it up, along with a copy of the Police's "Message in a Box" set, which features some of the early recordings he mentions.
Summary of Broken Music: A Memoir
Having been a songwriter most of my life, condensing my ideas and emotions into short rhyming couplets and setting them to music, I had never really considered writing a book. But upon arriving at the reflective age of fifty, I found myself drawn, for the first time, to write long passages that were as stimulating and intriguing to me as any songwriting I had ever done.And so Broken Music began to take shape. It is a book about the early part of my life, from childhood through adolescence, right up to the eve of my success with the Police. It is a story very few people know.
I had no interest in writing a traditional autobiographical recitation of everything that?s ever happened to me. Instead I found myself drawn to exploring specific moments, certain people and relationships, and particular events which still resonate powerfully for me as I try to understand the child I was, and the man I became.
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