Sting finds peace with his late parents, himself in autobiography

Sunday, November 23, 2003

By Lisa Hill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

For all his celebrity, Sting takes a rather unlikely approach in writing his autobiography.

	"Broken Music" By Sting Dial Press ($26)

The Grammy Award-winning musician, who rocketed to fame in the late 1970s as the lead singer of the Police and later as a solo artist, largely skips over these years and instead takes readers back to cold, early mornings spent delivering milk with his father in a blue-collar town near Newcastle, England.

The tale continues through awkward moments of adolescence, first love and first heartbreak, dead-end day jobs and gigs at seedy nightclubs, ending just after the formation of the band that would help him fulfill his boyhood dreams of stardom. It is, he says, "a story very few people know."

For fans of Sting's music, the eloquent, insightful prose will come as no surprise. Each word is carefully chosen, and the powerful images found in many of his lyrics are also found here.

Born Gordon Matthew Sumner in 1951, Sting grew up in the shadow of a shipyard where, in an image explored on his 1991 album "The Soul Cages," great ships would rise up, blocking out the sun, then push out to sea, leaving him feeling stranded on the shore.

Sting sensed that his father felt trapped in the life he had chosen, and he feared the same fate awaited him. Finding a way to escape became a theme of his early life.

Much of the book focuses on Sting's relationship with his parents and his efforts to come to terms with their weaknesses as well as his own. When they died within months of each other in 1987, he attended neither funeral.

In writing this book he appears finally to be finding peace with their memory.

His father comes across as an aloof man, haunted by regret and unable to express his love for his wife or his children. His mother is "a different animal entirely, spontaneously emotional, and as prone to tantrums and tears as she is to laughter and the joys of life."

She looks outside their marriage for the romance she craves, and as a young boy, Sting discovers her with her lover. It is an experience that will color his relationships with women well into adulthood and provide the model for the love triangle that will be the basis of many of his songs.

Upon learning of the affair, he finds an outlet for his grief and anger in music, pounding away at the piano at his grandparents' house:

"With both pedals hard to the floor I attack the keys with a decidedly unmusical ferocity. Sweet harmony may be what I am seeking in my damaged world, but that is not what my unschooled hands are producing. It sounds like hell and strangely gives me some comfort."

His grandmother asks him to play something nicer than this "broken music."

An old friend of Sting's father who is emigrating to Canada provides Sting with his first guitar, "a careworn acoustic guitar with five rusty strings." He pounces upon the instrument, finding an escape in the hours spent practicing chord sequences.

With a quiet determination, he learns Beatles songs note for note and eventually becomes known among the boys at the YMCA as the kid who can play Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze."

At 21, Sting becomes the bass player for a Newcastle group called the Phoenix Jazzmen. He acquires his nickname from the bandleader, who thinks his yellow and black sweater makes him look like a wasp.

A later band, Last Exit, gains a strong following among the locals, and despite the foot-dragging of his band mates, Sting moves to London in the hope that the group will hit it big. Instead, an introduction to drummer Stewart Copeland takes him in a different direction.

The pair form a group called the Police, a name Sting admits to hating. The eventual inclusion of guitarist Andy Summers completes the band.

Although the book ends before its rise to super-stardom, fans of the group will appreciate Sting's amusing and sometimes absurd tales of the band's formation. He also gives some interesting background about the creation of some of the group's first hits.

The name "Roxanne," a song Sting pens in a red-light district of Paris, comes from a worn poster for a performance of "Cyrano de Bergerac" hanging in his hotel. "Walking on the Moon," meanwhile, is inspired by his first serious girlfriend:

"Walking back from Deborah's house in those early days would eventually become a song," he says, "for being in love is to be relieved of gravity."

His memoir is a richly told tale and a far more satisfying read than other biographies of this rock star's life. Alternately funny and sad, it is the story of a man who has had his share of struggle and success and has come to terms with both.

There is a sense that at 52, Sting has reached a place of acceptance and forgiveness of others and himself. What was broken in the past has now been made whole.

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