Bibliography XIII

“Strange Things Happen – A Life with The Police, Polo and Pygmies” – Stewart Copeland

An excerpt from my rock n’ roll journal, dated May 31, 2007:

“Strangely, perhaps because Sting has remained a pop icon and produced commercial hits since 1984, and perhaps because I’ve seen him 3 or 4 times already, I found myself more enthralled with Stewart Copeland’s masterful touch on drums and percussion. He was mesmerizing on all counts. Impossible to ignore, really. A phenomenal drummer, maybe the best I’ve seen. It was a privilege to hear him play live; if I’m glad of anything on this trip, that is it—getting to see him work his magic in sublime testament to Sting’s hilarious descriptions of him in Broken Music. The man is, as Terri said, a mad genius. Completely manic and wild, he ran laps around the stage a couple of times, like a lanky kid hyped on sugar. He actually out-did Sting himself ...”

* * *

Looking back, what I wrote about him that night pretty well describes Stewart Copeland, period, as indicated in his most excellent autobiography. Alas, though it was a Christmas present in 2009, I took almost a dozen years to read it. I say “alas” because it is easily one of the most entertaining books, and maybe the best of the autobiographies, I have ever read. 

It’s not so much the story of his life as it is a bunch of stories from his life, everything from scaling crumbled castle walls as a kid in Lebanon to playing polo against the Prince of Wales to touring with a posse of musicians during Notta della Taranta festivals in Italy to composing operas and writing film scores to judging singers on a BBC reality show to facing off against a pride of lions in Africa ... and I’m not finished reading the book! I have yet to embark on the final section, chronicling Copeland’s 2007 experience touring with Sting and Andy Summers, aka The Police.

These tales are written with such articulate hilarity that he has propelled me into areas (like opera and Africa) that hold no interest for me at all. If I felt lukewarm at the start of any such segment, I quickly learned to pay attention because the story is so brilliantly told I would regret missing it. His acuity is so outrageous that I must put the book down for spontaneous bouts of laughter—Terri asked me yesterday if I was okay because I was quaking on the couch with my hand over my eyes, and given the current health climate, she feared something was amiss. I responded by releasing the laughter I was hopelessly trying to suppress.

Aside from the Calvin and Hobbes treasuries, books that capable of assaulting my funny bone are so few as to be counted on one hand. Comedy is really hard to convey in writing, though the humour here is not in the least contrived. Copeland is genuinely funny.

I have also been disappointed by autobiographies over the years. One actress managed to make a potentially fascinating life into an appalling snoozefest, and some of my rock icons have relied on ghost writers to get their stories told—for which I’m grateful, else I’d not know the stories at all, but still. You want a sense of the artist’s self in any book about him/her. Well, Stewart Copeland’s voice is all his own: a brash, shoot from the hip, sharply witty voice that prevails alongside nuts and bolts detail about subjects too varied to name, including music itself, that few ghost writers could or would affect, and many artists, though outstanding in their fields, will not achieve no matter how expert their command of English.

In short, it’s a cracking good read that even eclipsed Sting’s!