Product Description

"I pore over Beatles albums with the same obsessive and forensic scrutiny that I'd applied to Rodgers and Hammerstein, only now I have a guitar. I have an instrument that can reproduce the practical magic of the chord structures and the network of riffs that their songs are built on. And what songs, one after the other, album after album. I learn to play them all, confident that if I persevere, what I can't play immediately will yield its secret eventually. I will reapply the needle of the record player again and again to the bars of music that seem beyond my analysis, like a safecracker picking a lock, until the prize is mine. No school subject ever occupies as much of my time or energy. I'm not claiming that any kind of prescience about the future was at work here, but there was something in the driven and compulsive nature of this obsession that was unusual, something in the unconscious saying, 'This is how you escape.' 'This is how you escape.'"

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22290 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Customer Reviews

Sting - Broken Music
This engaging memoir comes from a natural storyteller, whose selection of discourse is first-rate. Each page becomes ever more engrosing as it gives an exquisitely detailed account of the singer songwritters life; from his childhood in Wallsend to his success in the police and beyond.
The lack of pictures in the book is more than made up for by his gifted use of prose, as he builds up visual images like a poet, as each page goes by.
This book extends well beyond the interest of a man's music alone. An essential read!

An immensely talented writer
A beautifully crafted book where Sting searches his often bittersweet childhood and early years, to understand how he became the man he is today.
This book is proof, is any were needed, of his immense and formidable talent - not only as a singer-songwriter, but also as a writer.
Inclusion of photos would be the only change I would make to this excellent memoir.

Good book, shame about the lack of pictures!
An excellent book, Sting engages the reader and his use of the English language is as gifted as we'd expect from a such a talented songwriter, so that we become totally involved in his world.
What a shame there are no photographs though, and for this reason I'm giving it 4 stars not five!!