Broken Music: A Memoir

When popular musician Sting performs, he has presence, as if a magnificent bird has landed. 'When I sing, I have total freedom to soar and swoop,' he says, 'it's a little like being able to fly.'

Now he has told the story of his incubation in a memoir that details his childhood years up until he joined Police.

Growing up working-class poor in England, his father was a fine singer, his mother a skilled pianist until their piano was repossessed; but it was the rock and roll records his mother brought into their home that affected Sting (born Gordon Sumner) the most.

Both his parents were eventually stricken with cancer, dying within a few months of each other while still in their 50s. He attended neither of their funerals, instead embarking on a journey of trying to understand their lives and his own. 'We have unfinished business,' he writes. 'That is why we are together in this strange echoing hall that is my memory. I am, as I have always been, surrounded by ghosts.'

He remembers his mother as someone sad, but beautiful; his father as 'remote and tormented.' Feeling trapped in his marriage, his father was a milkman whose income was supplemented by family allowance. Delivering milk with his stoical, unpraising father on the weekends, Gordon's imagination ran wild, usually settling on, 'I will travel the world...I will own a big house in the country, I will be wealthy and I will be famous.'

When he discovered his mother in a tryst with another man ? one of his father's coworkers ? he was deeply affected, but no one ever spoke of the incident.

Music would be his escape from the dysfunction in his parents' relationship, which he describes as 'a series of squalid, ugly conflicts.' When a friend of his father left an old guitar behind when he emigrated to Canada, learning to play it became his obsession.

In school, he was embarrassingly tall and during choir practice often disguised his soprano voice for fear of drawing unwanted attention. The highlight of his education was an English professor that instilled in him a love for books, 'For to sit in a room full of books, and remember the stories they told you and to know precisely where each is located and what was happening in your life at that time, is the languid and distilled pleasure of a connoisseur.'

He worked at a number of jobs after grammar school, often reporting for work an hour late and taking extended lunch hours, before deciding to escape the monotony by attending teacher's college.

He taught briefly, but always maintained that music was his true calling. The book contains humourous descriptions of some of his first gigs in early bands, including how the leader of one of those bands gave him the moniker, Sting, after he wore a black-and-yellow-striped sweater that made him resemble a wasp.

When Stewart Copeland suggested he and Sting form a band called the Police, Sting liked neither the name of the band nor the punk music Copeland wanted to play, but didn't say as much. His attitude toward both the band and its music changed when Andy Summers joined and they found their groove. Sting shares his inspiration for the first songs he wrote for the Police and alludes to the rivalry and bickering over money that would lead to the band's undoing.

Sting writes as well in long form as he does in short, and his memoir is at times as lyrical as his songs: 'Sometimes a bank of fog rolls off the Tyne and you can't see a yard in front of your face. I love walking to school on mornings like this, when the world has disappeared and the ruined sides of houses loom like the ghosts of ships