Broken music: a memoir by Sting ((Musician))

Author:Sting ((Musician))
Format: mobi
Tags: England, Entertainment & Performing Arts, General, Singers, Personal Memoirs, Rock musicians, Music, Musicians, Rock, Biography & Autobiography, Genres & Styles, Composers & Musicians, Biography
ISBN: 9780385336789
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2003-10-28T08:00:00+00:00

Our live show is getting better and better, and soon we will be rewarded for our improvement. Andy Hudson manages to get us a spot at the San Sebastian Jazz Festival on the Basque coast of Spain. The Big Band had played there successfully two years before and Andy had kept in touch with the organizers. The festival would take place over a week and begin toward the end of July. This is exciting news for us, our first date abroad. Our new roadies, Paul and Jim, are excited too. Now they can take their own fantasy a stage further. They estimate that it will take three days and nights to get the van and our equipment across the Spanish border. We don’t have anything as sophisticated as an export carnet, so the band gear will have to be loosely disguised as camping equipment. Paul and Jim will have to suspend their macho roles while going through customs. I suggest they wear knotted handkerchiefs on their heads and learn the words to the holiday anthem “Viva España.” This suggestion does not go down well, particularly as I’m going to have to miss this journey and travel to San Sebastian by air. The three days of travel coincide with the last three days of the school term, and as I’ve already gotten away with murder in the amount of time I’ve taken off school with all the theater work, I don’t want to push the good Sister any further. The others of course think that I’m being grand, and even though I’m paying the fare out of my own pocket, there is an atmosphere. Gerry will rough it in the van with the roadies and the “camping equipment,” and Ronnie and John will drive down in Ronnie’s car.

My first year as a schoolmaster has turned out to be a relative success. I haven’t been fired; I’ve managed to sustain my career as a working musician, developed as a performer, and kept the Last Exit dream afloat. I’ve arranged to meet Frances in London after the festival so I can spend the rest of the summer with her. As the plane takes off from Newcastle Airport on the way to Spain I imagine that my career too is on its way. Tyneside recedes beneath its covering of clouds as we head toward the sun. Viva España!

While my itinerary via London and Paris has been relatively painless, the journey south for my compadres has turned out to be a hellish odyssey of breakdowns, non-air-conditioned traffic jams, and absurd mishaps worthy of Don Quixote. When we finally meet up, I find myself even more persona non grata than I was already. A night of Cuba Libres and sangria lubricates me back into the fold, though, and after the sagas of the last three days have been recounted, we drunkenly help each other mount the four-story climb to the two attic rooms at the top of the pensione as if we were summitting the Pyrenees.

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