Big Sound Temple

When Scott Pack of the Friday Project (my publisher) offered, on his blog, signed copies of Stewart Copeland's Strange Things Happen: A Life With The Police, Polo and Pygmies to the first five people to reply, I quickly made sure that I was one of them. I've been a fan of The Police for a long time, and was - I may as well be honest here - looking forward to discovering more about the legendary fights (both verbal and physical) that Sting and Copeland (the drummer, in case you were unaware) used to have.

Well, as the 57-year-old Copeland is quick to point out, The Police only occupied eight years of his life. (Not including the reformation tour of recent years.) And in any case, this is a man with a seriously wide range of interests, who does not seem to like sitting still for anything longer than about two seconds. Which makes for pretty interesting reading, especially when the narrator also comes across as being easy-going, intelligent, and generally a pretty likeable bloke. From growing up as a child in Lebanon, hobnobbing on occasion with Kim Philby's son (only later would Copeland discover that his own father was in fact a secret CIA agent) to making movies with pygmies in a remote rainforest, precious little of Copeland's life has been humdrum. 

So he rather briefly recounts his rise to fame in The Police, having previously tasted chart success (appearing on Top of the Pops) under the guise of 'Klark Kent'. He makes no secret of the fact that he was driven to become famous, at one stage posting letters written by himself, but signed off with different names, to various music magazines and newspapers, all of them demanding to know more about the excellent, up-and-coming drummer (i.e. himself) that the 'person writing' has just seen.

The book hops between points in Copeland's life; a page can suddenly leap twenty years forward, or back. The reader learns about Copeland's fruitful, post-Police career as a film-score composer, and of the 'fun' band he formed with Gene Simmons ('...he with the long tongue...' from KISS) and several other famous rockers, because their kids attended the same high school.

The final part of the book primarily focuses on The Police's 2007/2008 reunion tour. Copeland makes no bones of the fact that he frequently finds Sting hard to deal with '...You fucking - Fucking - Fuckkkkinnng bastard...', is how Copeland delicately describes 'Stingo' at one point, after the person otherwise known as Gordon Sumner attempts to tell his sticksmith exactly how he should be playing the drums.

But, as is so often the case, all of this creative friction and drama only strengthens The Police's performance on stage. The book ends with Copeland's mild disatisfaction with the 'golden cage' lifestyle that a successful rock band is obliged to lead, and his desire to return to his opera-composing, polo-playing and many-other-things-besides life of before. If, on the final page, he'd written about how he was jetting off to Egypt to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx, it wouldn't have come as a surprise.

All in all a great book, and one which I read quickly and with great pleasure. Most recommended.