Broken Music: A Memoir (30 page)

Even at these low points, I still have no doubt that I’ve done the right thing in coming to London. I can give no rational reason why it feels right to have done this, except I know that London is where
the prize is. I know that at the center of this labyrinth, this multidimensional, socioeconomic, psychocultural, and artistic puzzle is the glittering, singular trophy of success. It may be elusive, but it is so powerful in its gravitational pull as to render everything else insignificant. Success and happiness have to be the same thing, don’t they?

William Blake said that “a man who persists in his folly will become wise,” but at this time I am blindly unaware, even at such a remove, that I have become addicted to the notion that everything will be solved in the afterglow of success, and I am being drawn inexorably toward its center, deeper and deeper. How dangerous this addiction is, I do not yet know.

    Last Exit’s long-scheduled London gigs are upon us. I haven’t seen the boys for a month and I miss them, though there isn’t much I can tell them about my adventures that will make them happy. The flat in Southgate has fallen through at the last minute. We think the landlord must have smelled a rat over my bogus employment at Virgin Music and had the locks changed after Freddy had sent us the keys. It is a long drive to Southgate, the car repacked with all of our possessions and our hopes, only to find a locked door, our vain knocking echoing hollowly in an empty flat with a key that doesn’t work. We feel humiliated, defeated, and angry and the only positive outcome of this is that I will write a song that evening. An angry rant of a song called “Landlord,” which Stewart will hear and praise paternally.

“That’s my boy! Keep them coming like that.”

So we are outstaying our welcome on Pip’s floor. She’s been so kind but we can’t live here forever. I’m on the dole and haven’t done a day’s work since I got here, but when the band arrives I try to present
a cheerful front, pretending that all is going as planned. We are parked outside the Red Cow pub in Hammersmith.

“How’s it going, Sting?”

“Oh, great!”

“Found somewhere to live yet?”

“Still looking.”

Ronnie and Terry give each other a subtle look that is not meant to be unkind, but it nonetheless hurts.

Gerry comes out of the pub, cigarette in hand, with a look that would curdle butter. “The fuckin’ gig’s been canceled.”

Next night in Bristol, after a four-hour drive, we discover we’ve been double booked. This is not going well. How am I supposed to attract this lot down here when there is nothing but doom and gloom? However, the next night at the Nashville Rooms in West Kensington we triumph, blowing the headliners off the stand and restoring our flagging spirits. We are a good band, and while a couple of record company types turn up they offer us no more than a patronizing pat on the back.

The boys head back to the north in the van and I’m on my own again, holding the baby. I think they’re beginning to feel sorry for me, as if I’ve lost my marbles. I wave them off as cheerfully as I can, but only Gerry looks back.

    Stewart’s swanky Mayfair address that so impressed me has turned out to be a squat. He and Ian and Sonja have only been there a few months. The flat is actually owned by an American lady named Marcia McDonald, who is Muhammad Ali’s publicist. She had lent the flat to a friend who then refused to leave. This is George, the large lady who almost knocked me down the stairs when I first arrived. On the advice of Miles Copeland, Sr., Stewart
and Ian’s father and a friend of the owner, the Copeland brothers had been brought in as subsquatters to make life as uncomfortable as possible for George (who preferred to be known as Georgina), so that Marcia could regain possession of her flat. If this sounds like a ridiculously convoluted CIA plot, it is probably because Miles Copeland, Sr., the head of the clan, was one of the founding members of that byzantine organization.

What I had witnessed on that first evening was the Copeland offspring carrying on the family business, practicing an extended campaign of psychological warfare and attrition involving wild all-night parties and hideously cacophonous jam sessions. Georgina would leave soon afterward, so there was some method in their apparent madness, but now the Copelands were forced to accept the realization that they had successfully plotted themselves out of a wonderful place to live, meaning that their days in the luxurious squat were now numbered.

One morning during those last days, Stewart called to say he’d found a guitarist and to ask if I could come round to hear him. I tell him I’ll have to bring the baby, as Frances has an audition. So that afternoon I haul Joe and his carry-cot up the four flights of stairs and into the rehearsal room. Stewart is seated at the drums wearing sunglasses and a leather jacket. As the room is sunless and adequately heated, I am slightly puzzled as to why he’s wearing this getup, until I see that in the other corner, framed perfectly by the white sheet draped over a chest of drawers, sits another man in impermeable wraparound sunglasses, a black tank top, and sprayed-on leather trousers. They are both wearing, as far as I can see beneath the sunglasses, expressions of abject seriousness, the way I imagine terrorists would look when they’re posing for the camera after planning some outrage. This must be the new look, for there is a distinct smell of attitude in the room, and the sight of me in the doorway in my dungarees
and holding a baby doesn’t exactly harmonize with the terrorist chic among the drapes.

“This is Henry,” says Stewart, maintaining his grim demeanor, I’m sure at the expense of his natural ebullience.

“Hello, Henry”

“Henry’s from Corsica. He doesn’t speak much English.”

I can just see, in my mind’s eye, a far more comfortable Henry at large in the picturesque nineteenth-century garb of a mountain brigand, with a cutlass and flintlock pistols, lying in wait in the hills above Bastia to rob and waylay hapless travelers.

Henry Padovani is the new guitarist, and it becomes apparent as we play that he hasn’t been hired for his virtuosity. He only knows a few chords, but boy does he look cool in those leather pants. Stewart has taught him the two songs that he’s written—“Nothing Achieving” and “Fall Out”—for a record Stewart wants to produce himself. Henry doesn’t play them badly, but when we start jamming he’s a little short on ideas. After my initial suspicions about him have dissolved, however, Henry turns out to be a rather delightful human being, polite, friendly, and desperately eager to learn, as well as having an amusing and rudimentary grasp of the English language. He stops playing at one point, seeming to have a problem with his guitar, and asks me, “Please to give me a rope?”

“A rope? What do you want a rope for?”

“Oui, c’est ça
, a rope.” He grabs a spare lead from my guitar case, indicating that this is the rope he needs, and from that day on we will call all guitar leads “ropes.”

Joe, who has slept through all of this din undisturbed, has now woken up to be fed. Henry endears himself to me by offering to help heat up the milk, and we have a baby break until the bottle is finished. I place my little boy back in his carry-cot, and as we commence the unholy row once more, he falls immediately to sleep again. You
would almost imagine that even if we were playing Brahms’ Lullaby instead of some thrash metal vamp, he couldn’t look more content.

The new guitarist is getting the hang of it now, and when we fizzle to a halt after one of our more successful musical harangues, he enthusiastically offers, “There was some really moments, yes?”

We nod sagely “Yup, some really moments.” Henceforth all of our inspired musical moments will be designated as “really moments.”

And so the Police are born, with a few isolated “really moments,” a baby’s bottle, a couple of power chords, and a pair of leather pants.

WEEKS OF FLAT HUNTING HAVE WORN US BOTH DOWN, AND Frances and I have nothing to show for our efforts but sore feet, bruised egos, and a massive petrol bill from driving fruitlessly around most of greater London. I’m beginning to feel that the task is hopeless, when the gods seem to smile on us with some Olympian largesse. An actress friend of Frances’s is doing a season up in Edinburgh. Her name is Miranda, and she rents a room on the top floor of a house in Bayswater. Aware of our predicament, she will let us stay there for a couple of months.

We drive across Hyde Park to find an elegant terraced house in Bark Place off the Bayswater Road. It is extremely posh, and I can’t quite believe that we are even walking through the front door, never mind staying here. The house had belonged to a Lord and Lady Dunnet (whoever they were), but the current mistress is an opera soprano named Penny. The house has large spacious rooms on four floors, filled with sculptures and paintings, although our room at the top is the smallest. The main room downstairs has a grand piano (happily in tune) and French windows that open out onto a small garden with an enormous beech tree. Our bedroom window looks out onto the topmost branches of this splendid tree, and it doesn’t
take much imagination to think yourself in a tree house. This is probably the greenest place I’ve ever lived up until now.

Bayswater is as central as it is possible to be in London, a minute’s walk from Hyde Park and the shops and restaurants on Queensway the main thoroughfare, which seems to be bustling twenty-four hours a day. It is, in short, a perfect location for a couple looking for work and excitement and cosmopolitan glamour. Greeks, Russians, Turks, Italians, Indians, and Pakistanis all have overlapping enclaves here in a melting pot of immigrant energy and colorful street life. There is a casino, an all-night supermarket, and reportedly a high-class brothel or two. This is definitely where it’s at. We feel outrageously fortunate to find ourselves in such a situation, if only temporarily. Since we only live from week to week now, a couple of months here seems like an eternity. But we can’t afford to tread water for too long. Something has to happen, and thank God, Stewart has a plan.

    We are going to record his two songs, “Nothing Achieving” and “Fall Out,” on which I will sing and play the bass and Stewart will play the drums and most of the guitar parts because he’s better than Henry. Then we are going to get the record pressed at the RCA factory in Durham and hand deliver it to record stores ourselves. Such passion and ingenuity is truly inspiring, and a telling contrast to the lily-livered procrastination that is my only abiding impression of the established record industry of the time. Stewart’s energy is a breath of fresh air, and I’m transported by it even if the music isn’t exactly my cup of tea.

We have a photo session on the roof of the Copeland squat in Mayfair on a bitterly cold and gray February afternoon. Stewart and Henry are looking either louche or cretinous in their sunglasses, depending on your point of view, while I’m looking sulky and wishing we could get this over with as quickly as possible.

It is around this time that I first meet Miles Copeland, the man who would become our manager, Svengali, mentor, and agent provocateur. Miles Axe Copeland III is the eldest of the Copeland brothers. Intimidating, intelligent, opinionated, and utterly serious, Miles had a reputation even then for being sharp, arrogant, and ruthless. I liked him immediately even though it was a year before he could remember my name, or have much to do with my career. He was busy elsewhere. In order to understand Miles, or indeed any of the Copeland siblings, it is essential to know a little about the father, Miles senior (mastermind of psychological warfare in the Mayfair squat).

Miles senior, one of the founding fathers of the CIA, had served as an operative in the crucial territories of Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt for its wartime genesis, the OSS. He had by his own admission brought down governments, sanctioned political assassinations, and acted as puppeteer to various bogus and corrupt regimes all over the Middle East. He had retired from the service to become a Washington lobbyist and writer of books on the covert, complex world of the intelligence community. Kim Philby, the British traitor and Soviet spy, had been a family friend and neighbor in the pleasant Beirut suburb he shared with the Copelands. Stewart always implied that Philby was a surveillance target of his father’s long before he defected to Russia, but my favorite Miles senior story is this one.

After the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in a cave near Qumran in 1947, they were sent to the CIA office in Damascus. Miles senior and his fellow spies couldn’t make much sense of them in the tiny, dimly lit office, so they took the first of the scrolls at hand up onto the roof, to get a better look. They had just unrolled the mysterious 2,000-year-old document from end to end on the flat, scorching concrete when a strong wind picked up and blew the fragile parchment into the air and across the rooftops of Damascus, where it fragmented
into a million pieces, never to be seen again. Miles senior and the CIA boys retired downstairs in some disarray. The precious scrolls were then entrusted to the more circumspect and cautious hands of trained archeologists. I often wonder what was written on that scroll.

Miles senior had reared and educated his eldest child to become a businessman, preferably an oilman, and Miles the younger would have done so had he not caught the rock-and-roll bug while managing a local band in Beirut in which his little brother Stewart happened to be the drummer. After the family moved to London, Miles enjoyed varying degrees of success as well as failure managing acts such as Wishbone Ash, Caravan, and the Climax Blues Band.

As the eldest scion of an evidently dynastic family, MAC III was driven to create an empire comprising management, touring agencies, publishing and record companies, all grandly cross-collateralized and therefore all vulnerable to the hubris that invariably takes over most empires. It was on Miles’s Illegal label that Stewart’s two songs were to be recorded.

Ever optimistic, Miles had overstretched his resources and taken a spectacular fall in the world of business and was just beginning to stage a comeback when I first met him. He now had modest offices in Dryden Chambers off Oxford Street, where he presided over a burgeoning city-state of minor punk bands like Chelsea and Cortinas as well as a more musically accomplished band from Deptford called Squeeze. He also provided an office to punks official chronicler, Mark P., the editor of
Sniffing Glue
, who was hatching plans to become a performer. Miles had no real interest in Stewart’s own revanchist scheme to re-create himself as a punk, when what he considered to be the real thing, Chelsea and the Cortinas and Mark P., were already on his books.