Free Broken Music: A Memoir by Sting Page A

pause—“but doesn’t!”
    During the war my uncle Joe was “mentioned favorably in dispatches.” His battalion was trapped on a beach in Crete, waiting to be evacuated by the Royal Navy. German Stukas dive-bombed them mercilessly for days. My uncle Joe played the accordion throughout the ordeal, and according to dispatches, “kept up the morale of the troops in the most trying of circumstances.”
    Uncle Joe was no blasé hero, he was as terrified as all the other boys on that beach, but I understand why he played that thing as the bombs fell, and I love him for it. He survived the war and played the organ in workingmen’s clubs well into his retirement.
    It is another uncle, although not a blood relation but one of mydad’s oldest friends, who introduces me to the guitar. He is emigrating to Canada and needs to leave a few things behind and asks if he could store them in our loft. One of the items is a careworn acoustic guitar with five rusty strings. I pounce upon it like a starving man in a cake shop, as if it is mine by divine right. I have missed our piano, and I’ve stopped playing the one at Gran’s, not wanting to upset her with my atonal experiments. My mother hasn’t mentioned the piano since the day of the blue van, but I know she’s sad.
    The guitar needs new strings, and I need to figure out how to play this thing. Next to the Gaumont Cinema is Braidford’s Music Shop. Mr. Braidford has thick pebble glasses, unruly and eccentric gray hair, and no roof to his mouth. Listening to and translating his utterances can take an agonizing length of time. He has a unique vocal argot that consists almost entirely of vowels. I have seen gangs of teddy boys in the shop, in their long velvet-trimmed jackets, slimjim ties, and built-up “brothel creeper” shoes, entertaining themselves at his expense, snorting behind their hands as he struggles to help them in their spurious requests.
    “Half a pound of sausages and two saveloy dips, Mr. Braidford.”
    The old man goes into one of his interminable stammers, as if the words themselves are fighting for breath. It seems to take an eternity but eventually, and with some anger, he is able to blurt out, “Aieees a oozic sho …”
    “What’s he say? Can’t you speak proper English, old man?”
    I desperately want to be brave enough to tell them, “He says it’s a music shop, you fuckin’ idiots.”
    But instead I’m silent and ashamed, ashamed of being young and ashamed of my cowardice. I’m terrified of the teds and they don’t even register that I exist.
    “All right then, how about a can of tartan paint? A packet of nail holes?”
    But they’re already bored and start to bundle out of the shop laughing and sniveling on the sleeves of their draped jackets, drunk on the delusion of their own wit.
    I like old Mr. Braidford, and I like his shop. It’s like Aladdin’s cave to me. The window is full of long-playing-record sleeves and the latest single releases. As you walk in the door there is a mechanical bell and a
Melody Maker
chart of the top twenty. The Springfields, Del Shannon, the Everly Brothers, Billy Fury. On the wall are acoustic guitars, banjos, mandolins, and behind the counter, a couple of trumpets and a tenor saxophone, but the centerpiece of the entire shop is a Burns electric guitar, just like Hank Marvin’s of the Shadows. I can’t imagine anyone in Wallsend being able to afford such a thing, but people come from far and wide to see it, and wonder at its mystery. Not being privy to the science of amplification I imagine that you just plug it into the wall and out come the most wondrous sounds. I imagine myself standing on a riser above a sea of dry ice as a TV audience of young women screams hysterically at me on
Thank Your Lucky Stars
.
    In a drawer behind the counter Mr. Braidford keeps sets of guitar strings. For the princely sum of two half crowns I purchase a set of Black Diamonds, and a further five shillings, begged from my