The successful rock musician and songwriter chronicles his life in music, from his miserable childhood in a rough naval town, through his days as a student at the Royal Academy of Music, to the succession of bands leading up to his solo career
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Joe Jackson has forged a singular career in music through his originality as a composer and his independent stance toward music-business fashions. He has also been a famously private person, whose disinterest in celebrity has been interpreted by some as aloofness or self-importance.That reputation is bound to be shattered by A Cure for Gravity, Jackson's memoir of growing up musical. After a miserable, asthmatic childhood in a rough naval port town, he became a teenage Beethoven fanatic, played his first gigs to audiences of glass-throwing skinheads and drunken sailors, and won a scholarship to study composition at the Royal Academy of Music. By his early twenties, Joe's career had embraced Top 40 pop groups with embarrassing names like Edward Bear and The Misty Set; jazz playing vibes with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra; proto-punk with the dramatically doomed Arms and Legs; fringe theater as co-creator of Schoolgirl Slaves of Soho; "heroic, Viking Saga drinking" with cabaret duo Koffee'n'Kreme; and musical directorship of the Portsmouth Playboy Club - all the while struggling to develop the songwriting style that would become his ticket to freedom.Along the way Joe writes about his passion: how people make music and why; musicians past and present; why music is like both sex and religion (and why it isn't); why he loves Shostakovich and The Prodigy and hates Brahms and Brian Eno; and how music saved him from becoming "one of those sad bastards you see milling around outside the pub at closing time, looking for a fight."
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