A Cure For Gravity

Since the release of his best-selling album Look Sharp in 1979, Joe Jackson has forged a singular career in music as a composer and performer. A famously private person, Jackson's lack of interest in celebrity has been interpreted by some as aloofness. But he dispels that illusion with this enormously entertaining memoir of growing up musical, a misunderstood misfit in a rough English port town, a teenage Beethoven fanatic who played his first gigs to audiences of glass-throwing skinheads and drunken sailors. As he takes us with him through the halls of the Royal Academy of Music, through London's punk and new wave scenes, and up to the brink of pop stardom, he also writes fascinatingly about his passion, music: how people make it, why it is like sex and religion (and why it isn't), and how it saved his life.