Andy Summers

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STEWART COPELAND Stewart Armstrong Copeland was born on July 16, 1952, in Alexandria, Virginia, USA. The rock'n'roll details of his youth are that he started on drums at 12 and a year later played his first gig and lost his virginity on the same night -not a bad start. But his family background is arguable the most mind-boggling in the history of pop. His father, Miles Copeland Jr, was not only a former trumpeter in the Glenn Miller orchestra but one of the founding field officers of the CIA, America's often infamous intelligent service, and later a freelance political adviser to the sheikhs and oil barons of the Middle East. This meant that Stewart spent his childhood in Cairo (President Nasser was a regular dinner guest) and then, for nine years, in a Beirut for which his news reporter's cliche "trouble-torn"was nearly as apt then as it is now. These settings were, incidentally, quite convenient for Stewart's mother, Lorraine, an archaeologist. While generally the Copelands lived in some luxury tended by a team of servants, tranquillity was never more than superficial. One of Stewart's earliest memories is of a Lebanese civil war: "I was just a toddler, but I remember explosions in the night, sandbags and tanks in the street, gangs fighting and gunfire. We were living in an apartment with the rooms full of food and the bathtubs full of water". If the streets of Beirut weren't rough enough, his older brothers ansd sister provided him with an in-house school of hard knocks -Miles III was agressively trying to emulate his father as anachiever and, worse, as disciplinarian during frequent paternal absences; Ian rebelled and joined neighbourhood Arab gangs; Lorraine, ("Lennie") fiercely went her own way against the rampaging masculinity around her. Ans so Stewart grew up with no kind of opinion of himself. Looking back, he's said: "I was a late developer in every respect. I was physically small for my age, bespectacled, utterly dreadful at my lessons, a real population statistic." All through his teens he worked away at his drumming, the one thing that made him special -but, sadly, he had to do it solo. There was no band for him to join. A little excess political heat in 1966 took his father to England, where Stewart concluded his schooling. Then, he went on to the University of California, in Berkeley where he enjoyed his studies in Music, Public Policy and Mass Communicationsand at last began to acquire some self-esteem. And that was when, quite unpredictably, the Copeland brothers, who'd fought like dogs through their teens, were drawn back together by rock'n'roll.