Lessons in rock ‘n’ roll’s school of life
QUESTION Sting was a teacher before achieving rock stardom. Have any other musicians followed this route?
BEFORE finding fame as a rock star, Sting – then known as Gordon Sumner – taught English at St Paul’s School, Cramlington, Northumberland. In his autobiography Broken Music, he recalled how one pupil skipped school and put on a high-pitched voice in a phone call to explain his absence. When Mr Sumner asked who was calling, the boy replied: ‘Er... it’s me mam.’
Ricky Ross, Deacon Blue frontman, was an English teacher at St Columba of Iona in Maryhill, Glasgow. The title track, Raintown, from Deacon Blue’s excellent debut album, was written in his head while walking to school. He talks fondly of his experience there in his biography Walking Back Home.
Ian Dury of Blockheads fame studied at the Royal College of Art under pop artist Peter Blake (famous for the Sgt Pepper album cover). Dury went on to become an art teacher at Canterbury College of Art in 1970. He recruited some of his bandmates for his first band, Kilburn And The High Roads, from pupils there.
Barry Quick, Nottingham. BRYAN Ferry, a fine art graduate, taught art and pottery at Holland Park School in London while founding what would become Roxy Music in his free time.
Mark Knopfler’s first job was as a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post but he later taught English at Loughton College in Essex. He moved to London and focused on building up the band later known as Dire Straits.
Swansea-born Spencer Davis read German at Birmingham University. He taught at Yardley’s Whittington Oval School while moonlighting as a musician in the mid-1960s. Gillian Sharp, London.
QUESTION Has a mercenary army reversed allegiance and attacked its employer?
BECAUSE mercenaries fight for money, rather than out of loyalty, it should come as no surprise that they did, on occasion, change their allegiance in return for higher wages – or to save their skins if they were on the losing side in a fight.
This situation was common in northern Italy during the Middle Ages. At the time the country was divided into city-states (Florence, Milan et al) which grew rich on trade.
However, they didn’t have large enough populations to maintain armies. Into this gap stepped the Condottieri – captains who raised mercenary armies to defend whichever city employed them.
Englishman Sir John Hawkwood (c. 1323-1394) was one of the most successful of the Condottieri leaders and a funerary monument to him can be seen in the cathedral in Florence, one of the cities that employed him.
When Condottieri armies met, they rarely engaged in open battle – their objective was to capture prisoners who could be held for ransom. Because of this reluctance to fight conclusive battles, most of the wars between the cities ended in negotiated peace treaties.
Realising that their armies were more powerful than the cities that employed them, the Condottieri leaders sometimes turned against their employers.
Most notable for doing that was a German by the name of Werner von Urslingen (1308-1354). In 1343 he was hired by Taddeo Pepoli of Bologna to fight against Obizzo III d’Este of Modena but he switched sides and went on to ravage several cities.
The end of the Condottieri came in 1494 when France invaded Italy and the fighters proved to be no match for the professional French army. Robert Sutherland, Northampton.
QUESTION Did filmmaker Jacques Cousteau fake some of his underwater footage?
BEFORE David Attenborough, there was French oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who helped invent diving gear and used it in expeditions across the globe aboard his research vessel, the Calypso.
His Oscar-winning documentary The Silent World (1956) became controversial as it featured divers hitching rides on the back of turtles, killing sharks and roughly handling fragile coral.
Afterwards Cousteau became a champion of conservation. He died in 1997.
However, a 1998 BBC Dispatches programme alleged that fakery had been used to make his Undersea World series.
It claimed that a scene in which a giant octopus escapes from a tank onto the deck of the Calypso was staged by adding bleach to the water.
Cousteau’s right-hand man, Albert Falco, admitted that a scene showing two sea lions walking comically across the deck of Calypso actually involved four animals, as the first two had died. ‘We kept them out of the sea too long to make the film,’ Falco said. Peter Douglas, St Andrews, Fife.