A renowned composer and one-time pop star"s charming, funny, inspiring memoir of becoming--and evolving as--a musician. Since the release of his first smash bestselling album Look Sharp in 1979, Joe Jackson has forged a singular career in music through his originality as a composer and his notoriously independent stance toward music business fashion. He has also been a famously private person, whose disdain for the rituals of celebrity has led some to call him effete and self-important.That reputation is bound to be shattered by A Cure for Gravity, Jackson"s enormously entertaining and self-revealing memoir of growing up musical, from a culturally impoverished childhood in a rough English port town to the Royal Academy of Music, London"s punk and new wave scenes, and the brink of pop stardom. Jackson describes his life as a teenage Beethoven fanatic; playing his first piano gigs to audiences of glass-throwing skinheads; and life on the road with long-forgotten club bands. Throughout, he finds a hundred excuses to share his thoughts on musicians past and present, on record companies and critics, on 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."In 1992, Jackson decided to "retire from the pop world." This book evolved as he tried to figure out what to do next. Far from a standard-issue celebrity autobiography, A Cure for Gravity is an intelligent, passionate book about music, the creative process, and coming of age as an artist.