From Rob: ""The first fruit [one of Copeland's operas] was Holy Blood and Crescent Moon, a bombastic story of the Crusades, which was also a fairly blatant attack on Israel's involvement in Lebanon. Copeland spent much of his childhood in Beirut: 'The reasons for my strong feelings are because the town that I grew up in, in 1982 was raped by its neighbour in the south, just right there in front of everybody, raped. The napalm, the phosphorus bombs - do you know what a phosphorus bomb does? It's jelly, it sticks to the skin and does not go out. Children were being buried still burning.'
He's notably articulate, well-informed and passionate about politics, particularly Middle Eastern politics (although he points out himself that the situation has changed, and he can get down from this particular soapbox now). Perhaps that seems more striking because he is a rock musician (after all, would you ask Billy Idol for his views on European monetary union?), but it's also a reminder that he doesn't have a typical muso's background.
His father, Miles, was probably America's most public spy. During the Second World War, working for American counter-intelligence, he was responsible for stopping plots against Hitler (the reasoning being that with him out of the way, Germany might get somebody sane and competent to run the war). After a spell destabilising governments, he returned to the US at the end of the Forties to become a founding father of the CIA. In the mid-Sixties he was living in Beirut with his family, working as a political 'consultant' and greasing the wheel while apparently still acting unofficially for his old colleagues, shadowing Kim Philby, then Our Man in Beirut. The Philby kids were the same age as the young Copelands, and the two families were very close. Then Philby vanished, only to reappear in Moscow. The resulting publicity meant that Lebanon became too hot for Copeland Sr, and Stewart ended up in boarding- school in England.""
