Instrumental

by James Rhodes

  As a pianist, they are the most frustrating, difficult, overwhelming, transcendent, treacherous, timeless pieces of music. As a listener they do things to me that only top-grade pharmaceuticals can achieve. They are a master-class in Wonder, and contain within them everything you could ever want to know.

  In 1955, a young, brilliant, iconoclastic Canadian pianist called Glenn Gould became one of the first pianists to play and record them on a piano rather than a harpsichord. He chose to record them for his first album, to the horror of the record label executives who had wanted something more mainstream. It became one of the biggest-selling classical albums of all time, and to this day his recording remains the benchmark all other pianists aspire to reach. They all fall short.

  I’M SITTING IN MY FLAT in Maida Vale. The dodgy part near the Harrow Road where kids are yelled at and alcohol and crack is Tropicana and cornflakes. I lost my lovely home in the posh part (Randolph Avenue, W9, natch) when my marriage ended – it was 2,000 square feet with a new Steinway grand piano, a big garden, four loos (shut up), two floors and the obligatory Smeg fridge.

  To be fair, it also had bloodstains on the carpet, angry screams in the walls and the immovable, Febreze-resistant stench of ennui. My place now is small but perfectly formed, with only one john, no garden, a dodgy Japanese upright piano and the infinitely more pleasant smell of hope and possible redemption.

  Among assorted directors, producers, crew, Channel 4 execs and whatnot, I’m here with my girlfriend Hattie, my mum Georgina, manager Denis and best friend Matthew. These four people have been here from the beginning, my mum literally, the others cosmically, or at least going back a few years.

  These guys are the backbone. They’re my Everything. With the notable and heartbreaking absence of my son, they are the guiding, shining forces in my life that represent the strongest possible motive for staying alive (staying alive) during dark times.

  We’re in my living room, pizza boxes strewn on the floor, about to watch my first TV show on Channel 4, James Rhodes: Notes from the Inside. It is a big moment for me. For anyone, I guess. But for me, someone who should not be here at all, it represents so much more than the ‘look at me, I’m on TV’ venereal disease that I’m a Celebrity . . ., Big Brother and Piers Morgan have infected us all with by continually fucking us in the ass via all media everywhere.

  It is almost exactly six years since I was discharged from a secure mental institution.

  I got out of my last mental hospital in 2007, off my face on meds, with no career, no manager, no albums, concerts, money or dignity. And now I am about to appear in front of an expected million-plus viewers in a prime-time Channel 4 documentary with my name in the title. So yes, even with the obligatory indignant, self-righteous, victim pout, it is a big deal.

  All the more so because it could so easily have been a Channel 5 documentary entitled ‘I ate my own penis to stop the aliens taking me. Again’. It could equally have been a CCTV excerpt from an episode of Crimewatch. But it isn’t. It’s something brilliant and honest and awkward and uncomfortable. Like a first date where you over-share (a lot) but don’t care because she’s hot and lovely and you want to crawl inside her and die from the moment you meet her.

  The premise behind the film we made is that music heals. It offers a shot at redemption. It is one of the few things (non-chemical) that can burrow into our hearts and minds and do genuine good. And so I take a giant Steinway model D (the best there is, all £120,000 and 1300lbs of it) into a locked psychiatric ward, meet four schizophrenic patients and, after chatting to them, I play to them individually. They feel better, I look wistful, we all go on a journey of self-discovery and reach a better place.

  So far, so TV exec wet dream, so vom.

  But it is a powerful film. Pick of the day in every newspaper, and tear-inducing but not in a manipulative, ITV kind of way. The whole USP with the press is that I’m not just presenting and performing in it, but that it’s especially poignant (their word) because I, too, was institutionalised and spent several months in secure psychiatric wards. They lap that victim-turned-success shit up. And, for my part, I love it. I’ll do all the publicity I can get. Get in as many radio and TV interviews, double-page spreads and magazine shoots as I can.

  As things build over time, I will use my backstory and minimal talent to flog albums, help charities, tour, do more TV and try to make a difference to those who don’t have a voice. Those who are dealing with the darkest, most desperate symptoms and circumstances and have no one to hear them – the ignored, belittled, lonely, lost, isolated. The ones you see shuffling along in their own little worlds, heads down, eyes switched off, unheard and backed into a terrible, silent corner.

  But I will also use it to try to make a difference to me personally. I will use it to make money and buy shit I don’t need. Upgrade everything. Become visible and soaked through with attention. My head tells me I need this. That I hunger for it. Because at some level I believe that there is a slim chance that (commercial) success, coupled with attention, will finally fix what is wrong with me.

  And if it doesn’t then I will go to Vegas, spend an aggressive amount of money in an even more aggressively short period of time and then blow my brains out.

  We all watch the show. And I feel uncomfortable and exposed. Like listening to your voice on an answerphone for an hour in front of a room full of people. Naked. There’s nothing quite like seeing your own name trending at the number one spot on Twitter while having literally thousands of comments, messages, tweets, Facebook updates all about you, to make you hunger for the isolation and security of a padded cell. It’s the flip side of being an attention-seeking asshole – we shout ‘look at me’ for long enough and then when people do, we get confused and startled and moan about it. Shine a light on anything involving dodgy motives and it generally wants to crawl away in shame.

  It goes down well in my messy little living room. Of course it does. We eat. They all say nice things because that’s what you do if you’re not socially retarded, and I get everyone except Hattie out the house, and go to bed.

  All I’m thinking about is what a dick I look like on screen, all ill-fitting jeans, stupid hair, dodgy piano skills and ingratiating voice. How I should have prepared more for it and whether or not I’ll get to feel important by being recognised on the Tube tomorrow. And then I get bored and angry at myself and force myself to think about the six concerts I have that are coming up in the next ten days. I do my usual night-time routine and, in my head, start going through each piece I’ll be playing bar by bar. I check all the key ingredients that go into a concert – memory (in my head can I watch myself playing and see my hands hitting all the right notes?); structure (how does each section relate to the others, where are the important shifts and changes, how is the whole thing unified and related); dialogue (what’s the story being told and how does that best get expressed); voicing (in a passage which contains several different melodies hidden among the notes, do I choose the obvious one or find inner voices that say something new); and on and on. It’s like having a fucked record player living in my brain with an inbuilt music critic providing commentary; I start at the beginning of each piece and every time I make a mistake or my memory falters slightly I have to start again from the beginning. Which, with a seventy-five minute concert programme, can take a while. But it serves its purpose and stops me thinking about other things which, if I’m not careful, will take me down a road that leads to nothing but trouble.

  I manage three hours’ sleep. And the minute I wake up, it’s on me. This thing that is more often than not my near-constant companion.

  There is an addiction that is more destructive and dangerous than any drug, and it is rarely even acknowledged, let alone talked about. It is insidious, pervasive and at epidemic levels. It is the primary cause of the culture of entitlement, laziness and depression that surrounds us. It is an art form, an identity, a way of life and has a bottomless, infinite capacity for pain.

  It is
Victimhood.

  Victimhood becomes, in a remarkably short period of time, a self-fulfilling prophecy. And having spent so long indulging it, it has its grip on me in ways that serve simply to anchor me further in the self-constructed hell that is The Victim.

  When I was a child, there were things that happened to me, were done to me, that led to me operating my life from the position that I, and only I, am to blame for the things inside me that I despise. Clearly someone could only do those things to me if I were already inherently bad at a cellular level. And all the knowledge and understanding and kindness in the world will never, ever change the fact that this is my truth. Always has been. Always will be.

  Ask anyone who’s been raped. If they say differently they’re lying.

  Victims only get their happy endings in run-down massage parlours in Camden. We don’t get to make it out the other side. We are ashamed, angry, appalled and to blame.

  I sat there on that Wednesday evening in my pokey fucking living room, looked at myself on the TV screen being a massive, odious cunt, and realised that nothing has really changed. Deep down, like most of us, still now at the age of thirty-eight, I have this empty, black hole inside of me that nothing and no one seems capable of filling. I say like most of us because, well, look around you. Our society, our businesses, our social constructs, habits, pastimes, addictions and distractions are predicated on vast, endemic levels of emptiness and dissatisfaction. I call it self-hatred.

  I hate who I was, am and have become and, as we are taught to, I constantly chastise myself for the things I do and say. And such are the global levels of intolerance, greed, entitlement and dysfunction it is evidently not just confined to a small, wounded section of society. We are all in a world of pain. If it was ever any different way back in the past, it has, by now, most certainly become normalised. And I am as angry about that as I am about my own past.

  There is an anger that runs underneath everything, that fuels my life and feeds the animal inside me. And it is an anger that always, always prevents me, despite my best efforts, from becoming a better version of myself. My goddamn head seems to have a life of its own, quite beyond my control, incapable of reason, compassion or bargaining. It shouts at me from deep inside. As a kid the words didn’t make sense. As an adult it’s waiting at the end of my bed and starts talking an hour or two before I wake up so that when my eyes open it is in full-on rage mode, blaring this shit at me about how glad it is I’m finally awake, how fucked I am today, how there won’t be enough time, I’ll fuck everything up, my friends are plotting against me, trust no one, I must try as hard as I can to salvage everything in my life while knowing it’s already a lost cause. I’m exhausted all the time. It’s a kind of toxic ME – corrosive, pervasive, penetrative, negative, all the bad -ives.

  I can feel it inside me now. I didn’t realise how fucking angry I still was until I started writing this book. What a terrific smokescreen a bit of money, attention and media can be. How brilliant Beethoven is at distraction. Why do so many successful people keep going, moving forward, trying to outrun their demons by accumulating more stuff, more distractions, more noise until they fall flat on their faces and self-destruct? Because you cannot outrun the causes of anger as potent as this.

  I can easily, happily look outwards to find reasons for my inner pain. I can make a convincing case as to why everyone in my life, every event, every situation and person and place and thing bears some responsibility for the fact that I am, most of the time, such a miserable, angry bastard.

  And I can just as convincingly look inwards, turn the spotlight on myself, and have a party with the unremitting horror that is self-blame.

  And it’s all irrelevant, immaterial and pointless.

  I all too frequently blame everyone and everything. I am at times so psychotically angry I can barely breathe. There is no way out and nothing that can ease it other than a few expensive, dangerous short-term fixes. And that anger is the reward for being a victim – every addiction needs a pay-off, and anger and blame are the rewards that sustain me and keep me going on a day-by-day basis.

  Believe me, this overly indulgent mixture of self-hatred and whiny self-pity that I seem to be trapped in is not who I want to be.

  I know that.

  Who would want to be like this? Let alone admit to it.

  I’d like to be all humble. Of service to music and the world and those less fortunate than myself. To bear witness to the fact that horrors can be endured and overcome. To help and give and grow and flourish. To feel light and free and balanced and to smile a lot.

  But I’ve a greater chance of banging Rihanna.

  Ultimately the reason I am so angry is because I know that there is nothing and nobody in this life that can help me overcome this completely. No relatives or wives or girlfriends or shrinks or iPads or pills or friends. Child rape is the Everest of trauma. How could it not be?

  I was used, fucked, broken, toyed with and violated from the age of six. Over and over for years and years.

  And here’s how it happened.

  TRACK TWO

  Prokofiev, Piano Concerto No. 2, Finale

  Evgeny Kissin, Piano

  Sergei Prokofiev was one of the great musical revolutionaries. He wrote his first opera at nine, and by the time he was a teenager at the St Petersburg Conservatoire he was already established as one of the great enfants terrible of music, composing ferociously dissonant, virtuosic music that smashed down existing conventions around tonality and kicked music violently into a new direction.

  I love him even more because he got reviews like this one from the New York Times: ‘The House of Bondage of normal key relations is discarded. He is a psychologist of the uglier emotions. Hatred, contempt, rage – above all, rage – disgust, despair, mockery and defiance legitimately serve as models for moods’

  Awesome.

  In 1912–13 Prokofiev wrote a piano concerto to the memory of a friend of his who had sent him a farewell letter and committed suicide. The music is so jarring, so angry, so overwhelmingly insane that when he gave the premiere many in the audience thought he was making fun of them. It remains one of the most difficult pieces of music in the repertoire, with only a handful of pianists being brave enough to perform it. One broke a finger while playing it live.

  It is the most accurate musical depiction of helter-skelter madness I have ever heard.

  I’M AT SCHOOL AND A bit fragile. It’s ‘big school’ after all. I’m a nervous kid. Shy and eager to please and be liked. I’m slight and beautiful and look a bit like a girl. The school itself is posh, expensive, on the same street as our house and, to my tiny eyes, huge. I am five years old. I have few friends and don’t really mind that. I’m ‘sensitive’ but not retarded and awkward. Just slightly apart. I like dancing and music and have a vivid imagination. I am free of much of the bullshit that adults seem to be weighed down by, which is as it should be. My little world is growing and unfurling in front of me and there is much to explore at school. Again, as it should be.

  One day (I was going to say ‘one Tuesday’ but it was over thirty years ago and I haven’t got a fucking clue what day of the week it was) I went to the gym with the rest of the class. My first gym class scares me. The other kids seem to know what to do. They can climb ropes, hurl themselves at footballs and shriek with delight. I’m more of a ‘watching from the sidelines’ kind of kid. But Mr Lee, our teacher, doesn’t seem to mind. He keeps giving me encouraging, kind looks. Like he knows I’m a bit self-conscious but he’s on my side and doesn’t mind at all. It’s all unspoken, but it feels clean, defined, safe.

  I find myself looking towards him more and more during the class. And sure enough, every time I look up I catch his eye, and they sparkle a little bit. He smiles at me in a way none of the other boys would notice, and I know at some deep and untouchable level, it is a smile just for me. I feel like the noise and hustle and crowd recedes when he looks at me, and there’s a rainbow-coloured spotlight shining on me and
only he and I can see it.

  It happens every time I go to his class. Just enough attention to feel slightly special, not enough to stand out. But enough to get me excited about gym class. Which is a pretty epic achievement. I keep trying to be nice for him so he’ll give me a little bit more attention. I ask and answer questions, run harder, climb higher, never complain, make sure my gym kit is clean and smart. I know one day he’ll come through. And sure enough, after a few weeks he asks me to stay behind and help him tidy up. And I feel like I’ve won some kind of lottery where self-esteem is the jackpot. A special ‘you’re the best, cutest, most adorable and brilliant child I’ve ever taught and all your patience has now paid off’ prize. My chest feels swollen and alive with pride.

  So we tidy up and talk. Like grown-ups talk. And I’m trying to be all nonchalant like this happens to me all the time and all of my friends are 130 years old and adult. And then he says to me, ‘James, I’ve got you a present’, and my heart stops for a second. He takes me into the walk-in gym cupboard where they store all the equipment and he has his desk and chair and he rummages around in his desk drawer. And then fuck me if he doesn’t pull out a book of matches. In a bright red sleeve. Now I know I’m not allowed to touch matches. And yet here’s this (achingly cool) man giving me some and telling me it’s A-OK to light a few of them.

  Kids are fucking stupid; it’s why they’re kids. He was overweight, balding, at least forty and far too hairy. But to me as a five-year-old he was ripped, strong, kind, handsome, dashing and totally magical. Go figure.

  I ask him if he’s sure it’s OK and he again tells me to go ahead and light one up. So that’s what I do. I light one and wait for the trouble, the shouting, the drama to start. And when nothing happens, when it’s clear there is no trap, I go to town. Giggling, striking match after match, eyes wide and bright, smelling the sulphur, hearing the rip of the flame, feeling the heat on my little fingers.