I’m booked to meet James Rhodes at Kateh, a neighbourhood Persian restaurant near his west London flat. He’s a devotee of the meat they serve, which, he suggests with some excitement, is sourced from the best butcher in the world – in particular, he raves about the charred lamb, and a saffron-marinated chicken.
When we turn up, however, the restaurant is resolutely shut; the dining room has been emptied of chairs and tables, decorators are in. We shuffle off to Rhodes’s default lunch option, the Quince Tree, which is in a big glass conservatory in his local garden centre (“Ignore the twee name,” he suggests, cheerfully, “the food is great”.) Putting all thoughts of saffron marinade out of our heads we settle for decent calamari and chicken skewers, seafood linguini and lamb shoulder, and start to talk.
It seems an incongruous setting to hear Rhodes’s story – which in its bluntest terms is a both a horrific chronicle of childhood abuse and a mostly triumphant escape into worldwide acclaim as a concert pianist – but then I am not wholly sure what would make an appropriate backdrop, an after-hours opera house perhaps. He carries with him a fierce and friendly intellectual crackle and a hard-won, defiant openness; he is reed thin, his hair has several minds of its own and he is trying hard not to think about having recently given up smoking. His first, extraordinary memoir, Instrumental, which he won a supreme court battle against his ex-wife to publish, carried the subtitle: “Madness, medication and music”. His second book, Fire on All Sides, is no less alliteratively extreme in its promise: “Insanity, insomnia and the incredible inconvenience of life.”
Neither title gets close to the energy of Rhodes in person, though, or the rawness of reading him. His books do not flinch in describing the three years in which he was raped repeatedly by Peter Lee, a boxing coach at his prep school, and the ways that brutal trauma returned to shape his life. After Rhodes left a job in the City of London aged 27 he had a breakdown that saw him suicidal and sectioned; he rebuilt himself by returning to the piano on which he had once been a prodigy, but which he had not touched for a decade.
When he decided to write about this experience, his first wife got an injunction on the unprecedented grounds that the book’s detail would disturb their son. With legal costs approaching £2m, and after 18 months in which his concerts and social media were policed for evidence of contempt of court, Rhodes won on appeal his right to tell the story of his own life, in a case that has established a crucial principle for artists and writers. A film of Instrumental is now in the works.
I wonder how easy it is, even so, to have those shattering facts he kept to himself throughout his childhood and into his 20s so vocally out in the world?
“It is not comfortable for me, of course not,” he says. “But I think it needs to be out there. No doubt. My book is now taught in criminology and in psychology degree courses. Judges have been encouraged to read it to help understand the lasting effect of sexual abuse and it has had an influence on sentencing guidelines. It would be much easier to just talk about music, but that is not my whole story.”
Music has been Rhodes’s enduring salvation. He is a pianist of enormous affective intimacy. His memoirs – the second is about his nerve-shredding life on the road and the breakdown of his second marriage – are accompanied by Spotify playlists of Beethoven and Rachmaninov. As he talks, he tries not to separate life from music in his head, an instinct that goes back as far as he can remember. “When I was eight or nine I had these tapes,” he says, “of pianists I loved and I would close my eyes in bed every night and listen to them and pretend it was me playing. My favourite recordings were of live performances, and I could hear the applause, and that was even better because I could imagine it was me they were clapping.” Those tapes literally kept him alive through those years, he says now, because otherwise, inside his head and outside at school “it was a fucking war zone”.
He still lives with the physical and mental fallout of the abuse. Any scenes of sexual violence in films or books, for example, will cause him to throw up, he says, and he cannot predict whether he will have good days or bad days, but he has strategies to employ. On bad days, he suggests in his book, “if somebody looks at me funny, doesn’t reply to an email, unfollows me on Twitter, brings the wrong food order in a restaurant, I want to kill or be killed.” Today is not one of those days. Rhodes has a complicated relationship with food, as with much else, meticulously weighing out his porridge on concert days, sometimes measuring his self-loathing in fast food, but when his main course arrives here, a huge plate of pasta with enough king prawns and clams to form an orchestra, he delivers a convincing ode to joy: “Ai-aiiii! Can we get something a bit bigger! Holy shit! I am so happy, man, I can’t even tell you!”
Not surprisingly given his history he is passionate about truth-telling, and the vulnerability that goes with it. “There are things we have to talk more about,” he says. “Things like self-harm. I think the human condition is much messier than we allow. You know in Britain we are too quick to say “everything’s fine”, or in America that “everything is amazing”. You can only distract yourself for so long before you blow your brains out.”
He is on a mission to bring music to schools, where it has been squeezed out of the curriculum – in part because it is an antidote to our attention-deficit lives. He has written a piano tuition book with the aim of having anyone play with 40 minutes practice a day. He looks around the garden centre cafe: “In six weeks anyone here could be playing a piece of Bach!” he says. “And I think that has to be equally as rewarding as learning algebra. There was a time when there were more pianos than bathtubs in homes. What happened to that?”
The music scholarship that took Rhodes to Harrow aged 10, and saved him from the torture at his prep school (Lee died while awaiting trial for his crimes), insulated him from the reality of music in education, he says. It was not until he went into some challenging schools to spread the gospel that he realised there were kids who couldn’t take a flute home to practice “because Mum or Dad or brother would sell it for crack. And so you have to have time not only for lessons but also to rehearse…”
He rants entertainingly against a culture that places no value on that. Against politicians and Ofsted who “couldn’t give two fucks about music”, against the formality of the classical music establishment, with its “lost, dead souls” keeping people out of the concert hall; against Classic FM, “those evil fuckers” who take “a six-minute piece of the greatest music ever written and play three minutes of it because that’s all they think anyone can cope with”. After our lunch Rhodes is due to meet the head of iTunes global, he says, who has asked him to bring a book. Rhodes has prepared one with a dedication that reads “here’s to getting rid of ‘classical fucking chill out’ on iTunes by 2019”.
He now plays at nearly all the concert halls he once listened to his heroes playing at and, just as he punctuates his music, so does he punctuate our lunch with passionate digressions but also with wayward anecdotes of the chaotic lives of the composers. His new book is a kind of hallucinatory diary from his last global tour and his raddled quest for a decent night’s sleep, (“I would give £50,000 right now to anyone who could guarantee me eight hours,” he says now). The psychological battles he describes of getting himself on stage have you wondering why he wants to ever do so again. Does he ever think, I ask, while we wait for the bill, two hours and the Quince Tree food having come and gone almost without comment, that it’s not worth it?
“There is a sense of achievement once you’re done playing,” he says. “But not for long. If in a concert where I have played 100,000 notes and put two grams of extra weight on one finger on one key, the whole concert is fucked for me.” How do you live for five minutes like that, he asks himself. “Well,” he says, “the answer is that you try to do it again.” OFM
Fire on All Sides is out now (Quercus, £16.99)
