is similar to a book of short stories based on a single unifying subject – an opening story describing one specific theme with each following story in the collection somehow related to that theme.
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
