James Rhodes interview: ‘It’s important to say that bad things happen – and we don’t lie about it’

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/23/james-rhodes-pianist-interview

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The pianist James Rhodes was in Rotterdam for a concert the day after the arrival of the supreme court judgment that will change not just his life, but those of innumerable others. He is skinny, bed‑headed, painfully alive, overjoyed and comically incongruous in his anonymous beige hotel.

The dispute concerned his book, Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music. Rhodes was raped repeatedly as a child by a teacher at his school; he writes about it, and the devastation that followed, with the very qualities that have always been remarked upon in his performances: a mesmeric combination of vivid, keen, obsessive precision and raw, urgent energy.

But, he says, it’s also “a book about music. It’s a love story, it’s a book to Hattie, my wife, who’s the greatest thing ever. It’s a book about my son, about composers, about the extraordinary lives that these composers and musicians lead, it’s about all the things that are important to me. I don’t ever want this to be ‘the guy who was abused as a kid’, any more than I want, ‘this is the guy who’s a Pisces. This is the guy who’s 5ft 11in … 10½ … I live in Queen’s Park, I’m married to a woman who is a 10 when at best I’m a five and a half or a six on a really good day, I play the piano.

Related: Pianist James Rhodes wins right to publish autobiography telling of abuse

“All of those things play a part in who I am as a person. It all has equal weight. I want sexual abuse to sit happily alongside other topics like music and creativity, without this gut shudder, ‘Oh no, we can’t talk about that.’” The book is accompanied by a playlist that Rhodes put on Spotify – Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Chopin’s Etude in C Minor – a wonderfully simple, powerful idea, which at times makes it heartbreakingly difficult to read.

Last year, his previous wife took out an injunction against publication, on the basis that to have these “toxic” details in the public domain would harm their son. This was rejected in the first court case, but upheld on appeal, and in an elaborately restrictive judgment. “It ended up being a bunch of judges having editorial control over what I said. Literally to the point where I wasn’t allowed to use graphic language or vivid and colourful descriptions. I could use the word ‘rape’, but I couldn’t use the phrase ‘getting raped’ … ”

He pauses, and recalls: “The shock of being told, in effect, you can’t say that. Not only can you not write it in a book, but we are trying to gag you from speaking anywhere in the world on any medium – on Twitter, in interviews, on TV – about not just sexual abuse but mental illness. Can you imagine? I wouldn’t be able to tell you now that I’m in treatment for mental illness without being threatened with imprisonment, had this been successful.”

Of course, that had profound implications for freedom of speech, and when the court of appeal issued its injunction last August, other writers and notables – including David Hare, Michael Frayn, Tom Stoppard and Benedict Cumberbatch – mobilised in support of Rhodes. But it also, naturally, had profound, shocking consequences for the author. His abuser’s cult of silence, which had wrecked his peace for so much of his life, had effectively been ratified in a court of law. “When did it become OK to be told, ‘You can’t talk about yourself’?” he says, baffled. “What an extraordinary violation of someone’s basic dignity. It wouldn’t be my life. It’s hard enough experiencing that as a child, it’s a totally different thing as an adult man, being told by judges: ‘You can’t say this.’ It’s very scary.”

The abuse started when Rhodes was five years old, at Arnold House, a prep school in St John’s Wood. He left the school when he was 10, by which time he was withdrawn, hypervigilant, ashamed, a different person. He is absolutely forensic on the aftermath of sexual abuse, and tells the story with fineness of detail that you realise you do not often hear, possibly because of all the ways in which rape victims are made to feel that their story is inappropriate. In the book, he writes of the “impact rape makes on a person. It is like a stain that is ever present. There are a thousand reminders of it each day. Every time I take a shit. Watch TV. See a child. Cry. Glimpse a newspaper. Hear the news. Watch a movie. Get touched. Have sex. Wank. Drink something unexpectedly hot or take too big a gulp. Cough or choke.”

He doubts, he says, that he will ever get past the assumption that it was his fault. “It’s a core, go-to, ingrained belief – my first gut reaction in any given situation. It rewires you when stuff like that happens. The difference is that now I’m able to have a second reaction – I can make my peace with it. I’m always going to think it’s my fault, I’m always going to think I was flirty, or too cute. There’s a ton of stuff that shrinks have said to me was abuse that it never occurred to me was abuse. They’re, like, ‘You were 10 when you did that.’ And I’m thinking, ‘But I chose it. I knew what I was doing.’”

There is such human warmth in his voice, a kind of commonality, and it solidifies as he makes his point. “If there’s another man or another woman out there, thinking, ‘Yeah, this was absolutely my fault, I totally loved that priest fucking me up the ass, he wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t given him the come on,’ if they have those thoughts and they don’t have the second thought, ‘This isn’t real, this was not me, this is not truthful’ – imagine living with that. I did. And it’s not a good way to live. You barely exist.”

What saved Rhodes was his love of music, about which he writes really movingly, with a tightrope poise between informality and the deepest imaginable respect. Bach’s appalling, grief-strewn childhood, Beethoven’s vicious father, Schubert’s fatal syphilis; when you see it all laid out, it is beyond miraculous that any of this music exists at all. “If you could only imagine what these guys were like … classical music has such a bad press, for good reason, it’s filled with assholes, it takes itself so seriously, anything I can do to lessen that even a tiny bit has got to be a good thing.”

But he hates the idea that composers, or geniuses generally, have any special claim on mental anguish, that it’s a part of their talent, something the non‑genius isn’t burdened with. “I find it hysterical, the notion that there is anyone who isn’t fucked up, musician or not. I hate, with a passion, this idea that somehow you have to suffer for art, or that musicians, especially classical ones, are damaged and fragile. Bollocks to that – everyone’s damaged, we are a world of wounded people, trying the best we can.”

Related: James Rhodes: a classical rocker with a passion for music in schools

Critics describe Rhodes as “self‑taught”, which isn’t exactly right, but he certainly hasn’t had the intensive training since early childhood that a regular concert pianist would have had. He plays down his talent to the point where, if you believed him, his career wouldn’t make any sense: four albums, international tours, a series on Channel Four, Notes from the Inside, in which he explored the healing power of the piano with some people who were schizophrenic. He hasn’t built all this on his looks (I mean, five and a half is harsh, but he’s not the Vanessa-Mae of pianos, either). He certainly had enough promise and training that, when he was 18, he was offered a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He went to Edinburgh university instead, dropped out, and then there was a 10-year hiatus while, having decided that he didn’t have the talent, he gave up all notion of music.

“I’d made my peace with it. I thought: it ain’t going to happen. You settle. It’s like some marriages. Am I happy? No, not really. But it’s been 10 years. I’ve got a mortgage. I’ll just get on with it. I was like that with music. And then suddenly the door opened half an inch.”

Well, he pushed it open: he did, he writes, “what an egocentric, City‑working cock would do – found the address for the agent who represented the greatest pianist in the world and set about forming a business partnership with him”. The agent, once he had heard Rhodes play, had other ideas – that he should be a concert pianist, not a partner. He introduced him to a teacher, Edo, and Rhodes began a monthly commute to Verona to refine his skills.

Edo was one of those tempestuous creatives who throw phones at you when you get things wrong, and hit you when you say you don’t like Bruckner, which clearly delighted Rhodes. It becomes clear from his trajectory that what was stopping him before was not just under-confidence, but a fear of what allowing space for this passion, which he’d had since childhood, would unleash in the rest of his life. He had a terrible breakdown, was sectioned, tried to commit suicide, started to self-harm. “Self-harm, Christ,” he exclaims – he is one of very few people of whom the word “exclaim” can be used literally – “self‑harm is an epidemic in this country. It’s not just skinny teenage girls, it’s investment bankers in their 50s, and no one talks about it. It’s so important. It can be quite an effective tool for dealing with stress. It’s not healthy, but you have to understand it before you can help.”

The section on self-harm is incredibly hard to read, but not in a gut‑wrenching way; rather, in squeamishness. I realised, reading it, how many layers go into creating a taboo. The book rejects, almost affectionately, the demands of its own narrative: that Rhodes would get well, and his problems would cease, that he would fall in love and everything would fall into place, that he would finally get proper treatment, or a proper diagnosis, or a proper psychiatrist, or the right drugs, and then he would be normal. All of those things happen, but you would never use a word like “resolution”. Victory, yes, but nothing’s over.

He says the hardest thing about the court case – apart from one preposterous moment in the trial when his behaviour was likened to that of a man who had knowingly infected his wife with HIV - was the 19th-century tort it was brought under, “intentional harm”. The appeal judges had effectively found that he would intentionally harm his own son. “As if, as a father, I would intentionally want to hurt my own child …” he tails off for a second, his face wracked, then continues: “It’s important to bear witness, but also it’s important to give a message that bad things happen and we don’t lie about it, we don’t hide it, we don’t pretend it hasn’t happened, we don’t do everything we can to remove every piece of evidence that it happened, to erase the past.”

I think I see relief flick across his features, as it dawns on him again that his case has been won. “That’s not the way to do it,” he goes on. It made me unwell, but look at me now, I’m happy, I’m married, I’m functioning … We remember the perpetrators, we remember Savile, but the victims are just lumped together as this silent huddle. I mean, fuck me, every one of those victims will have in their little finger a thousand times the humanity of a thousand Jimmy Saviles, and bravery, and strength and endurance.”

James Rhodes is in conversation with Stephen Fry at Hay festival tonight (hayfestival.com). Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music by James Rhodes (Canongate, £16.99) is out on 28 May. To order a copy for £13.59, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.