Contemporary Authors

• Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication, and Music Canongate (Edinburgh, UK), 2014

1. Instrumental : a memoir of madness, medication and music LCCN 2015513592 Type of material Book Personal name Rhodes, James, 1975- author. Main title Instrumental : a memoir of madness, medication and music / James Rhodes. Published/Produced Edinburgh : Canongate Books Ltd, [2015] Description xx, 275 pages ; 20 cm ISBN 9781782113393 (pbk) 1782113398 (pbk) CALL NUMBER ML417.R36 A3 2015 Copy 1 Request in Performing Arts Reading Room (Madison, LM113)

• How To Play the Piano - 2016 Quercus, London

• The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/04/instrumental-a-memoir-of-madness-medication-and-music-james-rhodes-review

  Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music by James Rhodes – review
  First comes the wound, then the music to heal it – a concert pianist’s memoir explores the legacy of the sexual abuse he suffered as a child
  James Rhodes
  ‘Extremity is the keynote’ in James Rhodes’s autobiography. Photograph: Ilvy Njiokiktjien
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  Blake Morrison
  Thursday 4 June 2015 11.00 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 14.47 EDT
  It’s something of a miracle that this book exists at all. At numerous points in his life James Rhodes was so set on self-destruction that survival to the age of 40 seemed improbable, to say the least. Rock bottom came during a spell in a psychiatric hospital, when he outwitted the guards watching over him 24/7, sneaked a television aerial cable into his en-suite bathroom, created a noose (“not too different from tying a double Windsor”) and tried to hang himself by jumping from the toilet seat. The fall failed to break his neck but he was dangling there, choking to death, when a guard walked in.

  But for that and other life-saving interventions, the book would never have been written. It might never have been published, either. Last month, the supreme court lifted the temporary injunction brought against it by Rhodes’s ex-wife. Her case was that their son, who has Asperger’s, dyspraxia and ADHD, would be distressed should he ever read it. The judges ruled that the author’s right to tell his story, his freedom of expression, was paramount.

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  Rhodes dedicates the memoir to his son, “the greatest part of my life … my absolute joy”. It is the truth about his own childhood he wants to expose, not his child, but the two are intimately linked: it was when he became a father that the “echoes of my past became screams”; hypervigilance about protecting his son was driven by memories of how unprotected he had been. His upbringing was privileged, for which he is jokily apologetic. But privilege is no protection against paedophiles, or wasn’t then. The gym teacher at the prep school in St John’s Wood where Rhodes went at the age of five was a man called Peter Lee. They took a shine to each other. The first time Lee asked the boy to stay behind after class he gave him a box of matches to play with – an ominously dangerous gift.

  Other presents followed, then an invitation to join the after-school boxing club. Initially enthusiastic, James became withdrawn and resistant – a changed personality. His teachers thought he was being a wimp (“little Rhodes needs to toughen up”). But it wasn’t the boxing he objected to, however objectionable the idea of six‑year-old boys being made to box now seems to us. What scared him was having to stay to help Mr Lee “clear up the equipment”, which meant being held down on a gym mat behind a closed door and raped.

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  It seems astonishing that no adult noticed what was going on, especially when the boy was found sobbing, with blood on his legs, begging to be let off gym. But Rhodes writes warmly of his mother (there’s no mention of his father) and, bullied into silence and scorched by shame as he was, he took 30 years to speak out about what he’d endured. Even then the police were slow to act and acquaintances slow to understand (“Well, James, you were the most beautiful child,” one family friend said). It was only after a former head of his prep school read an interview he had given, and made a statement confirming her suspicions at the time, that Lee was tracked down, to Margate, where he was working as a part-time boxing coach with boys under 10. He died before being brought to trial.

  Rhodes spares us the worst (“he’s inside me and it hurts” is detail enough) but it’s a terrifying account. Child abuse doesn’t cover it, he says. This was child rape, “the Everest of trauma”, leading to “multiple surgeries, scars (inside and out), tics, OCD, depression, suicidal ideation, vigorous self-harm, alcoholism, drug addiction” and much besides. Even with plenty to live for – a son, a new partner, supportive friends, rich patrons, a burgeoning second career as a concert pianist after five years in the City – he has an astonishing capacity to fuck up. It’s an angry book and much of the anger is directed at himself, for being shallow, needy and narcissistic. “I’m a bit of an asshole,” he says.

  James Rhodes in 2010.
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  James Rhodes in 2010. Photograph: Susannah Ireland/Rex Features
  Weird though the American usage sounds from someone so quintessentially English (prep school, Harrow, Channel 4), “ass” is preferred throughout, either because he can’t bring himself to say “arse”, or because “ass” allows for more word play, as when he lambasts the stuffy guardians of the music world for putting “the ‘ass’ into ‘classical’”. This is the book’s other strand: along with the unravellings, there’s Ravel. Rhodes writes passionately (another “ass” there) of his desire to bring classical music to younger, cooler audiences, and berates the enemies who stand in his way. Having saved his own life, he now wants to save classical music. Each chapter begins with a tribute to a piece of music that’s been important to him, which can be accessed free at a website he has set up. Top of his list is the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, which he first heard on a cassette tape as a child and which “acted like a force field” against distress.

  The mini-biogs of his chosen composers (“mental, depraved, genius bastards”) are as revealing as his musical choices. They include Bach (“treated like shit” and “chronically abused” after being orphaned), Beethoven (born into a family “riddled with alcoholism, domestic violence, abuse and cruelty”), Ravel (“fucked by the trauma of serving as a truck driver during the first world war”) and Chopin (whose Fantaisie in F Minor came out of his “dysfunctional, fucked-up, turd of a relationship” with George Sand). First comes the wound, then the music to heal it: that’s the refrain. Without the damage Rhodes suffered in childhood, his journey from promising talent to professional pianist and musical ambassador might have been smoother. But without music, he wouldn’t have made it through. As a child, he learned to dissociate – to leave his body on the gym floor and float away. And at the piano, remembering more than 100,000 notes in a recital, he is both grounded and lost, oblivious yet in control.

  Rhodes writes at full volume, with many a “fuck” and “literally” to help along his musical discussions; the prose is more Russell Brand than Alfred Brendel. What he went through as a child was extreme, and extremity is the keynote; we’re locked inside his head for long periods and it’s a manic place to be. But he is brilliant at describing precariousness – “I am only ever two bad weeks away from a locked ward” – and insightful on a range of mental health issues, including the highs he used to get from cutting. It is a pity the Mind book of the year award no longer exists. Instrumental would have run away with it.

  • To order Instrumental for £11.99 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Rhodes_(pianist)

  James Rhodes (born 6 March 1975 in London) is a British concert pianist.

  Contents [hide]
  1 Early life
  2 Career
  3 Concerts
  4 Television
  5 Discography
  6 References
  7 External links
  Early life[edit]
  James Edward Rhodes was born into a middle class Jewish family in St John's Wood, North London. He was educated at Arnold House School, a local all-boys independent preparatory school. There, he experienced sexual abuse by his PE teacher, who died before he could appear in court. Rhodes suffered mentally as well as physically, including spinal damage, eating disorders and PTSD.[1]

  Aged 7, he borrowed the CD of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto from his father's collection.[citation needed] He was taught piano, but did not progress formally beyond Grade 3.[1] First moving to a local boarding school, he was educated at Harrow School, where he worked with piano teacher Colin Stone, from the age of 13 onwards. It was during this period that he entered the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition, but failed to make it past the second round.[2]

  In 1993, he was offered a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.[3]

  Career[edit]
  A fan of the Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov, Rhodes wrote to Sokolov's agent Franco Panozzo in Italy, with the idea that Rhodes would become a music agent himself. Panozzo responded, and after Rhodes sent him a bottle of Champagne Krug, the pair arranged to meet in Italy. After hearing Rhodes play, Panozzo arranged for Rhodes to have a brief tutorage under the renowned piano teacher Edoardo Strabbioli in Verona, Italy. However after a period Rhodes was institutionalised.[4]

  In March 2010, Rhodes became the first core classical pianist to be signed with the world's largest rock label Warner Bros. Records.[5] In 2011, Rhodes became a regular culture blogger for The Telegraph,[6] and had popular articles in The Guardian Music Blog in 2013.[7] Returning to his original label Signum Classics, Rhodes released his 4th album JIMMY: James Rhodes recorded live at The Old Market Brighton in May 2012.[8] In 2015 Rhodes was blocked from publishing his autobiography by a temporary court injunction prompted by his former wife. She said that publishing the book, which includes details of sexual abuse as a child, would psychologically harm their child. In May 2015, the Supreme Court decided that the book qualifies for free speech protection and lifted the interim injunction.[9][10]

  Concerts[edit]
  Rhodes' first public recital was at Steinway Hall in London, on 7 November 2008. His second recital was at the Hinde Street Methodist Centre, London, on 4 December 2008. He performed his first full scale concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, in London on 6 February 2009.[11] In May 2009, Rhodes performed a solo concert at The Roundhouse in Camden, the first classical musician to give a solo recital since the reopening.[12] Rhodes has also played Proud Galleries in Camden; 100 Club in Soho; Tabernacle, Notting Hill and the nominations launch for the Classical BRIT Awards 2009 WITH NS&I.[13] In March 2010, Rhodes performed at the Holders Season 2010 in Barbados.[14] In Summer 2010 he was the first solo classical pianist to play the Latitude Festival sharing stages with international stars such as Florence + the Machine and The National.

  In September 2011 he performed alongside Stephen Fry in 'A Classical Affair' at the Barbican Centre. In October 2011 James performed an 11 date tour around Australia including three performances at the Melbourne Festival. Rhodes had his US debut in September 2012 at the International Beethoven Festival in Chicago. In 2013, James performed in Hong Kong, Vienna, the Barber Institute in Birmingham, Royal Albert Hall, Cheltenham Music Festival, the Waterfront stage at Latitude Festival and a series of concerts at Soho Theatre in London. A live in concert DVD, ‘Love In London’, was recorded at the Arts Theatre in London's West End in 2014. That year he also performed at Hay Festival, Harrogate Festival, Canterbury Festival, London Ambassadors Theatre, St George's Hall in Bristol, Watford Colosseum, Leeds Town Hall, Manchester RNCM and had two runs at Soho Theatre.

  Television[edit]
  In December 2009 Rhodes completed filming a BBC Four music documentary to celebrate Frédéric Chopin’s 200th anniversary, which is a discovery of Chopin’s life and relationship with the opera singer Jenny Lind. This documentary was broadcast in October 2010. James Rhodes filmed a seven episode series called James Rhodes: Piano Man.[15]

  In July 2013, he presented Notes from the Inside, with James Rhodes on Channel 4 as part of their Mad4Music season of programmes, in which each episode featured musicians from across the musical spectrum giving an alternative take on music and what it means to them and others around them; for example the second episode featured Björk being interviewed by Sir David Attenborough. During his episode, he both gave some insights into his personal life and played piano to four individual mental hospital patients, all dealing with their own mental health issues, inside their psychiatric hospital by selecting a piece for each of them to match their personalities and individual circumstances,[16]

  Rhodes filmed a two-part campaigning series called Don't Stop the Music (working title The Great Instrument Amnesty) [17] that was aired on Channel 4 in September 2014, with the aim of improving music education across the UK. The multiplatform project included an instrument amnesty which collected over 7,000 instruments (worth over £1.5M) to redistribute to 150 UK primary schools, benefiting 10,000 students a year.[18]

  Discography[edit]
  Albums

  Razor Blades, Little Pills and Big Pianos (Feb 2009), Signum Records[19][20][21][22]
  Now Would All Freudians Please Stand Aside (Mar 2010), Signum Records[23][24][25]
  Bullets and Lullabies (Dec 2010), Warner Music [26][27][28] Cover art by Dave Brown, Bollo from The Mighty Boosh[29]
  JIMMY: James Rhodes Live in Brighton (May 2012), Signum Records[30][31]
  5 (Jun 2014), Instrumental Records
  Inside Tracks - the mix tape (Oct 2015), Instrumental Records

• Independent - http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/james-rhodes-how-the-pianists-legal-battle-to-stop-the-injunction-of-his-memoirs-showed-him-how-the-10273617.html

  'I was raped as a child, and only now can I tell my story': How James Rhodes fought the law courts in a battle to be heard
  Now he can publish 'Instrumental', with its narrative of child sex abuse

  James Rhodes Sunday 24 May 2015 18:42 BST

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  The Independent Culture
  30-Cumberbatch-PA.jpg
  Supporting role: at the Supreme Court, Rhodes was accompanied by a famous friend, the actor Benedict Cumberbatch (PA) PA
  When paedophiles say to their victims, as they all do in one form or another, “If you ever speak about this, unimaginably bad things will happen to you”, what they are doing is perhaps on one level even worse than the physical act of abuse itself. They are manipulating their victims into being complicit in the abuse. Forcing the victim to take responsibility for protecting the abuser means that every time you smile, shake hands, speak with and act normally in front of the abuser – as you must, because he is your teacher, father, uncle or priest – you become a little bit more complicit. It is the most toxic form of manipulation possible. And in addition to making it pretty much impossible to trust in any kind of safe reality forevermore, that ingrained and very real fear – that if you speak out, then the world will end – takes hold at a cellular level and rarely, if ever, leaves.

  I was raped over a relentless, never-ending five years as a pre-pubescent boy by a gym teacher at my school. He was very, very good at ensuring my silence; so good in fact, that it took me 25 years to first speak about it. And then, in 2009, I gave an interview to the The Sunday Times. I mentioned what had happened to me – it was confined to one paragraph of a two-page piece – and as a result a teacher came forward who had witnessed the effects of that abuse. She and I went to the police and, when they found the guy, he was working as a boxing coach for pre-pubescent boys. He was charged with 10 counts of buggery and indecent assault against me.

  This was the first time it seemed possible to me that bad things didn’t always happen if I spoke about “it”. Finding a foothold of courage from somewhere, among the dozens of interviews and articles that I wrote in the ensuing few years were a few that talked about sexual abuse and its legacy, and the messages of support and gratitude I received as a result of these ran into the thousands.

  Having kept quiet for so long, having spent so much time and effort trying to destroy myself, having wasted so many months in psychiatric wards, I began to realise something new and important: simply being heard was one of the most effective ways of diminishing the shame and allowing myself to move on. Having my past witnessed and accepted with compassion and belief did more for my self-esteem than years of medication and therapy.

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  Free speech upheld: A robust judgment in favour of a memoir's publication
  Ian McEwan gives inspiring talk about freedom of speech
  As my mental health started to improve from 2009 onwards, so my career started to flourish. I stopped taking medication. I started to sleep better. The voices diminished. I began to eat properly. I stopped cutting myself. I met the woman who is now my wife and one of the absolute reasons to believe in good. And then, in 2013, I was asked to write a memoir. I jumped at the chance, especially as the offer came from Canongate, a publisher whom I admired. I agreed not for financial reasons but because I love writing almost as much as I love playing the piano; because here was a chance not only to talk about composers, music education and the industry but also to write a novel-length love letter to both my wife, Hattie, and my astoundingly brilliant son (the great miracle from a previous marriage). It was also an opportunity to prove to myself once and for all that the guy who raped me was wrong: bad things would not happen if I spoke in a bit more detail. In fact, there was a chance that it would be witnessed, accepted and received with kindness. And I was ready, finally, to take that risk.

  What happened next nearly put me back in hospital or worse. And though I wrote a much longer version of what comes next, a) it would have bored you to death and b) it would have landed me in prison. So on the advice of my lawyers, and in an attempt to avoid becoming somebody’s bitch inside, I’m going to avoid being too specific.

  29-Rhodes-Getty.jpg
  In the scales: just before a recital, Rhodes learned a first attempt to stop an action against him had failed
  In brief: somebody leaked an early draft of Instrumental (catchy title, no?); and a month later, I and my publishers were hit with the threat of an injunction – brought on behalf of my son (who knew nothing about any of this) by my ex-wife, on the basis that he would suffer emotional distress and psychological harm were he to be exposed to the contents of the book – unless it was withdrawn immediately. Further, in addition to pulling the book, there was to be a potentially indefinite gagging order imposed that would stop me from speaking or writing in any medium anywhere in the world about the following:

  1. Graphic and detailed accounts of the sexual abuse I had suffered and the lasting harm it had caused me (physical, emotional and mental);

  2. Accounts of my serious mental health issues as an adult (including periods of treatment as an in-patient);

  3. Details of my treatment for those mental health issues;

  4. Accounts of my self-harming;

  5. Accounts of my suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts.

  It was made clear that my past history of sexual abuse and mental illness was so abhorrent, shameful and “toxic” (their word) that it should never be talked about except privately with close friends; and that, as far as the world at large was concerned, my past should in effect cease to exist.

  In an effort to avoid the trauma and cost of protracted litigation I stripped several thousand words from the book, going above and beyond what my lawyers told me was necessary. After every re-submission the threat of injunction was repeated and my efforts were dismissed as unsatisfactory. Eventually, Canongate and I – both named as co-defendants – appeared in the High Court, where the judge not only found in our favour but struck out the claim, stating that the other side had no cause of action, nor should there be one.

  I celebrated. I thought a line had been drawn and we could all move on. And then, incredibly, a few weeks later, shortly before publication and half an hour before performing a solo recital, I got an email telling me an appeal had been granted. While two of their three attempted causes of action were dismissed, they were granted the appeal on the basis that an obscure 1897 tort could be argued to apply in this case. The tort, never used in publishing before, relates to the intentional infliction of emotional harm. The lawyers’ argument was that, by publishing a truthful account of things that had happened to me many years ago, I intended to cause harm to my son (who wasn’t even alive at the time).

  This idea was so absurd and abhorrent to me that I could hardly believe the court could take it seriously. However, Lady Justice Arden ruled that, despite the book being true, containing “striking prose” and “carrying an important message of hope” that would help many people, there should be an injunction until trial because there was a chance a judge would agree with the claimant that the book represented the intentional infliction of harm. The original ruling was overturned, and the case was ordered to go to trial for a judge to decide its fate.

  Meanwhile, a temporary injunction was put in place: I could not speak about any aspect of my past mentioned above; translations of the book were put on hold (we had sold it already to the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Spain); customers who had pre-ordered it were sent emails saying it was delayed but not given a reason why; serialisation in a major newspaper was cancelled and 10,000 copies (already printed) sat in a warehouse while we awaited a High Court trial six to nine months in the future.

  james-rhodes-getty_1.jpg
  After the injunction translations of Rhodes' memoir were put on hold (Getty)
  After a few weeks of enforced silence, I asked for a “public domain exemption” to apply; this would mean that I could speak about my past if what I said had already appeared in the press or on television. This was granted, although the injunction banned “graphic language”. (When we asked what that meant, we got responses such as “no colourful or vivid descriptions”, or “You can use the word ‘rape’, but not the phrase ‘getting raped’.”)

  It seemed the Court of Appeal had become my editor both in print and in voice. And although reporting restrictions had been put in place, ensuring everything was anonymised and I could not be identified, there was outrage in the papers and online. Legal blogs around the world found the decision beyond baffling, entirely without reason or precedent, and intensely scary.

  In a desperate attempt to avoid the trial – the long wait, the horror of being cross-examined for a day, the emotional and financial cost – my lawyers asked the Supreme Court for permission to appeal the Court of Appeal’s judgement. (They do this in perhaps one per cent of interlocutory cases such as this). Three freedom-of-speech NGOs intervened on my behalf at their own expense. The Supreme Court said yes, Canongate joined the appeal, and in January five of the most powerful judges in England heard the case. They refused to let us know when a decision would be coming, and I spent weeks in a permanent state of anxiety waiting for it to arrive. In fact, their decision took so long that two trial dates (April and then June) were vacated because we wouldn’t have enough time to prepare, and the trial was relisted for December. Finally, after a four-month wait, the news came through. We had won. In a 68-page judgement, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Court of Appeal decision was wrong and overturned it. Instrumental can, and will be published.

  The Supreme Court wrote in their judgement: “The only proper conclusion is that there is every justification for publication. A person who has suffered in the way that the appellant has suffered, and has struggled to cope with the consequences of his suffering in the way he has struggled, has the right to tell the world about it. And there is a corresponding public interest in others being able to listen to his life story in all its searing detail.”

  Before all this started, I was happier than I had been in years. I was engaged to the woman of my dreams, fulfilled in my career and friendships. I smiled at people on the Tube, and woke up excited at life. By the time of the final court hearing, I was on anti-schizophrenic medication, with a shot immune system and an adrenal system on its knees. My Twitter and Facebook feeds were being monitored round the clock and anything the opposing lawyers felt was inappropriate (a generic tweet about free speech after the Charlie Hebdo atrocity, for example) led to instant threatening letters demanding their deletion.

  On the day of transmission of my Channel 4 series Don’t Stop The Music, they wrote to the channel’s lawyers to make them aware of the injunction, despite our assurances that it was a series about music education in primary schools and didn’t contain references to my past. They even demanded to know what I would be saying at concerts and in interviews.

  And, of course, I was not allowed to speak about any of this. I could not mention the phrase “legal issues”. I had to put much of my career on hold, pull out of certain engagements, and even to turn down an invitation to appear on Newsnight – to discuss historic sexual abuse – as it could have put me in contempt. I could not let people know the hell I was going through. Were I to speak about this in public, directly or indirectly, then it was punishable by imprisonment.

  The potential legal bills were telephone numbers. I mean, bowel-loosening, terrifying, beyond-belief big. Before the Supreme Court decision I was liable, should I have lost, to pay roughly £700,000 – and that was even before the trial. I could not get legal insurance for this sort of claim.

  It all got too much. I wrote my will. I called the Samaritans. I wrote notes, put computer passwords, bank details and email accounts in a safe place for my best friend to deal with. I made a plan. And a backup plan. I existed on a few choppy hours’ sleep each night and somehow managed to work and give concerts while crippled with anxiety. The very fact that our justice system was seriously considering banning a book because it contained a narrative about child abuse that someone on the other side of the world, where it wasn’t even going to be published, found unpalatable was just too shocking to get my head around.

  It felt, and forgive the victim mentality here, like being raped all over again. I lived in constant fear that the next email would be from one of the dozen lawyers involved; that it would be another astronomical bill, a threat, a court summons, an accusation; yet another 1000-word letter explaining why I was so utterly disgusting to talk about things that were done to me 30 years ago; or, worst of all, that the book would be banned and I would be gagged for the next 20 years.

  Without my wife Hattie’s support, my brilliant team of lawyers, the overwhelming kindness of close friends and the extraordinary courage of Canongate, I don’t think I would have made it this far. At any stage I could have dropped the book, sold my flat, paid over half a million in legal fees and moved on with the promise that I would never again talk about my past abuse or any aspect of my past and current mental illness. But were I to do that, then they would win. Not just those behind this action. No. Those who rape. The six-foot, 200lb man who for five years pinned me down and half spat, half whispered to me that bad things would happen if I told anyone.

  Well, fuck you. FUCK. YOU.

  I’m going to tell the world. Because you can’t open a newspaper today without yet more vile revelations of the sexual abuse of children on an industrial scale. Because I didn’t do anything wrong. Because there are too many like me who didn’t make it and now can’t talk about it. Because it is not something to be ashamed of. Because, if it took me – with my privilege, famous friends, healthy bank balance, semi-public voice and team of psychiatric experts – over a YEAR to be allowed to speak out; and only then after hearings in the three courts, thousands of emails, 4,000 pages of dense statements and arguments, and hundreds of thousands of pounds, then what kind of chance does someone from Rotherham or Kincora or Rochdale have of ever being heard?

  © James Rhodes 2015

  www.jamesrhodes.tv

  ‘Instrumental’ will be published by Canongate on Thursday (£16.99 hardback; available also as an ebook)

  The Samaritans provides a round -the-clock support service, every single day of the year for those who need to talk to someone. Please call 08457 90 90 90 (UK) 116 123 (ROI), email jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find details of the nearest branch

• Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/23/james-rhodes-pianist-interview

  James Rhodes interview: ‘It’s important to say that bad things happen – and we don’t lie about it’
  Pianist James Rhodes has written a personal memoir so raw and harrowing that the court of appeal – and his ex-wife – prevented him from publishing it. Now that the ban has been lifted, he explains why he refused to be silenced
  'I’m always going to think it’s my fault …' James Rhodes.
  ‘I’m always going to think it’s my fault’ … James Rhodes. Photograph: Ilvy Njiokiktjien
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  Saturday 23 May 2015 03.00 EDT Last modified on Monday 22 May 2017 10.01 EDT
  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.

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  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.

  Pianist James Rhodes wins right to publish autobiography telling of abuse
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  “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’ … ”

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  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.”

  Rhodes leaves the Supreme Court in London with Benedict Cumberbatch after winning the right to publish his autobiography.
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  Rhodes leaves the Supreme Court in London with Benedict Cumberbatch after winning the right to publish his autobiography. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
  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.’”

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  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.”

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

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  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.”

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  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.

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• The Herald Scotland - http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13599857.Interview__Author_and_musician_James_Rhodes__on_winning_the_right_to_publish_a_searingly_honest_account_of_his_childhood_abuse/

  15th August 2015
  Interview: Author and musician James Rhodes, on winning the right to publish a searingly honest account of his childhood abuse

  Vicky Allan
  Senior features writer
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  JAMES Rhodes wasn’t quite a household name before he emerged from the Supreme Court on May 20, alongside his wife Hattie Chamberlain and friend Benedict Cumberbatch. He did already have a profile, as the “most exciting thing in classical music”; the Jamie Oliver of the grand piano. But following the court case, a great many more people know his name. And they know him as the man who had to go through a long legal fight to overturn an injunction preventing publication of a memoir detailing how, between the age of six and 10, he had been “used, f***ed, broken, toyed with and violated” by a boxing coach (now dead) at his London preparatory school.

  The court’s ruling – that anyone who had suffered as Rhodes had “has the right to tell the world about it” – was hailed as a free-speech landmark, and the book, Instrumental, was published amidst a flurry of love and solidarity for the victim who could finally tell his own tale. Yet it was not some Big Brother establishment conspiracy that had been silencing Rhodes. Instead, it was his ex-wife who, having read an early, leaked draft of the book, was concerned about the psychological impact it would have on their son, who has Asperger Syndrome, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyspraxia and dysgraphia. The wonders and disintegration of the couple’s marriage are also documented in Instrumental, and Rhodes is, for the most part, kind and generous about her. Both mother and child now live in the United States.

  One of the problems Rhodes’s ex-wife had with the memoir was its graphic nature, the vivid language used to describe both the rape and the author’s mental illness. “Abuse. What a word,” Rhodes had written, in a passage that was quoted within the Supreme Court judgment. “Rape is better. Abuse is when you tell a traffic warden to f*** off. It isn’t abuse when a 40-year-old man forces his c*** inside a six-year-old boy’s ass.”

  At a time when new revelations of abuse emerge almost weekly, Instrumental stands out because of its eloquence, and because it conveys the horrific nature of his experience without seeming like a misery memoir. “It’s not a comedy, is it?” says Rhodes when he picks up the phone to talk to me. Yet at times, curiously, it is. There are jokes: often angry, often involving swear words, and often at his own expense. Rhodes’s onstage introductions of his piano performances have often verged on sophisticated stand-up comedy (once, onstage at the Hay festival, he referred to the electronic piano he was about to play as the “pianistic equivalent of a vibrator”). He has a gift for bringing humour to darkness, shining light into the abyss. He wants this to be a positive book, he says. “I hope – if only for the music alone – there’s an upbeat message by the end. But who knows, people take different things from it I guess.”

  Despite what Rhodes describes as a “ridiculously privileged” Harrow education, his route to being a concert pianist was unconventional. He got a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music aged 18 but didn’t take it, lost a year at Edinburgh University to drink and drugs, got a job in the City, married, had a child, then switched direction inspired by a music agent who told him he should play the piano.

  Instrumental is partly a book about music, a love letter to the art form, and an acknowledgement of how it “saved” Rhodes. It tells how, aged seven, he first listened to the Bach-Busoni Chaconne on a cassette player and felt: “I had something ripped apart inside but this mended it”. It tells how, as an adult locked up in a psychiatric unit where he had tried to hang himself, a piece by Bach played on a smuggled in iPod “released some kind of inner gentleness that hadn’t seen the light of day for 30 years”.

  When we talk, two months after the court ruling, Rhodes seems in a good mental space. He is on holiday in Greece, focusing on “being a husband, sunbathing, wearing ridiculous swimming trunks and trying to eat and sleep”, not playing the piano. But this is just the moment he is in. In the afterword of Instrumental, he writes of a continuing struggle with his mental health: “I have no idea if I’m going to survive the next few years. I’ve been in places before where I felt solid, reliable, good, strong and it’s all gone to s***. Sadly, I am only ever two bad weeks away from a locked ward.”

  He does not expect the “toxic shame” that is the legacy of abuse to ever leave him. “I think those feelings are always there. It can be lessened and rationalised, and there are mechanisms of coping, but sadly the gut response is there, a bit like when you put your hand on a hot surface and your instinct is to pull it back as quickly as possible.”

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  When I ask if he was driven to the edge by the 14-month court ordeal, he says: “You can’t imagine how close. I was closer than I think I’ve ever been.” Nor does he pretend he’s all better now. Like a diabetic who needs always to carry insulin, he needs to make sure that he has everything in place, everything that will help him look after what goes on in his head. “I don’t think I’ll ever be better now,” he says. “But it won’t stop me enjoying life and having a brilliant time and working my ass off.”

  It’s been a “bizarre” couple of years. “The book was hard enough to write,” he says. “But then to have it reach this insane court case, ending up at the Supreme Court, and the costs you can’t imagine, and constantly been monitored by lawyers and on Twitter feeds, the gagging order that I couldn’t talk on any aspect of my past in any medium in any area of the world ever ... all that kind of knocked me for six. And in a way it kind of confirmed everything I’d feared, which is that we don’t really want to talk about this stuff. Our society doesn’t want to open up about it. We say that we do, but when push comes to shove, it’s been 14 months and hundreds of thousands of pounds and the Supreme Court, simply to be able to talk about it.”

  Instrumental is symbolically significant because, effectively, Rhodes had been told to shut up, like the child who is told to keep quiet and not tell. Even after the Supreme Court decision, some questioned the wisdom of publication and wondered if the mother – who lived with the 12-year-old boy – may have been right.

  Rhodes believes his ex-wife’s reaction was partly informed by the way our society deals with such issues. “And I get that,” he says. “I understand that when you’re having your cornflakes in the morning you don’t want to read yet again about another seven-year-old who has been raped and had to have surgery to deal with that. It’s something we have a gut instinct to turn away from. But it’s not an excuse to not confront it ...

  That another writer would

  do this is disturbing,” he says

  (his ex-wife is a novelist).

  Was there a moment when he questioned his own judgment? “Of course. Yes. But from the get-go, even before the legal stuff, every time I

  would send a draft to the publishers I would be thinking about him. Every

  draft would be prefaced with, ‘As usual, please think about my boy when you’re reading this. If there’s anything I’ve missed. If there’s anything you feel should be gotten rid of. Please let me know.’ Not once did they flag anything up. And of course I would rather die than hurt my son.” Even in court, there were times when he wondered: “Have I got this terribly wrong?”

  “It seemed to me,” he recalls, “that surely it could not have got this far were there no substance to it. But the law is a funny thing and I think if you throw enough money and anger at something you’d be amazed how far it can go.”

  The issue was not whether his son would read the book, which is not published in the USA. (“No-one thought that he was going to read the book, and nor should he; it’s an adult book,” says Rhodes.) It was that his son might Google his father and read the extracts, the quotes, which have already exploded across the internet.

  “I’ve always felt that there is an age-appropriate way to tell children information that is important,” says Rhodes, who plans, at some point, to “sit him down and in an age-appropriate way, having been advised by professionals, let him know that this happened when I was a kid ... I would tell him that I didn’t talk about what happened to me when I was a child and actually in a way that made it harder to deal with. I would say, ‘You are still the most important thing in my life.’ I don’t think being appropriate and telling the truth is a bad thing. It’s the right thing to do.”

  As far as he knows, his son is completely unaware of the book and the controversy that surrounds it. “He’s coming over in a couple of weeks. We’re going to go on holiday and just rock out together, he and I and Hattie. I can’t wait for that.” But he adds: “Even if he was aware, he’s not that kind of kid. He wouldn’t really care that much. Even if he found a copy he would snigger at the word “f***” and then go and play Gameboy. I know my son. Believe me, I know him so well and it’s just not an issue. Certainly nothing in the same stratosphere as they made out it was. And of course they lost absolutely brutally and categorically and unanimously for a good reason.”

  Does he hope that one day his son will be proud of him? “I would never dare presume that would be the case,” he says. “But I suppose my big hope is that whatever he feels, he’ll be able to sit down and say, ‘I feel this.’ So whether that’s proud or angry or disappointed or thrilled, whatever it is, he can say that.”

  Having his story out in the world is not without complication for Rhodes himself, who is now recognised as the musician who wrote that searing and horrifying memoir. “It’s not comfortable that people stop me in the street and talk about their own experiences, saying, ‘This happened to me’. One woman literally pointed to me and fell into my arms sobbing. It may not be comfortable, but when has it ever been comfortable, doing the right thing?”

  Can any good have come from the publicity surrounding the Supreme Court case? “I think I need a little bit of time to get my head around the way it all happened.” says Rhodes. “But, yes, it can’t be a bad thing that more people would have heard about it as a result.”

  The boy who is not meant yet to read this book, is very much part of it. Instrumental is dedicated to Rhodes’s son, “the greatest part of my life”. It’s also a kind of love letter to his current wife Hattie, who tells him each evening that he can wake her at any time of the night if he needs someone to talk to. It’s a tribute to his Irish psychiatrist Billy, who once said frankly: “Look, James, I don’t know if you are going to be here in a year or not – it’s 50:50 – so let’s not mess around.” And, most chillingly, it’s an angry expose of the now-dead man who abused him.

  So who is the book really for? “What a lovely question,” Rhodes says. “I suppose deep down I always felt it was for those of us who weren’t able to find the words or opportunity to speak out loud or write them down. And sadly, there are a lot of them.”

  Instrumental: A Memoir Of Madness, Medication And Music is published by Canongate. James Rhodes will be at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Sunday, August 30, at 9.30pm www.edbookfest.co.uk

• James Rhodes - http://www.jamesrhodes.tv/supreme-court-overturns-ban-on-memoir/

  About James Rhodes:

  James Rhodes was born in London in 1975. A keen piano player, he was offered a scholarship when he was eighteen at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, but went to Edinburgh University instead. James stopped playing the piano entirely and dropped out after a year. After twelve months working at Burger King in Paris, he went to University College, London to read psychology. He then worked in the City for five years. After a period of personal crisis, he took up the piano again. He is now a professional and acclaimed concert pianist, writer and TV presenter.

• Evening Standard - http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/esmagazine/playing-with-fire-how-concert-pianist-james-rhodes-overcame-his-demons-9696945.html

  Playing with fire: how concert pianist James Rhodes overcame his demons
  Maverick musician James Rhodes overcame abuse, mental illness and addiction to become the world’s most talked-about concert pianist. Now he’s on a crusade to bring the healing power of music to children across Britain. It really can save your life, he tells Richard Godwin

  RICHARD GODWIN Thursday 28 August 2014 16:50 BST0 comments

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  James Rhodes wants my clarinet. The 39-year-old pianist is in the process of launching an ‘instrument amnesty’, calling on the people of Britain to take their rusty bassoons, detuned cellos and obsolete keyboards to their nearest Oxfam shop to be donated to schoolchildren. He’s been talking about the vital importance of music — and its terrible neglect in British state schools — for a few minutes, building up to a pitch of passion that is at once persuasive and slightly unnerving.

  ‘Don’t be a massive dick,’ he says. ‘Don’t be one of those idiots who say, “I’ve got a book in me” and then don’t write it. Don’t be a f***ing idiot and complain that you have no time to devote to music. Anyone can find 20 minutes a day. It’s not that hard.’

  When I let slip that I was a reluctant woodwind as a boy and still have my clarinet somewhere, he lets fly. ‘You might think, “What good will it do to hand it in?” but I swear to God, I will clean it and recondition it and it will be in the hands of some kid who really appreciates it within one or two weeks. And when you see the effect that owning an instrument can have on their family lives, on their relationships with their peers, on their concentration and aspirations — you just can’t imagine. Every child should have this. It’s not some dubious luxury for middle-class kids in North London.’ He pauses. ‘So donate your f***ing clarinet.’ All right, all right! I think it’s under the sofa…

  If you’ve seen Rhodes perform, you’ll know that he doesn’t really do mild-mannered. He’s messy, charismatic and impressively foul-mouthed for a concert pianist. The ‘f***’ count reaches 34 in the course of our interview; at one point he says that the conventions of regular classical concerts ‘make me want to shit on my hands and clap’. As for the sub-classical world of ‘f***ing Alfie Bowe singing ‘Phantom of the Opera’ at the f***ing Classic Brit Awards!’, it’s best not to get him started. ‘It breaks my heart that this has all been appropriated for a certain kind of person. Classical music is constantly apologising for itself and it shouldn’t.’

  Rhodes performs in jeans and Converse and has a tattoo on the tender part of his wrist that says Sergei Rachmaninov in Russian. He chooses venues such as the Roundhouse over Wigmore Hall (he prefers a drinking audience) and begins his renditions of Beethoven and Bach by telling the audience how rock’n’roll the composers were. He has little time for the sort of arcane musicology that fills Radio 3 discussions.

  ‘I mean who the f*** cares about sonata form in Beethoven’s Vienna? I don’t!’ he says. ‘I want to know that Beethoven was born into poverty and syphilis and domestic abuse, almost beaten to death twice by his drunk father before he was a teenager.’ As for Bach, he was a ‘gnarly, aggressive, obsessive lunatic’ who was arrested for keeping groupies in the organ loft. ‘Once you play a piece after that, it makes sense to people. It’s about feelings.’

  And then he plays rapturously, meaningfully, expertly, a few misfingerings maybe, but who gives a damn? He plays as if his life depends on it — and in a very real sense, it does. Between the ages of five and ten, he suffered systematic sexual abuse at the hands of a teacher at his prep school, which left him with a dark burden. He’s been through addiction, depression, eating disorders, several mental institutions, ‘an A-Z of the most vile-sounding drugs’, attempted suicide and survived a series of improbable lurches in fortune in order to play for people. When he says the music saved him, it is no platitude.

  His electrifying concerts (together with some fiery forays into journalism) have helped Rhodes create a strong following, including his old schoolfriend Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Fry, also a manic depressive, whom he counts as a close friend. ‘He’s one of the most supportive and kindest people I’ve ever met.’ This autumn, though, it looks as if Rhodes will reach the mainstream. His auto-biography, Instrumental, will be published by Canongate, and he’ll front his latest show for Channel 4. Don’t Stop the Music is made by Jamie Oliver’s production company and follows Rhodes’ attempts to get to the bottom of why the musical education he took for granted as a child has been eroded.

  There’s an astonishing scene where he enters a music class in a nice Home Counties primary school, full of eager children, only to learn from the teacher that the music budget is £400 per year for 160 pupils. Just as he’s wondering what she can possibly do for £400 per pupil per year, she corrects him. It’s £400 for all of them per year, £2.50 each. She got round this chronic lack of resources by having them bash margarine tubs.‘When I was a kid, there was music everywhere: orchestras, school concerts, lessons,’ says Rhodes. ‘Now it’s a total lottery. In some schools, it’s great. In others, there’s absolutely nothing. It’s the injustice of that that gets me. It will end up like acting, dominated by the Old Etonians. You have to ask, how many Simon Rattles and Adeles are simply not aware that they have that talent?’

  He has spent a year studying the government’s published national music strategy and now wants to meet Education Secretary Nicky Morgan to discuss how it can actually be implemented. As he says: ‘It’s more than me wanting music education to succeed. It has to succeed. Music goes to something much deeper than learning how to play scales. It can save your life. How dare we deprive hundreds of thousands of kids of that?’

  Rhodes was silent for years about the abuse he suffered as a child and it was only decades later that the man responsible was brought to justice (as a result of Rhodes talking about his experience in a newspaper interview). In the meantime, he had suffered a lifetime of mental and physical after-effects. ‘The physical act […] is just the beginning — each time it happened I seemed to leave a little bit of myself behind with him until it felt like there was pretty much nothing left of me that was real,’ he has written in the past.

  Understandably, he does not want to dwell on those years now. When he was working on his book, he says he wrote about his childhood between three and nine in the morning — ‘as quickly as possible’. However, he maintains that ‘anything that pervasive and that toxic has to have a light shone on to it for a long time’.

  ‘There are so many people in the public eye who have been accused or convicted of these awful things, now more than ever,’ he says. ‘But there are very few people who will actually stand up and say, “This happened to me.” They’re treated with scorn or disbelief or as if somehow they’re to blame. So it’s a hard thing to do, but it’s so important to say: “This is what happened. This is the price we pay. And this is how you can come through.” It’s worth feeling ashamed and wanting to die as you get it down on paper so that you can say that.’

  Rhodes first fell for Beethoven aged seven, when his lawyer father played him the Emperor Concerto at their St John’s Wood home. Remarkably, Rhodes only had his first proper piano lessons at 14 — by which time he had a lot of confused emotion to give to the instrument. He credits his ‘phenomenal’ teacher at Harrow, Colin Stone, with drawing out his volatile talent. He managed to get to Grade 8 within a short space of time, but then he gave it up entirely at 18. He was offered a scholarship to Guildhall School of Music and Drama but his parents feared that his mental state would not be conducive to the uncertain career paths music offered. He ended up study-ing psychology at UCL. ‘In a typical druggy teenage fit of pique, I went: “F*** it. If I’m not going to be a concert pianist, I won’t play ever again.” ’ And so he didn’t for ten years.

  Instead, he took a sales job in the City, met his first wife, an American writer, had a son and tried to forget music. ‘It was grim. It just wasn’t me. I was brought to my knees. I thought, “The only thing I want to do is music.” ’ At 28, he finally decided to quit in order to work in the music industry. He insists he was careful about saving enough money and establishing a definite time-frame. It was only after four years that, as he puts it, ‘everything fell apart’.

  He initially wanted to be an agent. He contacted Franco Panozzo, who managed his hero Grigory Sokolov, but once Panozzo had heard him play, he convinced Rhodes that he was good enough to perform. Panozzo hooked him up with a teacher named Edoardo Strabbioli to draw out his talent. His methods were exacting, or as Rhodes puts it, ‘mental, crazy, psychotic, awful, hideous…’ He would write ‘baby killer’ in painful parts of the score. But piano-wise, as he says, ‘it did the job’.

  Rhodes ended up having a series of breakdowns that led to a period of eight months in and out of mental institutions in Britain and America ‘doing my level best to kill myself’. He survived, but his marriage did not. I ask if it was the music that pushed him to such a desperate state, but clearly there was a lot else going on. ‘I would have had that pressure wherever I was. I worked in Burger King as a teenager and felt unbelievable pressure. It’s just who I am, anxious, neurotic, controlling, overwhelmed by the tiniest thing.’

  It was only after he had emerged from this dark spell in 2007 that he met his present manager, Denis Blais, at the Steinway shop in Marylebone. ‘The one piece of classical music he knew was the one piece of music I’d just finished studying, the Bach Chaconne. I played it for him in the Steinway shop and he said, “Great! Where can I buy your album?” I told him that I didn’t have any. He said: “All right, let’s make one!” ’ Rhodes went on to become the first classical musician to be signed by Warner Bros. ‘All of this points to the fact that all musicians have a responsibility to pass on the energy and passion that they have about music to people who need it most.’

  He has now managed to wean himself off medication, unless you count Marlboro Reds. And there is clearly no slowing down. When I ask what he’d still like to achieve, he says: ‘Everything! I could live 20 lifetimes and still only cover a fraction. Bach, Beethoven, Prokofiev, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Schubert, Schumann, Ravel, Debussy, Scriabin, Bartók, Haydn, Mozart… On and on! It’s insurmountable!’

  He plays for four hours a day — if you need more than four, you’re not doing it right, apparently. If he can’t play, he’s clearly no fun to be around. ‘I try to make up for it by listening to a lot of music, but that just makes me more pissed off that I’m not playing it. It’s like going out with an amazing woman, I just want to be with her all the time.’

  Speaking of which, he has a wedding to plan. His fiancée Hattie Chamberlin is a singer and writer, who’s training to be a yoga teacher. Stephen Fry will be reading at the wedding, but Rhodes doesn’t want to reveal more so as not to ruin the surprise. In the meantime, he won’t let up on his mission. ‘Trying to do things for other people is the best possible thing. Kindness is the best cure for any mental condition there is.’ He’s quite right. So donate your f***ing clarinet.

  Don’t Stop the Music begins on Channel 4 on 9 September at 9pm. Instrumental is out in hardback on 9 September (Canongate, £16.99). James will be performing from 9-10 September at the Ambassadors Theatre, London

  Portrait by James McNaught

• James Rhodes - http://www.jamesrhodes.tv/profile/

  PROFILE
  Twitter Icon Facebook Icon Youtube Icon
  James Rhodes has no formal academic musical education or dedicated mentoring. The title of the debut album “Razor Blades Little Pills and Big Pianos”, hints at the suffering that dogged Rhodes’s childhood and early adult life. Classical music became his solace and key to his survival. It was Bach, Beethoven and Chopin, not Faith Hope and Charity, that offered comfort.

  In 1993, mental health issues stopped him taking up a scholarship to the Guildhall. A chance meeting, 10 years later, with Franco Panozzo, agent to Russian concert pianist virtuoso, Grigori Sokolov. Panozzo arranged for James to have a brief tutorage by the renowned piano teacher Edoardo Strabbioli in Verona Italy.

  Suffering further setbacks due to health issues it was not until 2008, when Rhodes met his present manager, Denis Blais, that he was encouraged to record his first CD. This enabled him to bare his soul and put many of the ghosts of the past to rest.

  With Blais, Rhodes also created a distinctive and unique approach to how the classical piano repertoire should be presented. Uncomfortable with the austere and traditional ‘white tie and tails’ recital they decided it was time for the performer to communicate directly with the audience. Rhodes was going to introduce his own programme notes and share what it takes to perform these works of art using fascinating anecdotes about the composers and his own life experience. Delivered in his unique trademark stand-up style he creates an immersive experience that has won him and classical music a dedicated new following.

  2008/2009 saw his profile go from complete unknown to rising star, attracting celebrity followers such as Stephen Fry, Derren Brown and Sir David Tang. Having performed in non-traditional classical venues such as the 100 Club, the Tabernacle and Proud Galleries, James built on this new revolutionary performance approach. The pinnacle performance being at London’s historical Roundhouse where he was the first classical pianist to perform since it’s reopening. His debut CD Razor Blades Little Pills and Big Pianos also went to number one on the iTunes chart.

  In October 2009 James appeared in his first documentary on BBC Four’s CHOPIN: THE WOMEN BEHIND THE MUSIC. He also released his second album “Will all Freudians please stand aside”, which also made it to No1 on the iTunes chart.

  In March 2010, Rhodes became the first core classical pianist to be signed to the world’s largest rock label Warner Bros Records. His 1st album with Warner Bros, “Bullets & Lullabies” became his 3rd No1 iTunes album. That summer he was also the first solo classical pianist to play the Latitude Festival sharing stages with international stars such as Florence + the Machine and The National.

  Within three years of his debut, James presented and performed in his very own television series JAMES RHODES: PIANO MAN on Sky Arts which first aired in December 2010 – January 2011.

  In September 2011 he performed alongside Stephen Fry in A CLASSICAL AFFAIR at the Barbican Centre. Then in October 2011 James performed an 11 date tour of Australia which kicked off at the Melbourne Festival to a sell out audience.

  Returning back to his original label Signum Classics, Rhodes released his 4th album “JIMMY: James Rhodes recorded live at The Old Market Brighton” in May 2012.

  In September 2012 he has his debut performance in the US at the International Beethoven Festival in Chicago.

  2013, James performed in Hong Kong, Vienna, the Barber Institute in Birmingham, Royal Albert Hall, Cheltenham Music Festival, Waterfront stage at Latitude Festival and a series at Soho Theatre in London. He also presented and performed in the acclaimed television documentary NOTES FROM THE INSIDE which aired in August 2013 on Channel 4 in the UK.

  2014 was a very busy year for James, releasing his 5th studio album “Five” in the summer and launching his new label, Instrumental Records. A live in concert DVD, “Love In London”, recorded at the Arts Theatre in London’s West End was also released this year.

  James filmed a new series for Channel 4 called DON’T STOP THE MUSIC that aired in September 2015 in the UK. James is passionate about the power of music to change lives and is shocked at the state of music education in the UK. This two-part documentary followed James’ attempt to give schoolchildren the chance to learn a musical instrument by calling for an ‘instrument amnesty’ – a mission to collect unused musical instruments from around the country. James’ campaign managed to provide schools all over the UK with over £1million worth of instruments.

  James also presented and performed in Channel 4’s PIANO NIGHT, interviewing celebrities including Benedict Cumberbatch, Alan Rusbridger and Derren Brown at the piano.

  His Sunday Times and international bestselling memoir, Instrumental, published by Canongate is a brutally honest, moving and compelling story that was almost banned until the Supreme Court unanimously overthrew an injunction in May 2015.

  Instrumental recently reached No. 1 in Spain on the ABC non-fiction list. His SoundCloud and YouTube channels have had over 10,000,000 views, and he has over 500,000 listeners per month on Spotify.

  In 2016 James headlined some of the most important festivals in Spain, including Sonar by Day (Barcelona), Festival de Verano de San Lorenzo (El Escorial Madrid) and Veranos de la Villa (Madrid). He will also embark on tours to Germany, Italy and South Africa later in 2016.

  James has also signed a new two-book deal with Quercus. The first of these will be out on 6th October 2016, entitled How to Play the Piano.

  Discography
  INSIDE TRACKS: THE MIX TAPE
  (Instrumental Records)
  Release date: October 2015

  FIVE
  (Signum Classics)
  Release date: June 2014

  JIMMY: JAMES RHODES LIVE IN BRIGHTON
  (Signum Classics)
  Release date: May 2012

  BULLETS & LULLABIES
  (WARNER BROS – WCJ)
  Release date: December 2010

  NOW WOULD ALL FREUDIANS PLEASE STAND ASIDE
  (Signum Classics)
  Release date: March 2010

  RAZOR BLADES, LITTLE PILLS AND BIG PIANOS
  (Signum Classics)
  Release date: February 2009

  Social Media
  Web: www.jamesrhodes.tv

  Twitter: http://twitter.com/JRhodesPianist

  Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/jamesrhodepianist

  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5CDonRtIeV3ZYeE8nFjBUh

  Contacts
  Agent: Denis Blais Management Ltd
  denis@jamesrhodes.tv

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Print Marked Items
Rhodes, James: INSTRUMENTAL
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Rhodes, James INSTRUMENTAL Bloomsbury (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 2, 7 ISBN: 978­1­63­286696­7
A noted classical pianist revisits the horrors of the abuse and rape he experienced as a little boy and rehearses the
enduring effects on his life, loves, and music.Rhodes debuts with a memoir that is, in many ways, a dark, underground
cavern only intermittently permeated by shafts­­and sometimes floods­­of light. He divides his account into 20 "tracks,"
each of which begins with rumination about a relevant classical piece for the piano, including some biographical details
about the composer and information about the performance he recommends. Throughout the passionate narrative, the
author examines a variety of topics, including the serial rape he experienced for five years in elementary school
(painful even to read­­though not overly graphic), the enduring psychological problems that ensued (he says he's never
more than "two bad weeks away from a locked ward"), the process of becoming a respected classical pianist (despite a
10­year hiatus in late adolescence/early adulthood), the events that led to the end of his first marriage (he offers
numerous declarations of love for his son), his stays in mental institutions, and his fiery beliefs about the status and
future of classical music. In a particularly bitter passage, Rhodes assails those whom he calls "gatekeepers," stuffy
performers, record labels, and critics whom he blames for what he sees as the moribund state of the genre. He proposes
a number of solutions, and he practices what he preaches­­on YouTube are a number of his performances that make his
beliefs and practices particularly clear. The text is replete with dismissive profanities for those he believes have earned
his disdain. There are times when Rhodes becomes a bit preachy and repetitive, but, given the haunted house in which
he's lived since boyhood, most readers will surely cut him some slack. A powerful story of day­to­day survival,
struggle, triumph, and hope.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Rhodes, James: INSTRUMENTAL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865653&it=r&asid=0d42f38b382a19da0a7564752db47e10.
Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469865653
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Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication,
and Music
Sarah Grant
Booklist.
113.7 (Dec. 1, 2016): p8.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication, and Music. By James Rhodes. Feb. 2017.304p. Bloomsbury, $27
(9781632866967). 780.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
As a six­year­old, Rhodes faced horrific sexual abuse at the hands of his elementary­school wrestling coach. At 30,
Rhodes finally begins to process this early trauma, landing him in a series of mental­health wards where, ultimately,
music, which as a child he turned to in a nearly obsessive indulgence, saves him. In this triumphant and arresting
memoir, Rhodes charts his ongoing recovery and journey to his place as today's most exciting classical pianist­­he
performs concerts in hospital wards, or in major concert halls in jeans and sneakers, anything to bring classical music
down from the ivory tower. Between his candid explanations of the sexual abuse he endured and the mechanics of how
this trauma plays out in his life, to life inside psychiatric wards, a la One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Rhodes injects a
dose of music history­­recommended playlists, with portraits of composers whose tumultuous lives parallel his own,
giving an eerie nod to the connection between madness, personal suffering, and artistic genius. Despite such heavy
themes, Rhodes writes with an arresting charm, at times cold and clinical, shockingly self­effacing, then painfully
personal and poetic­­sure to register powerfully with readers with similar experiences (he gives "trigger warnings"
before the more gruesome scenes). A gripping testament to the immense tragedy of sexual abuse, the magic of music,
and the power of hope.­­Sarah Grant
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Grant, Sarah. "Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication, and Music." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 8. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474716468&it=r&asid=ecd07f71cb4a9d38ae37e4f0a8f61696.
Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A474716468
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Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication
and Music
Publishers Weekly.
263.41 (Oct. 10, 2016): p66.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music
James Rhodes. Bloomsbury, $27 (304p) ISBN 978­1­63286­696­7
Music soothes a lifetime of mental illness and psychosexual trauma in Rhodes's intense memoir. Rhodes, an English
concert pianist famous for his classical­music­for­the­masses shows, tells of being raped from the ages of six­10 by a
teacher, which eventually led him to heavy drug abuse, obsessive­compulsive tics, a wrecked marriage, a suicide
attempt, and commitment to mental institutions. The author tells his story with harrowing realism and even rollicking
humor­­smoking heroin, he writes, was "the greatest and stupidest thing I've ever done"­­probing both the everlasting
anguished chaos in his head and his own appalling behavior with self­lacerating specificity. Intertwined throughout is
the remarkable efflorescence of his musical career­­he didn't start studying piano seriously until his late 20s­­and the
healing power of music. (He credits a cache of music smuggled into his psych ward by a friend with helping him regain
sanity, and he sprinkles in rapturous appreciations of his favorite pieces.) The book trails off at times in self­promotion
(Rhodes even plugs his shoe line) and showbiZ rants, but Rhodes's energetic, edgy, painfully perceptive prose makes
for a gripping narrative of abuse and dysfunction as well as the quiet, painstaking, redemptive labor of music making.
(Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music." Publishers Weekly, 10 Oct. 2016, p. 66. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466616190&it=r&asid=928f33907d3ee4975aff67e0acbe8f43.
Accessed 30 May 2017.
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Salvation through music
Ian Thomson
Spectator.
328.9747 (June 20, 2015): p37.
COPYRIGHT 2015 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music
by James Rhodes
Canongate, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 275, ISBN 9781782113379
Spectator Bookshop, 14.99 [pounds sterling]
Ours is the era of everybody's autobiography.
Bookshops groan with misery­lit memoirs­­Never Let Me Go, Dysfunction Without Tears ­­which dilate on anorexia,
alcoholism, cruel bereavement. When is a life worth telling? B.S. Johnson, the London­born novelist (and tireless
chronicler of himself), put the most revealing sexual details into his autobiographical novels of the 1960s. They might
have amounted to mere solipsistic spouting, were the writing not so good.
James Rhodes, a 40­year­old classical musician, was repeatedly raped at his London prep school in the early 1980s. In
his memoir, Instrumental, Rhodes tells how he found salvation in music and became one of our leading concert
pianists. Written in faux American hip­jive slang ('fuck­bucket', 'I shit you not'), the book is an attempt, among other
things, to give the author's damaged life justification and meaning. Instrumental may be crudely written, hyperbolic and
gruelling to read, but Rhodes's is a life worth telling all right.
Sexual abuse, previously disregarded, is the child protection issue of our time. Rhodes's rapist, a school boxing coach
named Peter Lee, was traced to Margate and charged, but he died of a stroke before he could stand trial. Many others
have been wrongly accused. Not long ago, friends of ours were raided by the Metropolitan Police, who impounded
laptops and computer storage devices on suspicion of paedophile activity. The couple had neglected to secure their
wireless network with a password but still the police needed to make sure that the modem had indeed been
'compromised'. After eight weeks, the computers came back with no evidence on them of child pornography. In all
likelihood a perfect stranger­­a man like Peter Lee ­­had parked his car outside their house and, using a smartphone,
hacked into their Wi­Fi system.
It seems extraordinary that no one thought to question the schoolboy Rhodes when he expressed fear at attending
boxing classes, or when blood was seen to run down his legs. For five years the appalling assaults continued. Rhodes
describes them unflinchingly and with a proper retrospective fury. His former wife tried to prevent publication of
Instrumental on the grounds that their 12­year­old autistic son might be 'psychologically harmed' by the graphic detail.
Last month the Supreme Court lifted the injunction, arguing (among other things) that the book would help other
victims of abuse.
Perhaps it will. At my own boarding school in south London called Brightlands (a misnomer for that dark Victorian­era
barracks) the predatory abuse of boys was not uncommon. Any one of us caught masturbating or talking after lights out
was made to strip in the bathroom at the end of the corridor, where a sports master (it was always a sports master) beat
us with a slipper. It was a shaming punishment that filled me (and still fills me) with impotent perplexity; in some
unformulated way I understood that the beatings were a sexual outrage. The school was a feeder for Dulwich College.
Rhodes's school in St John's Wood was a feeder for the no less privileged Harrow (where, he tells us, he befriended
Benedict Cumberbatch). The violence done to him as a six­year­old inevitably cast a shadow over his life. He suffered
nervous breakdowns, eating disorders, depression, drug and alcohol abuse; more than once he attempted suicide.
Instrumental is an angry book, but most of the anger is directed by Rhodes at himself ('I'm a bit of an asshole'). Some
readers may weary of what he calls his 'narcissistic' and 'whiny' company.
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Having gone through AA's 12­step alcoholic recovery programme, Rhodes found solace in piano practice, practice,
practice. The classical music he champions here is Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart. Great moderns such as Ligeti, Webern
or Messiaen are nowhere to be found. The music's fuddy­duddy image is of concern to Rhodes. Keen to appear righton,
he describes his favourite composers in strenuously street­cred terms. Chopin was immersed in a 'dysfunctional,
fucked­up turd of a relationship' with George Sand; Liszt was a 'wanker' (news to me).
During piano recitals, Rhodes wears sneakers and jeans like a younger Nigel Kennedy. For all I care he can wear a gold
lamé jockstrap, so long as the music's tiptop. Rhodes is a brilliant concert pianist but anyone who dares to suggest that
he might be a teensy bit self­righteous in wishing to 'save' classical music (the Daily Telegraph's 'douchebag' music
critic Michael White, for example) is aggressively taken down a peg. Editor: where were you?
The legal action taken against Instrumental was probably ill­judged, but I feel sympathy for Rhodes's ex­wife. Their
child has Asperger Syndrome. Living with a teenage autistic son may involve levels of domestic violence, weight­gain
from antipsychotic medications, threats of suicide, school refusal, the destruction of all you hold dear in a family and
marriage. Cruelly, an autistic tendency will often transmit itself down the generations like an unwanted gene. (Rhodes
himself has Asperger Syndrome.) It would be naive to think that a child with autism might not be traumatised by
reading a book like this. Still, the pianist's life had been well worth telling.
Thomson, Ian
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Thomson, Ian. "Salvation through music." Spectator, 20 June 2015, p. 37+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA418836804&it=r&asid=d2df3a12f34cf61ecada3983fd18e629.
Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A418836804
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Hitting the black notes
Caroline Crampton
New Statesman.
144.5266 (June 12, 2015): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2015 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Instrumental: a Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music
James Rhodes
Canongate, 275pp, 16.99 [pounds sterling]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould recorded Bach's Goldberg Variations twice in his career­­at the start, in 1955, and
then again in 1981, the year before he died. His technical mastery had, if anything, increased over the decades and in
the later version there is a swithering, autumnal colour, an aching sense of loss that you feel could only come from a
musician nearing the end of his life. To the frustration of recording engineers everywhere, Gould used to hum while he
played­­unconsciously, he said­­and somehow his gentle vocal overtones during the 1981 performance, hovering at the
edge of your hearing, only drag you more completely into his perfectly voiced melody. At times, it can feel like your
entire future happiness is suspended somewhere in between two of his sublimely hesitant notes.
This is the music that the pianist James Rhodes has chosen as the first and last "tracks" for his memoir, Instrumental, in
which each chapter is named after a piece that has a particular resonance for him. These Goldberg Variations, he writes,
"do things to me that only top­grade pharmaceuticals can achieve". After a few chapters, you are ready to take him at
his word. From the outset, it's hard not to feel that we're in "misery memoir" territory, as Rhodes explains how he was
repeatedly raped and abused by his gym teacher from the age of six, an experience ­ "Child rape is the Everest of
trauma," he writes­­that leads to years of self­harm, medication and hospitalisation.
He dealt with the horror by escaping, first out of himself (he learned to divorce his consciousness from what was
happening to his body) and then into music. At seven, he had what he calls a "Princess Diana moment" when he found
a cassette of the BachBusoni chaconne, an early­20th­century piano transcription of the Partita for Violin No 2, which
is said to have been Bach's memorial to his first wife. "It was like being on the receiving end of a Derren Brown tranceinducing
finger­click while on ketamine," Rhodes writes, which is something that I am absolutely sure nobody has ever
said about this music before.
It is typical of the furious bluntness and belligerence with which Rhodes writes. At times, it feels as though he is daring
you to dismiss him, to find his story trivial or inferior. The book received a lot of publicity after Rhodes had to overturn
an injunction taken out by his ex­wife to prevent the publication of passages relating to his abuse on the grounds that
they would cause harm to their son. Seeing him standing triumphant outside the Supreme Court, next to his
schoolfriend Benedict Cumberbatch, you could feel the defiance emanating from him.
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In his performing style and image­­tattoos, cigarettes, jeans and trainers onstage­­Rhodes positions himself as an
outsider to the classical music world. He is often described as self­taught, too, which is not entirely true: although he
didn't go to music college, he certainly had lessons during his time at Harrow and then later in Italy. His concerts aren't
to everybody's taste, as he likes to talk between pieces and is unashamedly positive about the music.
There is a gear change about halfway through this book where he begins to set out his manifesto for how to make
classical music more approachable (he suggests dropping the "classical", for starters). Technically, he might not be
among the top flight of concert pianists; in a rare lapse of ego at one point, he describes himself as a "tattooed loser"
who "plays the piano perhaps as well as a bunch of music college undergraduates but certainly no better", but if anyone
can bring much­needed diversity to concert audiences, it's him.
Reading a memoir is always an exercise in getting inside the author's mind, to a greater or lesser extent. For at least half
of Rhodes's book, this is a distinctly unpleasant experience. He is frenzied, wheedling, entitled and infuriating by turns.
Then you realise that such is the horrific nature of the trauma he is still living with that there is no criticism you could
make of him that he has not already made of himself. Extreme self­hatred is an unusual route to empathy but it is no
less powerful for that.
Crampton, Caroline
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Crampton, Caroline. "Hitting the black notes." New Statesman, 12 June 2015, p. 49. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA419926034&it=r&asid=de2dcdd5936b304f3403b54eb9bef975.
Accessed 30 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A419926034

"Rhodes, James: INSTRUMENTAL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865653&it=r. Accessed 30 May 2017. Grant, Sarah. "Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication, and Music." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 8. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474716468&it=r. Accessed 30 May 2017. "Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music." Publishers Weekly, 10 Oct. 2016, p. 66. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466616190&it=r. Accessed 30 May 2017. Thomson, Ian. "Salvation through music." Spectator, 20 June 2015, p. 37+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA418836804&it=r. Accessed 30 May 2017. Crampton, Caroline. "Hitting the black notes." New Statesman, 12 June 2015, p. 49. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA419926034&it=r. Accessed 30 May 2017.

• New York Journal of Books
  http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/instrumental-memoir
  Word count: 858

  Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication, and Music

  Image of Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication, and Music
  Author(s):
  James Rhodes
  Release Date:
  February 6, 2017
  Publisher/Imprint:
  Bloomsbury USA
  Pages:
  304
  Buy on Amazon

  Reviewed by:
  Lew Whittington
  British classical pianist James Rhodes is a rebel with a cause as he unleashes his iconoclastic view of the vaulted world of classical music in concert halls and on British TV and in the streets and on the iTunes classical charts, where his five albums have been bestsellers. Rhodes exalts the music of the music of Chopin, Beethoven, Liszt, Schubert, and Bach, always Bach, like they were rock stars.

  On top of Rhodes’ technical artistry, he speaks in concerts about the often tragic lives of classical composers and how their personal lives informed and inspired their music. Meanwhile, Rhodes’ own life has been full of devastating circumstances as he reveals in his memoir Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication, and Music.

  It is, indeed, not like any other book about classical music that you are likely to read. Rhodes not only lives his truth but triumphs as a person, a survivor, and a singularly irreverent artist.

  As a concert pianist on the international circuit, Rhodes has had a singularly remarkable career. Not only because he had no formal training until he was 14 and even after showing great promise, he stopped playing altogether for ten years. He returned to training and performing in his 20s, almost by accident, while applying for a position in arts public relations.

  His academic and professional life was going well. But he was still going through a private hell that he writes about in graphic detail. Rhodes gives a brutally honest account of being repeatedly raped for five years by a 47-year old teacher at a private school. It is tough reading and one of the most harrowing memoirs of survival you are likely to read.

  The abuse was so severe that Rhodes had to have surgeries on his spine because of being subjected to repeated rape at such a young age. The impact on his life has resulted in a series of breakdowns and cycles of self-destructive behaviors including drug abuse, episodes of anorexia, cutting his own skin, and attempted suicides through drugs and other means.

  Be warned, Rhodes uses no euphemisms in this book about the abuse he suffered as a child or what he did later to survive the psychological trauma. His abuser was eventually prosecuted, but that was little help emotionally to Rhodes. He was treated at various times for various overlapping psychoses and has been hospitalized many times.

  Rhodes writes honestly and tenderly of his first marriage, but one that ended in bitter divorce and his separation from his son, and he dedicates the book to him. Though on amicable terms, his ex-wife sued to keep Rhodes memoir from being published in Britain because of its graphic nature and what she saw as potentially negative impact on their young son. Rhodes won in court and the book was published in the U.K., and is now being released in the U.S.

  When his wife found out he was cutting himself, she and his friends intervened. He was in the hospital, then out, then acting out and spiraling down to the point he was about to commit suicide and was temporarily rescued by a friend who paid for him to go to a special rehab in Arizona. It worked but only for a while; his life fell apart again. At one point he made a video suicide note, but after watching it couldn’t imagine his son ever seeing this record of him planning his own death.

  There was also pushback over its publication by the classical music industry, which likes to keep the images of musicians above the tabloid fray. Rhodes makes it clear that he isn’t buying into such image making. He expresses his distain for the commercialism and marketing of classical music, as well as commenting on the devaluation of classical music. And Rhodes’ honesty, cynicism, and often scabrous humor fly in the face of the squeaky clean images the classical music industry wants to project.

  Rhodes writes so passionately and eloquently about his classical music and his artistic goals. His connection to music is as a sanctuary and a vital part of his continued inspiration for wanting to live, love, and make glorious music. His TV documentary Don’t Stop the Music has raised more than $1 million for instruments in U.K. primary schools. In his epilogue Rhodes reveals that life is still hard in many ways, but he has found new personal and professional peace and even happiness.

  Lew J. Whittington writes about the arts and gay culture for several publications including Philadelphia Dance Journal, Dance International, CultureVulture, and Huffington Post. His book reviews and author interviews have appeared in The Advocate, EdgeMedia, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

• The Spectator
  https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/06/sound-and-fury-the-pianist-james-rhodes-is-very-angry-indeed/
  Word count: 946

  BOOKS
  Sound and fury — the pianist James Rhodes is very angry indeed
  Instrumental is an unflinching misery memoir about abuse from early childhood — but James Rhodes’s anger seems equally directed at himself
  Ian Thomson

  James Rhodes (Photo: Getty)
  Ian Thomson
  20 June 2015
  9:00 AM
  Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music
  James Rhodes
  Canongate, pp.275, £16.99
  Ours is the era of everybody’s autobiography. Bookshops groan with misery-lit memoirs — Never Let Me Go, Dysfunction Without Tears — which dilate on anorexia, alcoholism, cruel bereavement. When is a life worth telling? B.S. Johnson, the London-born novelist (and tireless chronicler of himself), put the most revealing sexual details into his autobiographical novels of the 1960s. They might have amounted to mere solipsistic spouting, were the writing not so good.

  James Rhodes, a 40-year-old classical musician, was repeatedly raped at his London prep school in the early 1980s. In his memoir, Instrumental, Rhodes tells how he found salvation in music and became one of our leading concert pianists. Written in faux American hip-jive slang (‘fuck-bucket’, ‘I shit you not’), the book is an attempt, among other things, to give the author’s damaged life justification and meaning. Instrumental may be crudely written, hyperbolic and gruelling to read, but Rhodes’s is a life worth telling all right.

  Sexual abuse, previously disregarded, is the child protection issue of our time. Rhodes’s rapist, a school boxing coach named Peter Lee, was traced to Margate and charged, but he died of a stroke before he could stand trial. Many others have been wrongly accused. Not long ago, friends of ours were raided by the Metropolitan Police, who impounded laptops and computer storage devices on suspicion of paedophile activity. The couple had neglected to secure their wireless network with a password but still the police needed to make sure that the modem had indeed been ‘compromised’. After eight weeks, the computers came back with no evidence on them of child pornography. In all likelihood a perfect stranger — a man like Peter Lee — had parked his car outside their house and, using a smartphone, hacked into their Wi-Fi system.

  It seems extraordinary that no one thought to question the schoolboy Rhodes when he expressed fear at attending boxing classes, or when blood was seen to run down his legs. For five years the appalling assaults continued. Rhodes describes them unflinchingly and with a proper retrospective fury. His former wife tried to prevent publication of Instrumental on the grounds that their 12-year-old autistic son might be ‘psychologically harmed’ by the graphic detail. Last month the Supreme Court lifted the injunction, arguing (among other things) that the book would help other victims of abuse.

  Perhaps it will. At my own boarding school in south London called Brightlands (a misnomer for that dark Victorian-era barracks) the predatory abuse of boys was not uncommon. Any one of us caught masturbating or talking after lights out was made to strip in the bathroom at the end of the corridor, where a sports master (it was always a sports master) beat us with a slipper. It was a shaming punishment that filled me (and still fills me) with impotent perplexity; in some unformulated way I understood that the beatings were a sexual outrage. The school was a feeder for Dulwich College.

  Rhodes’s school in St John’s Wood was a feeder for the no less privileged Harrow (where, he tells us, he befriended Benedict Cumberbatch). The violence done to him as a six-year-old inevitably cast a shadow over his life. He suffered nervous breakdowns, eating disorders, depression, drug and alcohol abuse; more than once he attempted suicide. Instrumental is an angry book, but most of the anger is directed by Rhodes at himself (‘I’m a bit of an asshole’). Some readers may weary of what he calls his ‘narcissistic’ and ‘whiny’ company.

  Having gone through AA’s 12-step alcoholic recovery programme, Rhodes found solace in piano practice, practice, practice. The classical music he champions here is Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart. Great moderns such as Ligeti, Webern or Messiaen are nowhere to be found. The music’s fuddy-duddy image is of concern to Rhodes. Keen to appear right-on, he describes his favourite composers in strenuously street-cred terms. Chopin was immersed in a ‘dysfunctional, fucked-up turd of a relationship’ with George Sand; Liszt was a ‘wanker’ (news to me).

  During piano recitals, Rhodes wears sneakers and jeans like a younger Nigel Kennedy. For all I care he can wear a gold lamé jockstrap, so long as the music’s tip-top. Rhodes is a brilliant concert pianist but anyone who dares to suggest that he might be a teensy bit self-righteous in wishing to ‘save’ classical music (the Daily Telegraph’s ‘douchebag’ music critic Michael White, for example) is aggressively taken down a peg. Editor: where were you?

  The legal action taken against Instrumental was probably ill-judged, but I feel sympathy for Rhodes’s ex-wife. Their child has Asperger Syndrome. Living with a teenage autistic son may involve levels of domestic violence, weight-gain from anti-psychotic medications, threats of suicide, school refusal, the destruction of all you hold dear in a family and marriage. Cruelly, an autistic tendency will often transmit itself down the generations like an unwanted gene. (Rhodes himself has Asperger Syndrome.) It would be naive to think that a child with autism might not be traumatised by reading a book like this. Still, the pianist’s life had been well worth telling.

  Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £14.99 Tel: 08430 600033

• Gramophone
  https://www.gramophone.co.uk/feature/book-review-instrumental-by-james-rhodes
  Word count: 906

  Book review: ‘Instrumental’ by James Rhodes
  Andrew Mellor Wed 22nd July 2015
  ‘He is a vital and significant presence who is lambasting our industry into positive change through words and actions...’

  My head was spinning every time I put this book down. Spinning with shock, compassion, confusion, inspiration, but mostly anger. Anger that a person with so much to say does so with such levels of unchecked inelegance and confusion; anger that someone with so much appetite for change and renewal has missed countless opportunities to practise what he so tirelessly and loudly preaches.

  In less than a decade, James Rhodes has gone from issuing his debut recording as a pianist to campaigning for music education in his own prime-time television slot. He is a vital and significant presence who is lambasting our industry into positive change through words and actions. I make no apology, as a writer for a magazine Rhodes describes in his book as ‘somewhere between peanut butter and Andrex moist wipes on the scale of worldly importance’, for believing many of his ideas both long overdue and bang on the money. I don’t find his cosy vicarage jokes funny even when they’re disguised in the angry, profanity-laden language of one who’s experienced the world at its absolute worst. But it’s a compliment to Rhodes that I doubt he’d mind me saying so.

  Still, Instrumental is…well, what is it? It’s a mess. That might be entirely necessary and of secondary importance given the huge issues Rhodes is dealing with (child rape, addiction, the overwhelming challenges of everyday life after experiencing either of those, and the increasing estrangement of the great music we all claim to love). But it’s true. The book lurches from autobiography to rant to careers handbook for professionals to entry-level composer guide to industry manifesto to critique of mental health care to rambling diary to tub-thumping lecture on how to conduct a relationship and more besides. It’s littered with half-truths (‘Glenn Gould poured boiling water over his hands and forearms before playing’) and is exhausting in its haranguing, I‑speak-the-truth tone.

  “He relentlessly attacks celebrity culture and then casts composers as ‘rock stars’”

  Rhodes directs his book at those outside the classical music world yet kicks phrases like ‘existing conventions around tonality’, ‘active repertory’ and ‘étude’ around with no explanation of their meaning. He talks constantly of composers ‘changing the world’ but stops short of explaining, even in the simplest terms, how they did so. He bemoans the tired language and convention of the industry yet pretentiously refers to himself throughout as a ‘concert pianist’ (isn’t he just a ‘pianist’?). He contradicts himself endlessly (‘everything about classical music…is almost totally devoid of any redeeming features’; ‘classical music needs to stop apologising for itself’) and his inconsistent and incalculable financial references are irritatingly gauche (for the record, owning a flat with only one bathroom in Maida Vale isn’t the definition of failure; for most 38-year-olds it’s actually out of reach). He relentlessly attacks celebrity culture and then casts composers as ‘rock stars’ and lingers cringeworthily on his friendship with Stephen Fry; we learn nothing of Rhodes’s ‘best friend, best man, best everything’ – a bloke called Matthew who is pretty much consigned to the acknowledgements page.

  And yet, what a life Rhodes has had – what a journey he has been on, and how astonishingly honest he is when it comes to the abhorrent crime and tragedy of child rape (he understandably detests the word ‘abuse’). His descriptions of what he endured from the age of five are graphic and horrifying, and his analysis of how those events have in some sense come to define him both physically and mentally are real, clear, cutting (literally) and devastating. You can’t help but fume and weep for him – with him; you can’t help but naively will the erasing of the past and the glimpsing of a James Rhodes who never had these horrors to contend with and doesn’t still.

  Those horrors are real and Rhodes deals with them astonishingly. But problems arise when music is seemingly crowbarred back into the narrative. ‘Music quite literally saved my life,’ Rhodes posits in his introduction. But music disappears for pages on end, fails to do the business when required and is never acutely linked to a process of psychological strengthening. Instead, two self-help books initiated Rhodes’s most significant recovery process and then, or so the ensuing text suggests, he saved himself through mental strength wrought from love for his son and his girlfriend. That allowed him to pursue his career in music, not the other way around.

  Rhodes’s fans might not care about these inconsistencies and I hope his book enlightens them in the ways it has the potential to. But as with Rhodes’s arguments about crossover music, he should have credited his readers with a little more intelligence and curiosity. He should have offered them more nuance, more structure, more consistency, more musical exploration, less meaningless hyperbole and less cliché, whether they’d appreciate it or not.

  Details Canongate, HB, 275pp, £14.99. ISBN 978-1-78211-338-6. 'Instrumental' on Amazon

  This review appears in the August 2015 issue of Gramophone – on sale now. Subscribe to Gramophone

• Portland Book Review
  http://portlandbookreview.com/2017/04/instrumental-a-memoir/
  Word count: 705

  Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication, and Music by James Rhodes
  by Dick Weissman on April 20, 2017
  1
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  ?

  Rhodes has concocted an unusual format for this memoir, which is also in development as a feature film. The chapters are titled as “Tracks,” as one would find on a record album. Each track includes an introductory page that references a specific performance of a piano work that the author particularly enjoys. These introductory pages are quite detailed, and may be a bit beyond the reach or interest level of the non-musician average reader. The author is passionate and opinionated in his descriptions off the performances.

  Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
  Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook, Kindle, Audible
  Purchase: Powell’s | Amazon | IndieBound | iBooks
  Rhodes has had, to say the least, a rather unusual life. Starting at the age of six, the author was constantly physically abused by the gym teacher at his school for the next five years. Although one of Rhodes’ teachers was suspicious about why a previously carefree and happy child suddenly became miserable and withdrawn, the author’s own parents were entirely oblivious to these changes of behavior. Over the years, the author describes how music has repeatedly saved him from his many periods of mental disease and an inability to relate to people or what most of us would regard as normal situations. During Rhodes’ high school years, he continued to have a variety of homosexual relationships, and was generally miserable. His first piano teacher was impressed by the intensity of his interest in the piano, but when he helped arrange a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music, the author’s parents refused to allow him to attend music school.

  After various mental breakdowns and drug abuse, the author makes his way into the world of advertising sales, and finds himself earning over three thousand pounds a week. The author then describes his first marriage. As the reader might anticipate, this relationship does not work out very well. In fact, the author’s ex-wife sued Rhodes’ publisher to prevent the publication of this book. It is puzzling to the reader exactly why “Jane” sued to keep the book from being published. Rhodes’ descriptions of her are uniformly complimentary, and he accepts the blame for the relationship going south. Apparently, she simply did not want their son to ever read about all of the unfortunate aspects of his father’s life. It is also possible that she resented the fact that the author only revealed the misery of his life experience at the point when he realized that they would not be able to stay together. It is also impossible for the reader to know whether certain edits were made to the book on the basis of the lawsuit.

  It isn’t necessary here to follow the sequence of the rest of the authors’ odyssey. Through the help of wealthy patrons Rhodes was able to get sufficient therapy to be able to study piano, function, and another benefactor provides him with the resources to make an album, and took on the role of Rhodes’ personal manager. He has been able to pursue a mostly successful relationship (and marriage) with another woman, and this has led to best-selling albums and world-wide concert appearances.

  Near the end of his book, the author outlines a number of possible ways of expanding the audience for classical music, such as playing in non-traditional music venues, including ones where drinks are available. There is a sort of interesting disconnect between the author’s notion that

  classical music should be brought nearer to the world of the average person, but at the same time it should not be watered down by marketing classical musicians as glamorous stars, or by confusing pop-classical artists with more serious classical musicians.

  Instrumental will be most appealing to readers with a serious interest in classical music, or to those who may be inspired by the author’s ability to overcome abuse and a lifetime legacy of insecurity. In general, the book is easy to read, and an interesting synthesis of formality and down-to-earth language and emotions.

• New Statesman
  http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/06/pianist-james-rhodes-self-hatred-there-compelling-case-empathy
  Word count: 834

  MUSIC & THEATRE 18 JUNE 2015
  In pianist James Rhodes' self-hatred, there is a compelling case for empathy
  In his memoir Instrumental, it feels at times as though Rhodes is daring you to dismiss him, to find his story trivial or inferior.
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  BY
  CAROLINE CRAMPTON

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  Instrumental: a Memoir of Madness, Medication and Music
  James Rhodes
  Canongate, 275pp, £16.99

  The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould recorded Bach’s Goldberg Variations twice in his career – at the start, in 1955, and then again in 1981, the year before he died. His technical mastery had, if anything, increased over the decades and in the later version there is a swithering, autumnal colour, an aching sense of loss that you feel could only come from a musician nearing the end of his life. To the frustration of recording engineers everywhere, Gould used to hum while he played – unconsciously, he said – and somehow his gentle vocal overtones during the 1981 performance, hovering at the edge of your hearing, only drag you more completely into his perfectly voiced melody. At times, it can feel like your entire future happiness is suspended somewhere in between two of his sublimely hesitant notes.

  This is the music that the pianist James Rhodes has chosen as the first and last “tracks” for his memoir, Instrumental, in which each chapter is named after a piece that has a particular resonance for him. These Goldberg Variations, he writes, “do things to me that only top-grade pharmaceuticals can achieve”. After a few chapters, you are ready to take him at his word. From the outset, it’s hard not to feel that we’re in “misery memoir” territory, as Rhodes explains how he was repeatedly raped and abused by his gym teacher from the age of six, an experience – “Child rape is the Everest of trauma,” he writes – that leads to years of self-harm, medication and hospitalisation.

  He dealt with the horror by escaping, first out of himself (he learned to divorce his consciousness from what was happening to his body) and then into music. At seven, he had what he calls a “Princess Diana moment” when he found a cassette of the Bach-Busoni chaconne, an early-20th-century piano transcription of the Partita for Violin No 2, which is said to have been Bach’s memorial to his first wife. “It was like being on the receiving end of a Derren Brown trance-inducing finger-click while on ketamine,” Rhodes writes, which is something that I am absolutely sure nobody has ever said about this music before.

  It is typical of the furious bluntness and belligerence with which Rhodes writes. At times, it feels as though he is daring you to dismiss him, to find his story trivial or inferior. The book received a lot of publicity after Rhodes had to overturn an injunction taken out by his ex-wife to prevent the publication of passages relating to his abuse on the grounds that they would cause harm to their son. Seeing him standing triumphant outside the Supreme Court, next to his schoolfriend Benedict Cumberbatch, you could feel the defiance emanating from him.

  In his performing style and image – tattoos, cigarettes, jeans and trainers onstage – Rhodes positions himself as an outsider to the classical music world. He is often described as self-taught, too, which is not entirely true: although he didn’t go to music college, he certainly had lessons during his time at Harrow and then later in Italy. His concerts aren’t to everybody’s taste, as he likes to talk between pieces and is unashamedly positive about the music.

  There is a gear change about halfway through this book where he begins to set out his manifesto for how to make classical music more approachable (he suggests dropping the “classical”, for starters). Technically, he might not be among the top flight of concert pianists; in a rare lapse of ego at one point, he describes himself as a “tattooed loser” who “plays the piano perhaps as well as a bunch of music college undergraduates but certainly no better”, but if anyone can bring much-needed diversity to concert audiences, it’s him.

  Reading a memoir is always an exercise in getting inside the author’s mind, to a greater or lesser extent. For at least half of Rhodes’s book, this is a distinctly unpleasant experience. He is frenzied, wheedling, entitled and infuriating by turns. Then you realise that such is the horrific nature of the trauma he is still living with that there is no criticism you could make of him that he has not already made of himself. Extreme self-hatred is an unusual route to empathy but it is no less powerful for that.

  Caroline Crampton is assistant editor of the New Statesman. She writes a weekly podcast column.

• Scotsman
  http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-instrumental-by-james-rhodes-1-3788547
  Word count: 950

  Book review: Instrumental by James Rhodes James Rhodes found solace in classical music after being sexually abused as a child. Picture: Contributed STUART KELLY 13:55Sunday 31 May 2015 0 HAVE YOUR SAY THAT I am reviewing this book at all is remarkable, and not for the obvious reason. On 20 May, the Supreme Court overturned an injunction granted to the author’s ex-wife, preventing publication on the grounds that his revelations might constitute a danger to their son. It is indeed an exceptionally harrowing book, recounting how the concert pianist found solace in music, after being sexually abused as a child, suffering psychotic incidents brought on by alcohol and drug use, and was sectioned in psychiatric units several times. No, the reason it is remarkable is, as his therapist tells him frankly, that he has such a propensity towards self-destruction that he estimates his chances of survival at 50-50. That he made it at all, let alone becoming a musician, writer and broadcaster, is humbling, although he would be the first to refuse to be any kind of role model. Instrumental is no “misery memoir” (how quaintly Nineties that now sounds), as James Rhodes unflinchingly relates the harm done to him – abuse, as he says, is shouting at a traffic warden, whereas what he experienced was rape. The after-effects of the crime are almost as debilitating as the crime itself: hypervigilance, tics, anxiety attacks and, most especially, dissociative identity disorder. I have rarely read so cogent an account of the nature of victimhood. Parts of this may surprise. Rhodes is almost thankful for the dissociation – the sense of leaving the body during trauma – which leaves him with multiple identities. It can make him sly, narcissistic and ambitious. There is no sense of saintliness in being a victim. There is a very bleak humour in his writing: after a partial recovery from his breakdown in Edinburgh he gets a job in London. “My job involved selling advertising and editorial to businesses around the world for financial publications no-one read. And as it involved manipulating, lying to and cajoling older men, I was absolutely amazing at it”. That dark wit can turn instantly to a kind of translucent fury. “Paedophiles”, he writes, “– don’t think for a minute you’re anonymous to those who’ve been through it.” Perhaps the most ghastly irony is that when he finally admits what has happened to him, the results are every bit as disastrous as his abuser claimed they would be if he ever told anyone what had been done to him. Likewise, his description of self-harming is visceral and palpable – he says the only comparable feeling is heroin – so much so that it is prefaced by a trigger warning. There is an awful clear-sightedness in this powerful work. Rhodes has a rigorous lack of self-pity, even when it comes to confessing how self-pitying he can be. The text bristles with smart asides, put-downs, demotic upbraids. Each of the 20 chapters is prefaced with notes on a piece of music of significance to Rhodes, beginning with Bach’s Goldberg Variations (played, of course, by Glenn Gould) and wheeling through Shostakovich and Bruckner, Chopin and Brahms. Music was, in the parlance of psychotherapists, Rhodes’ “safe space”, and he is eloquent on how music affects us. “If there was something not manufactured by government, sweat shops, Apple or Big Pharma that could automatically, consistently, unfailingly add a little more excitement, lustre, depth and strength to your life, would you be curious? Something with no side effects, requiring no commitment, no prior knowledge, no money, just some time and maybe a decent set of headphones. Would you be interested?” Given that two-thirds of this book are among the most powerful pages I’ve read all year, the turn from memoir to manifesto is slightly disappointing. The rather wince-making “relationship advice” is Deepak Chopra dressed up as Tupac Shakur. Rhodes rails at the “people who put the ‘ass’ into classical”. Deriding music industry snobs while taking pot shots at Andrew Lloyd-Webber may smack of double standards. Rhodes limns the lives of the great composers to stress insanity, booze, egomania and eccentricities, but I doubt that anyone is going to go and hear Telemann or Stravinsky because they think the composer’s a rebellious dude. Classical music does need to be demystified, but it doesn’t need to repackage itself as the old rock’n’roll. When I took my brother and sister-in-law to their first opera, they were anxious at first about what to wear. I said if you fancy dressing up, dress up; if you want to wear jeans, wear jeans. And I have never truly understood what “to be transported” meant until I saw their faces in the last act of Don Giovanni. It is concomitant on those of us who love this music not to keep it to ourselves. Initiatives such as the BBC Music Magazine Ten Pieces or Big Noise Raploch might prove a more efficacious route to involving young people in classical music. The parts of this book dealing with Rhodes’s ex-wife and their son are done with sensitivity and a sense of profound regret. Rhodes neither seeks to excuse himself nor to apportion blame. Although I can understand Canongate’s desire to get the book into the public domain as soon as possible, I hope that the paperback will include Rhodes’s thoughts on the case. I am profoundly glad that this brave, intelligent and affecting book is not now censored. I am quite certain that if his son ever reads it, he will be immensely proud of his father. n

  Read more at: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-instrumental-by-james-rhodes-1-3788547

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/books/review/songs-of-themselves.html?_r=0
  Word count: 1607

  Songs of Themselves
  By MEGHAN DAUMFEB. 2, 2017
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  Credit Loren Capelli
  The observation that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” has been attributed to everyone from Martin Mull to Frank Zappa to Thelonious Monk. It’s famous enough that it’s almost hackneyed by now, yet it’s as good a description as any for the nearly impossible task of using words to describe the sacredly wordless. Get bogged down in technical terms like diatonic interval and chromatic diesis and you risk sounding gratingly wonkish. Indulge in platitudes like “lyrical melody” and “haunting chords” and you’re a pathetic lightweight, a philistine.

  So you’ve got to hand it to musicians who put down their instruments long enough to write entire books. Classical musicians, especially, carry a set of burdens that can make cross-genre endeavors uniquely challenging. They are confined to practice rooms for hours, days and years on end and tyrannized by necessary perfectionism; their achievements in many ways rest on their ability to shut out the noise of the outside world and play the same set of notes again and again. And while that can yield fine results, it doesn’t always lend itself to the kind of divine hubris required to put your thoughts in print and expect anyone to care enough to read them.

  In a memoir published last year and two forthcoming this month, an oboist, a concert pianist and a guitarist set out to map the intersections of their musical lives and the much thornier vagaries of life in general. For Marcia Butler, the oboe was a protective garment and a ticket to the world, though both applications came at a steep price. As an awkward, antisocial preadolescent in 1960s Long Island, Butler is coerced into “a binding and sickening pact” with her father; if she confers sexual arousal by sitting on his lap, he will drive her to oboe lessons. “My father was my epic Wagnerian Wotan,” Butler writes in THE SKIN ABOVE MY KNEE: A Memoir (Little, Brown, $27), referring to Richard Wagner’s ruthless patriarch. “I was his dutiful daughter Brünnhilde.”

  Butler wins a scholarship to the Mannes College of Music, where she undergoes the perfunctory comeuppances of high-level music study, including an assignment to go back to the basics and practice nothing but long tones for three mind-numbing months. Long tones are notes held until you run out of breath, and anyone who’s ever seriously studied a wind instrument (I played the oboe with varying degrees of resolve from childhood through college) will experience traumatic flashbacks reading about Butler’s stages of grief around this situation. “The time spent crying could be used for playing the long tones,” she writes. “You do as you’re told.”

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  Outside the conservatory, it’s 1970s New York City, and Butler by default embarks on the hero’s journey particular to that time and place, stealing food and spare change from a roommate, riding the subway with fake tokens and sleeping with an assortment of grungy ne’er-do-wells, including one who winds up at Rikers Island for what Butler later learns was a rape at gunpoint. In one especially affecting scene, Butler plays a Harlem church gig and is discreetly acknowledged by a congregant who recognizes her from the bus to Rikers.

  “That was the thing about being a girl who played the oboe and had a boyfriend in the clink,” Butler explains, in what is surely the only time such a sentence has ever been committed to paper. “It was easy for me to separate the two realities and carry on as if all were harmoniously blended.”

  If the colluding forces of her father’s abuse, her relentless self-discipline, and her love of opera and similarly concupiscent classical works split Butler into two discordant and ultimately incompatible halves — dutiful nerd on one side, hot mess on the other — James Rhodes’s dysfunction broke him into the proverbial million little pieces. A late-blooming British virtuoso pianist who found celebrity in part by styling himself as a sort of rock ’n’ roll bad boy of the classical world — his albums have titles like “Razor Blades, Little Pills and Big Pianos” — Rhodes never landed in jail. But reading INSTRUMENTAL: A Memoir of Madness, Medication, and Music (Bloomsbury, $27), you get the sense he wishes he could claim such dramatic levels of bottoming out. If his first love is music, his second is his own destruction. As a child he endured sexual abuse by a teacher that was horrific enough to result in long-term physical disability as well as psychological damage that led to promiscuity, substance abuse, dissociative identity disorder, suicidal ideation and self-injury. At one point, he takes off his shirt and shows his wife that he’s carved the word “toxic” into his arm with a razor blade.

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  Rhodes would like us to know that he’s in good company. Musicians, even powdered-wig types like Bach and Mozart, are notorious for making train wrecks of their personal lives. As proof, Rhodes splices his own story with interstitial mini-bios of great composers, leaning heavily on the tortured nature of their genius and attendant psychosis. Schubert was “a walking, talking car crash,” Beethoven’s family was “riddled with alcoholism, domestic violence, abuse and cruelty,” and Schumann, a failed suicide, died “alone and afraid” in an asylum, but not before writing “Geister (Ghost) Variations,” a piece “so called because he said that ghosts had dictated the opening theme to him.”

  Butler’s book also contains italicized interstitial sections, which she deploys to show the grueling process of learning a piece of music, making reeds or the cobbled-together life of a working musician. But while “The Skin Above My Knee” is overwritten in places (it would appear the author never met an adjective she couldn’t find a job for), it ultimately succeeds because it leaves readers knowing a thing or two about an esoteric world they probably never thought about before. “Instrumental,” for its part, hews desperately to the well-trod conventions of the well-trod genre known as Portrait of the Artist as a Young, Self-Hating Narcissist.

  Quoting from “Instrumental” is tricky, since Rhodes drops an unprintable-in-a-family-newspaper epithet at least once a page. He is quite good at articulating the often intractable dimensions of shame as experienced by sexual abuse survivors. But he seems almost chemically dependent on the F-word and its innumerable iterations. His use is excessive even by the standards of the digital age, according to which “voicey” writers on the web reflexively opt for lazy vernacular as a way of branding themselves as insouciant badasses. The effect, however, is nearly always tedious and soporific, the verbal equivalent of a weary double-reed player blowing nothing but remedial long tones.

  An antidote, at least of a sort, can be found in Andrew Schulman, whose earnest but affable memoir, WAKING THE SPIRIT: A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul (Picador, $25), uses the author’s own story as the first movement rather than the entire symphony. In 2009, Schulman was placed in a medically induced coma following a cascade of post-surgical complications and thought to be near death until his wife, Wendy, pressed an earbud to his head and played Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.” Within hours, his vital signs stabilized, his life saved by “the passion of Wendy and Bach.”

  Once recovered, Schulman pursues a second career as a volunteer “medical musician,” enrolling in the hospital’s music therapy program and eventually returning to the same intensive care ward where he was once a patient. If Schulman seems a little too dazzled by the notion of his own healing powers — several scenes show patients taking miraculous turns as he strums his guitar next to their beds — he redeems himself with his willingness to take on some real research and reporting. He talks with neuroscientists and psychiatrists and explores the legacy of Pythagoras, the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher who was among the first to recognize the healing properties of music. Along the way, Schulman posits that the relationship between the pain we feel and the songs and compositions we love has its roots in a tender, transcendent form of symbiosis. “Artists who used their music to alleviate their own suffering composed some of the greatest music ever written,” Schulman writes, “which in turn has the effect of ameliorating the suffering of others.”

  Not that there will ever be a cure for the suffering that music can sometimes inflict on the very musicians playing it. But, hey, it’s nice work if you can get it.

  Meghan Daum is the author, most recently, of “The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion.”

  A version of this article appears in print on February 5, 2017, on Page BR27 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Memoir. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

• Huffington Post UK
  http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/victoria-sadler/james-rhodes-instrumental_b_8067244.html
  Word count: 1027

  THE BLOG
  James Rhodes, Instrumental: A Powerful Memoir on Child Abuse and Classical Music
  01/09/2015 13:55 | Updated 31 August 2016

  Victoria Sadler
  Arts and Culture Blogger
  2015-08-31-1441052184-2860988-JamesRhodesInstrumental.jpg

  With his autobiography Instrumental, James Rhodes may well have achieved the impossible - writing a first-hand account of child abuse and its terrible legacy that is not just desperately needed, but is also readable and, well, even funny.

  This book secured headlines for the attempts made to ban it - a challenge that was so severe it took a Supreme Court ruling in May to secure its publication. But though the implications of this trial are huge in what it means for free speech, don’t let it define what you think you know about this book for this is a stunningly frank account about not just abuse, but also the healing powers of music. This is a book that is both terrible and beautiful.

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  James is a popular pianist who is creating a huge following as a result of his willingness to challenge the stuffiness of his profession and make classical music dynamic and exciting. Yet he is also a survivor of child rape for James was repeatedly raped by his gym teacher when he was only six years old.

  How James managed to hold it together to write about his experiences I do not know. But as this book demonstrates, James has been in and out of psychiatric wards ever since. There have been very desperate times - suicide attempts, deliberate and unintentional sabotage of relationships and friendships, and a constant battle with a tsunami of emotions that make even the simplest daily tasks almost impossible.

  For as James writes “you cannot outrun this stuff. You cannot hide from it. You cannot deny it. You cannot push it down and expect it not to eventually reappear.” And this book is a powerful testament to that damage, and how abuse constantly works at destroying the victim, long after the abuse has stopped.

  2015-08-31-1441052264-6408544-JamesRhodes_01DAVEBROWN20142.jpg

  There are dark passages in this book, particularly the episodes of self-harm and James’ description of the adults around him unable (unwilling?) to identify the cause of the changes in the young James’ personality. And even the responses from some as James, 25 years later, finally starts to confront and open up about his trauma are god-awful.

  But as much as this is a book about abuse and mental illness, this is also a book about music. For it was music that saved James in his darkest moments and it is his passion for classical music that gives this memoir its soaring sprit and its sense of hope.

  James cleverly weaves this love into the book. Each chapter opens with descriptions on passages of music and composers that have inspired James - a manner that not just brings in music at key moments in James’ journey but breaks up the darkness in the writing, making the book easier to read.

  On the wonderful Schumann, he writes “[he] was one of several who suffered from severe depression, throwing himself into the Rhine and then, having not managed to kill himself, sectioning himself voluntarily and dying alone and afraid in an asylum.”

  Whereas on Mozart, James wryly notes “The world’s most famous composer. It’s quite an achievement and yet somehow one feels Mozart wouldn’t have given two fucks.” No, he probably wouldn’t have.

  And suddenly these greats of classical music no longer seem like obscure figures from history who played for the pleasure of the wealthy and elite, but real men with complex personalities, battling huge issues. Suddenly to us they become human, even relatable. And their music becomes relevant all over again.

  2015-08-31-1441052305-1751793-JamesRhodes_02DAVEBROWN20142.jpg

  For those who have seen and heard James playing live, this format may not be much of a surprise as this is very much the way James lays out his concerts. His passion to drag classical music out from the stale and deliberately prohibitive classical music halls leaps off the page as he continues his criticisms of the classical music establishment and talks about his challenges in widening its audience.

  And he is funny. James is funny and this book is funny. It’s a dark humour, yes, but come on, anyone who can observe about Schubert’s Piano Trio that “this is the soundtrack of a man so depressed he started out his student days training to be a lawyer” deserves credit for that.

  That James has found a way to build a life for himself beyond the abuse is extraordinary. But this isn’t a rose-tinted view that all obstacles can be overcome. Even at the end James confides that “I’ve no idea if I’m going to survive the next few years.”

  For child abuse isn’t ever something you get over or leave behind. And at a time when parts of society is still trying to tell victims they have taken too long to come to bring their abuse to light, that you can’t cast aspersions on the dead, that not every accuser should be believed, James’ book could not be more timely.

  We need this book. That James found it within himself to write these words down on a page, to endure again what must have been unbelievably traumatic to write and to edit, we should be incredibly grateful for.

  Instrumental by James Rhodes available in paperback from October 1, 2015. Also available in hardback and e-book.

  James is also touring to accompany the book. His Instrumental show, including readings and anecdotes from the book and live performance, will tour throughout the autumn and winter. Dates and venues listed on www.jamesrhodes.tv

  Image Credits:
  Cover art from Canongate Books.
  Photos of James Rhodes © Dave Brown

• BBC
  http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170110-why-its-never-too-late-to-learn-the-piano
  Word count: 1454

  (Credit: Alamy)
  Counterpoint Classical music
  Why it’s never too late to learn an instrument
  The start of the year is a great time to take on a new challenge. The pianist James Rhodes tells Clemency Burton-Hill how anyone can learn to play Bach in six weeks.
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  By Clemency Burton-Hill
  10 January 2017
  Is it ever too late to learn a musical instrument? According to the leading British concert pianist James Rhodes, the answer is an emphatic ‘no’ - and he has just written the book to prove it. The delightfully straight-talking How To Play the Piano is an elegant little volume that promises - with just 45 minutes’ practice a day, six days a week, for six weeks - to enable anyone with access to a keyboard to play one of JS Bach’s most beloved works, the Prelude no 1 in C major from Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
  The book, Rhodes reveals, came from an overwhelming response to his excoriating 2015 memoir Instrumental, which addressed his devastating mental breakdown and the critical role music played in his recovery and redemption. Following its publication, countless readers were moved to tell him they’d been inspired by his words to return to the piano themselves. “I lose track of how many people have said ‘Oh, I used to play when I was a kid, I wish I’d stuck it out,’” he tells me, mentioning one particular email that sparked the idea.
  James Rhodes
  Concert pianist James Rhodes believes it’s never too late to take up a musical instrument (Credit: GL Portrait / Alamy)
  “I got a message from a retired Mexican professional airline pilot who said: ‘I used to play as a kid but I haven’t played for 50 years. I read Instrumental, I bought a piano, I got myself a piano teacher, now I practise every day. And I just want you to know: these are my best days.’ I found that so moving.”
  Learning a musical instrument can unlock the door to a new dimension that many of us have forgotten exists – James Rhodes
  Rhodes’ new book is the first in publisher Quercus Books’ Little Book of Life Skills series. It manages to tap into something pervasive, even romantic in the Western zeitgeist - becoming better, more skilled, more cultured and accomplished versions of ourselves - whilst never deviating from the integrity of a tradition that has remained essentially unchanged since humans first started making music on keyboards hundreds of years ago. “Learning a musical instrument can unlock the door to a new dimension that many of us have forgotten even exists,” Rhodes begins in his opening chapter, and there is no denying the immense appeal of laying aside technology to engage one’s fingers and brain and soul in a pursuit that has nothing to do with email, texting, or social media.
  His project offers perhaps the ultimate digital detox. Reading the book, I had fantasies of lighting a few candles of an evening, pouring a large glass of wine and getting stuck in to my piano practice: an alluring act of hygge, artistic self-improvement and self-care all in one. If you’d told me as a kid that I’d one day actually look forward to practising the piano, I would have laughed in disbelief. But in Rhodes’ witty, engaging, unpretentious hands, the prospect of daily piano-practice and its requirement of deep concentration becomes both meditation and medication.
  Candlelit piano
  The deep concentration required by piano practice offers perhaps the ultimate digital detox (Credit: Davide Ferreri / Alamy)
  “We live in an age of such instant gratification, we’re always looking outside of ourselves, and I think we’ve lost sight of just doing something quiet for ourselves,” he offers, when I suggest that the book is also a timely reflection of a modern Western aspiration not to material wealth but to spiritual and emotional enrichment, as seen in the proliferation of on- and offline adult skills courses such as those offered by Skillshare, Creative Live and The School of Life.
  “Not for the reward but just for the sheer loveliness of doing it. I think of playing the piano as a version of mindfulness - for which you don’t need a fleet of commando-style, shaven-haired monks, you just need a keyboard.” Besides, have we ever needed analogue escape routes more than now? Rhodes agrees. “All the news is bad, so why not just do something lovely for ourselves?”
  Ditch the scales
  Besides, learning - or re-learning - a skill such as playing the piano is proven to be good for our brains. According to research from the University of Texas, “mentally-challenging leisure activities” can re-wire our grey matter, restoring our brains to a more “youth-like” state. Rhodes is careful not to over-promise. “Look, this book won’t have you playing Rachmaninov or Chopin etudes. I was well aware that if you set out with a book about learning to play the piano and you say it takes 10,000 hours, nobody’s going to do it, because for whatever reason, good or bad, it has become hard to find time to simply focus and work on something for yourself. Time is such a precious commodity. But it will have you playing some Bach. And the Bach is still challenging, it will still push you, but it’s as accessible as possible.” He continues. “And six weeks is an outsize estimate: if you have time to practise more, or you played a lot as a kid, it will come back quicker. And it will give you a proper insight into the music. Maybe that in itself will be enough, or maybe you’ll enjoy it so much you’ll decide to get a teacher and learn other things.”
  Prelude
  Bach’s Prelude no 1 in C major is challenging but as accessible as possible (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy)
  Find a piece you love, and work on it through the music - James Rhodes
  Central to his approach is the beauty of the actual music itself. “I’m a big fan of taking a piece that you want to play and finding a positive way to work at it, not through scales and etudes and exercises, but by simply playing it,” he explains. The book breaks down exactly how to practise in this way, including his genius fingerings, which staves off the potential boredom and frustration that would lead many of us to give up. I tell him I could never face doing scales and arpeggios as a child and I feel no differently about them as an adult.
  Bach piano
  Rhodes encourages learners to ditch the scales and work through a piece of music that they love (Credit: Jeff Morgan / Alamy)
  “Arpeggios and scales are never necessary!” he insists. “In any piece there will be technical challenges that you can work on using the music itself. I also loathe doing scales and arpeggios, but hey, I’m looking at this Mozart concerto that’s sitting on my piano right now, and it’s filled with scales and arpeggios. If you’re working on a piece and achieving something, it’s a great way to learn. Find a piece you love, and work on it through the music.”
  Rhodes is evangelical about the joys of connecting or reconnecting with the piano, and beyond the book itself, his website has tutorials and videos dedicated to help you on your journey. The start of a new year, with all its attendant resolve, seems as good a time as any to take the plunge; our lives, after all, are not getting any longer. “Yeah. We’re not going to be lying on our death bed thinking, I wish I’d sent a few more emails and done a few more spreadsheets,” he jokes. “But you might well think: I wish I’d written that novel or painted that picture. Or learned to play that piece of Bach on the piano…”
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