by James Rhodes
TRACK TEN
Liszt, ‘Totentanz’
Sergio Tiempo, Piano
Liszt is the wanker who is responsible for making pianists perform full-length piano recitals from memory. This was never done before – concerts were a mixture of different musicians and genres of music, and performers always used the score. And then this nineteenth-century rock star, the Paganini of the piano and Keith Richards of his day, shattered performance convention by giving long, memorised piano recitals, and playing faster, louder, harder and more violently than anyone had ever done before. He composed treacherous, monumentally difficult pieces for piano: transcriptions of all the Beethoven symphonies for solo piano, virtuoso showpieces based on popular operatic themes of the day, dozens of études which remain almost impossible to perform accurately unless you’re a fucking machine.
A child prodigy who quickly morphed into a womanising, super-rich showman, it all got a bit much for him, and several affairs and children later he took holy orders at the age of forty-six and joined a Franciscan order, continuing to play and compose until his death in 1886 at the age of seventy-five.
In addition to two piano concertos, he wrote a few pieces for piano and orchestra, one of which was called the ‘Dance of Death’. He was slightly obsessed with death, frequenting Parisian hospitals and asylums and even prison dungeons to see those who had been condemned to die. Many of his works have titles linked with the same subject, and this piece, this overwhelmingly terrifying seventeen minutes of piano fury is based on the famous Dies Irae – the death theme used by composers from Rachmaninov to Berlioz.
This performance is a live one by Sergio Tiempo and I genuinely have yet to hear a performance so ridiculously bombastic. The guy just has two incredible hands, zero fear and an absolute conviction of what he wants to say. It’s astonishing.
HINDSIGHT IS CRYSTAL CLEAR. I can see now that I had let a very old, very toxic secret out. I had brought my wife into it (without her consent – she had ostensibly married a decent, undamaged, stand-up guy), I had embarked on a ridiculously ambitious career change, and my son had just turned four. What the fuck did I think was going to happen?
Here’s another heads-up for victims of abuse. It is, apparently, very common for the world to spin completely off its axis when your child approaches the age you were when the abuse began. I didn’t know this. My psyche did. I was blindsided. There was something inside me, clawing at me, desperate to get out, and I just could not keep it in any longer. It felt like my mind was a computer that had been pushed too hard for too long and simply exploded. My brain literally felt hot. It’s the weirdest feeling; not pleasant, overwhelmingly scary. And I was scrabbling around for anything that would fix it, however temporary.
I knew drink and drugs were an option. I also knew that if I went down that route I would end up dead (fair enough) but more importantly I’d probably destroy the people I loved most too.
And then, just as I was desperate to find something that was halfway between suicide and murder, I found razor blades.
I’d done what any self-respecting guy in my situation would have done and gone online looking for solutions to what was happening. And I’d found the glorious, unhinged world of the online forum. Anonymous, intonation-free, text-based cesspits masquerading as help but merely a front for vomiting all of the various neuroses, perversions, kinks and foibles out into the world in the hope of ending the feeling of ‘always alone’ and possibly finding someone worse than you. And on one of these sites people were talking about cutting. As if it were a bad thing – how they’d done it again but were furious about doing so and wished they could stop. It was something I’d heard about, usually in connection with teenage girls, but it had never occurred to me to do it myself.
But everything hurt, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. And so in the most banal way imaginable, I popped off down to the local chemist and bought a five-pack of Wilkinson Sword razor blades and some bandages.
This part of the book is likely to trigger the fuck out of anyone with similar issues. So skip it or call a friend. And before you judge me too much for what I’m about to share, perhaps a few words about the act of carving your arms up.
Self-harm (SH from here on in) is a wonder drug. It is reaching pandemic levels in the UK, where we already have the highest rate of SH in Europe. Instead of tapas and siestas we are reaching for small metallic objects with sharp edges and strips of absorbent material. And the reason for this is that it is the most effective, immediate and electric high, one that is only equalled by heroin (injecting not smoking) and crack cocaine. It has no come down, no negative side effects (when done right), costs next to nothing, can be done anywhere and you only ever need to score from Boots (or your kitchen drawer if they’re closed).
It involves all the ‘safe’ elements that make illegal drugs so appealing (ritual, thought control, feelings slam, isolation, escape, general ‘fuck the world’ rage) and adds in a dose of visceral self-hatred, immunity from arrest (unless you’re very unlucky), greater control, a healthy(ish) expression of rage and the lovely feeling of being able to scream out to the world about how much pain you’re in without having to say it out loud. Remember that feeling of wanting to tell on someone at school who was bullying you/abusing you, but not feeling able to? Magnify that by a million and then imagine you could go back in time, set fire to that person again and again, force them to watch you decapitate their family and then do a jig in front of them as they burn slowly to death. You can achieve all of that and then some with a £1 box of Wilkinson Sword blades and a 20p bandage.
And that is why wanting to stop it and seeing it as a bad thing is a losing battle. Something like this can never, will never, be dealt with by talking, mental health charity adverts, waiting room leaflets and well-meaning teachers. It works too well, the pay-off is too great, the endorphin release too intense.
It is a regular, consistent, effective coping mechanism. And it is as rife as the not-so-hidden Valium craze of the 1970s. The majority of those who engage in this behaviour are catastrophically misunderstood, misdiagnosed, mistreated. SH is not an indicator of suicidal ideation. It is not indicative of a threat to others. It does not mean that you are less capable of functioning well. Russell Brand, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, Alfred Kinsey, Sid Vicious are a few high-profile men who have used it. The list of women is far longer.
This is not something done only by skinny teenage girls (although far too many of them indulge frequently). It is invariably a response to a culture in which we rush around invisible and unheard and find ourselves unable to keep up with the pace and stresses of modern life. A place where, male or female, we must parent, earn and achieve in unsustainable and impossibly increasing ways. And even if we manage to get to that place of achievement, the surprise is that it makes not the slightest bit of difference. We still feel shabby and less-than.
But that day I found a cure, a way to stop feeling quite so shit about myself.
I get home to an empty flat. Jack is out with Jane. I’m shaking as I set out the little cutting kit on the bathroom floor, sat cross-legged. I stare at my arms and decide which one and where. I figure left forearm is the place to start. So I pull off my T-shirt, take out and unwrap a single blade. It is impossibly shiny and kind of scary to look at – smooth, flexible, tiny, ludicrously sharp. I push it down into the skin and then angle it upwards and inwards and drag it hard across about an inch of flesh, pushing down as I do so. At first nothing at all. No pain, no nothing. And then about a second or two later, I see the skin literally open up, blood appearing magically, pain rushing through my body, the flesh opening. And the blood keeps coming. Far more than I’d thought. I had totally miscalculated the pressure needed. Bandages were going to do fuck all so I grabbed a towel and used that. I was starting to panic – there was blood all over the white, tiled floor, the towel was getting soaked through, I couldn’t enjoy my high at all. I had completely screwed this up.
I called my best
friend Matthew because he and his wife were a kind of medical power-couple – he a psychologist, she the head of ER at a hospital ten minutes’ drive from my house. And of course he came round, drove me to his wife’s hospital, had a quiet word with her, helpfully avoiding a psych consult and the long, drunken queue of miserable bastards already there, and she kindly, gently, flushed it, stitched it, bandaged it and let me out.
I played every card in the book to keep them quiet. To not interrogate me, call my wife, come home with me, confiscate my blades. To convince them it was my first time and wouldn’t happen ever again, that I was horrified and had made a terrible mistake. And of course that’s what good friends do, isn’t it? They left me, mercifully, to my own devices, and went on with their business. And I got home, cleaned up the floor and tried again. A little less pressure, a little more attention to detail. And this time it was perfect. Three inch-long slices, not deep enough to require stitches, not shallow enough to allow the pain to subside too quickly. Just right. And it felt like a heroin high. Only cleaner. That feeling of falling back down onto the bathroom floor, satisfied, spent, exhilarated was everything I’d hoped it would be and more.
That’s the thing about cutting – not only do you get high, but you can express your disgust at yourself and the world, control the pain yourself, enjoy the ritual, the endorphins, the seedy, gritty, self-violence privately and hurt no one other than yourself. It felt like having a particularly seedy sexual affair, whilst saving a fortune on hotel rooms and not having to betray your wife and forensically scrub cell phones and email inboxes.
And it did its job well. I’d found something, albeit temporary, that helped me function better, be more available, show up for my family, put on the mask. It became a kind of dirty, daily reprieve from falling apart, and gave me just enough strength to act like a husband and father to the outside world, but not quite enough to remove the stink of weird, not-quite-rightness surrounding me while I did it.
I’d play my piano having dropped Jack at nursery school, break between practice sessions to cut myself, pick him up at the end of the day and we’d all spend the evening as a family doing what families do. It was schizophrenic and weird and wrong but I couldn’t get out of it.
There is this peculiar twist inside me that forbids me to enjoy things that I like unless they are hidden. With the sole exception of smoking, everything that is pleasurable brings shame. Sex – secretive and hidden away with the lights off. Piano – shutters down, door closed, never in front of other people unless they’ve paid for tickets. Drugs – alone in a shabby room undisturbed. Cutting – behind a locked bathroom door. Eating – usually quickly and urgently in the kitchen, away from prying eyes. Spending money on nice things – hidden from my wife, done online away from shop assistants, delivered anonymously via the mail by a judgmental postman. Holding my son – in the dead of night as the world slept, alone in his room, his breathing deafening me.
Life is temporary, dangerous, hostile and aggressive. And I acted accordingly. I should have got out of it then and there. Made my apologies, filed for divorce, surgically removed myself from the equation, fled the country, started afresh somewhere far away where I might have been able to buy a few more years of relative peace. But I didn’t. Instead, I decided to organise my first public concert.
It was an outstanding idea. Just as things are beginning to fall apart, when there is pressure coming from every angle – pressure to make the marriage work, to be the best father on the planet, to play the piano like a genius, to be a man – I decide to add to it by giving my first performance. To show those closest to me and myself that I wasn’t a total waste of space, and that the work I’d been doing was actually bearing fruit.
I found a concert hall to rent on London’s South Bank that had about 400 seats and was a stone’s throw away from the Festival Hall. I found a children’s charity that I could align it with (so as to avoid the arrogance of charging money to see me play and also pretend I was doing something vaguely noble and altruistic). And I set the date for a few weeks’ time.
I was playing a stupendous programme – three giant pieces by Bach, Beethoven and Chopin (the holy trinity of piano music), perhaps 120,000 notes, all from memory, all with the right fingering, all with the right touch, pedal, nuance, all the time being aware of the note that came before and the note that comes after, all merged into one glorious whole and sent out of the piano to a waiting audience. It’s a hell of a thing to do, especially for the first time. Most pianists – well, all pianists – have been doing that since the age of nine or ten, younger in Asia. I had just turned thirty-one. I had no idea about nerves, performance practice, breathing, how to deal with audience noise and how to concentrate for two hours to such a degree. I could barely make it through an episode of EastEnders without (literally) losing the plot.
The hall was rammed. I’ve no idea why. Friends came, friends of friends came, the hall must have emailed their database because there were also strangers, music lovers, randoms, hundreds of people crammed in, last-minute scrabbles to find extra chairs, me backstage wanting to vom, lights down, last coughs, that unique noise heard in concert halls all over the world as the audience settles into the expectation of something beneath words. And on I walk.
Shrinks talk a lot about finding a safe place. Somewhere that you can go to in your head that engenders a feeling of well-being and relaxation. Perhaps the nook of someone’s arm, a favourite beach, a childhood bedroom. I know now that mine, invariably, is sat in front of a grand piano, single spotlight on the keys, the rest of the room in total darkness. All I can see in my field of vision is a black and white keyboard with eighty-eight keys and, preferably, the gold letters that spell out ‘Steinway’.
And thank fuck for that. Because after walking on trembling, I sit on the stool and something takes over. I disappear in a good way. Without flying out of my body, without searing pain in my ass, without tears and blood and concrete boots. It is the best thing ever, like having a four-handed, naked, hot stone Bach massage. Everything goes by in a flash and, at the same time, the world seems to slow right down and all of my anxieties about time disappear. There is infinite space in between the notes, total awe at the sound my fingers are producing (not the quality, simply the fact that I am somehow doing this), a sense of coming home. This must be what Sting was talking about when he was raving about tantric sex.
It goes well. A few fluffed notes, no major memory lapses (I still have a recording of it), decent voicing (where the melody sings out properly), new (to me) musical interpretations of pieces that have been played for centuries. And I realise that all of those fantasies about giving concerts that I had as a kid, that kept me alive and safe in my head, were accurate. It really is that powerful. And I knew I wanted to do it forever. No matter what.
We had a big dinner afterwards to celebrate. I was treated kindly. Even Edo, who had flown over from Italy, was complimentary. My wife brought me flowers. We ate all the dim sum. My adrenaline levels had spiked, crashed, done cartwheels. I didn’t sleep that night. Now, a few years down the line and after a couple of hundred concerts, this has become almost normalised for me. But then? It was like having sex for the first time with someone who was your spiritual twin. And hotter than hot. A bigger high than heroin and cutting and everything else destructive. It was my own personal, private nirvana.
And for a few weeks, it stayed with me. I was still cutting regularly and hiding it from Jane (long-sleeved T-shirts helped). I was still wrestling with voices in my head I didn’t understand or want. But I was functioning well enough. And I was still enjoying some kind of afterglow from giving my first concert. I’d had a taste of something that felt immortal. Looking back, those few weeks post-concert seemed to be like walking on a tightrope while largely oblivious to the circling sharks underneath waiting for me to fall off. My life revolved around my son, my piano, my razor blades and doing my utmost to convince my wife and the rest of the world that everything was OK.
&nb
sp; I did a pretty decent job of not thinking too much about things (harder than it sounds) and threw myself into other endeavours. And for a short time, cutting aside, it felt like we had a chance.
I don’t think I shall ever understand what happened next. On paper it seems like this was the perfect springboard into a new career. I could have found an agent, given more concerts, forged my way in this weird, wonderful musical world. Carved a little niche just for me. My life could have been a succession of concerts, practising, hanging out with Jack, working on my marriage. That would have been lovely. Normal and extraordinary at once. I could have put down the razor blades, found a decent shrink to work through some of the bigger mind-bombs, put one foot in front of the other day by day and moved gently towards a good life.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, was stopping me from doing that. Again, this is why it is so hard to have patience with people like me. In front of me are two doors. One clearly labelled ‘Good Life’, the other ‘Hell’. And not only did I walk into the dark one, but I did so whistling, all nonchalant, rolling my sleeves up purposefully. I strutted like the biggest cock in the world into Arma-fucking-geddon.
TRACK ELEVEN
Brahms, ‘German Requiem’, First Movement
Herbert von Karajan, Conductor
Brahms was both traditionalist and innovator when it came to composing. He was a leading light of the Austrian musical scene but didn’t get involved in the War of the Romantics between composers such as Liszt and Wagner, who represented a more radical approach to composition, preferring to stick to a more conservative route. One of the holy trinity of Bs (along with Bach and Beethoven), he remains one of the great musical grandfathers of our time, with his symphonies, piano concertos, chamber music and piano compositions a consistent part of the mainstream repertoire.
