Instrumental

by James Rhodes

  Depression abhors a vacuum. Despite a run of concerts, filming, recording and writing, I suddenly found myself empty. There was very little in the diary, I was exhausted after the end of the relationship and an intense period of work on the documentary, alone in my flat, my son on the other side of the world, friends busy with their own lives. Denis was around, he always is, and yet when people like me spot a space we tend to tunnel into it rather than out of it. We’re as stupid and as incapable of learning as moths circling a light bulb.

  And the following twelve months were the closest I’ve been to disappearing for good since being hospitalised. The whole cosmic, self-help mantra of being given what you need when you need it, of needing to hit rock bottom, having to go through things rather than around them is, sadly, true. At least for me. If I’d weighed a few stone more, had the constitution to handle alcohol, heroin and crack, a lot of cash and no issue with sleeping with hookers, I could perhaps have got through things a different, slightly more entertaining way. But I finally had time, space and loneliness forced upon me by some force greater than myself and, as it turned out, I came through the other side ready, for the first time in my life, to live well.

  There are not seven stages of grief. Not in my experience. Why does everything have to be boiled down into bite-sized, manage-able, understandable chunks? Are we that fucking stupid and incapable of living without definitives or corners or edges? There was just one long stage of hell. It would switch in an instant from absolute anger to inconsolable sadness to despair, hopelessness, an unfillable emptiness. There were occasional moments of peace, usually as a result of having only two hours’ sleep and being too tired to feel anything. There was the occasional relapse into self harm and cutting, a couple of disastrous dates, one brief, mental fling and a soulless one-night stand, but primarily there was an awful lot of time on my own, thinking, sitting, feeling. Without medication. It was a first for me, and something that was inevitable, essential and, more by dumb luck than anything else, ultimately redemptive and restorative.

  There was a certain desolate routine that I stumbled into. Up at three or four in the morning after a few hours’ sleep, giant pot of coffee, couple of hours of piano in my little spare bedroom, more coffee, endless cigarettes, talk radio for company, more piano, shuffling out to Starbucks when it opened and watching, with open hostility, those couples going to work holding hands. Glazed eyes, ‘fuck off’ tattooed invisibly on my forehead, losing weight day by day. There was no focus in my life other than on its lack of focus. And that is a terrifying thing for someone who has entertained thoughts of suicide or self-harm. And the most painful thing was not that I had lost the one true love of my life, but that she was, in my head as per usual, going about her life with a spring in her step, having spectacular sex with a succession of handsome, well-built, rich men, partying until the small hours and giggling with joy the whole time.

  I know there’s nothing new here. Nothing that isn’t happening to a million unfortunate bastards every fucking day. And yet when it’s happening we all feel like we are the only ones. Grief and sadness is always wretchedly unique.

  Denis and various friends tried their hardest to help but I guess I didn’t want to be helped. It became apparent that this was not simply pain that came from the break-up of a relationship. It was bigger than that. Evidently, after a few weeks, most people would simply snap out of it, move on to someone new, put it down to life experience. Hattie and I had had five years, which was long, but by no means seriously long-term. We hadn’t had children, hadn’t been married, had only lived together for a couple of years. But I simply could not get over it. If anything, the pain was getting worse.

  Six months down the line I was still in pieces. Everything I saw reminded me of her, everything I did was empty because she wasn’t there. Even now I hate myself slightly for just how full of self-pity I seemed. I was a friend’s worst nightmare. The crushing bore, obsessed with his own pain, with no room for any other news.

  Nothing was working, and it felt time-sensitive. Like chances are I would not make it if things carried on much longer. I made a new will, wrote goodbye notes to a select few, played around with the idea of ending things once and for all. And once again, Jack stopped me from doing it just by existing. I made a goodbye video for him, watched it back and knew then and there that it wasn’t a viable solution. I could not, just absolutely could not leave him. It didn’t matter that we saw each other only a few times a year.

  I did the occasional concert on autopilot (grim, jet-lagged performances in Chicago, Hong Kong, a few in London), practised every day, did what I could to function at the bare minimum.

  What was lovely was how, despite my mood, despite giving concerts where some were good enough and some were, to my mind, a bit shabby, my audiences were consistently, overwhelmingly supportive and brilliant. For all my personal ups and downs and raging, self-critical head, they were so incredibly kind and reassuring.

  One highlight was when I flew to Austria to play two concerts in one day. We landed and drove to the British ambassador’s residence where I played for ninety minutes to an assorted audience of well-heeled Viennese and English socialites and influencers (whatever the fuck that means). And then immediately afterwards I was driven to the Konzerthaus for an evening recital – a concert hall steeped in tradition and history and Austria’s equivalent to the Wigmore Hall.

  Backstage they had a fridge full of chocolate, a Nespresso machine, bananas and Haribo (Southbank Centre take note). And even more delightfully, a smoking room where I sat with my coffee and chatted to a few violinists and cellists – who turned out to be members of the Vienna Philharmonic. Feeling a little like a football fan in the Stamford Bridge players’ cafeteria, I dribbled and blushed my way through five minutes of music chat (turns out Sakari Oramo is a proper gent) before rushing back to the piano, realising stupidly late that I was about to play Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin to a soldout Konzerthaus in bloody Vienna.

  And it went well. Good enough, anyway. Which is the best I can hope for. Five encores and the terrific realisation that the Viennese have a sense of humour even about what they hold most sacred – comparing Franck Ribery to Schubert (short, aesthetically challenged, genius) was met with genuine laughter, and not just from my mum, who had made the trip and doesn’t even know who Franck Ribery is.

  I will always be stupidly grateful to this hall full of strangers whose kindness and support and applause made life a little more colourful and a little less threatening.

  It started to go from grim to dangerous on New Year’s Eve. Never, ever scour Facebook looking for evidence that your ex is having a better time now she is without you. Ever. Turned out that Hattie’s New Year’s Eve was everything it should be for a hot young single girl in London. Guys, parties, dancing, short skirts, more parties, more (ripped, handsome, cuntish) guys. Turns out that perhaps my toxic imagination wasn’t so far-fetched after all. Me, I was in bed alone by 9.30 p.m. desperate to escape into sleep. Something snapped.

  At 6 a.m. I still hadn’t slept and called Denis. He answered (he always does) and I went round to his place and just sobbed at his kitchen table. I know that I am in my mid to late thirties. I know that my emotional reaction to all of this is that of a seven-year-old boy. But I am incapable of shifting it, working through it, beating it. And if I surrender to it I believe I will die.

  And then Denis gave me a couple of books and suggested I read them.

  He said to me:

  ‘James I need to tell you that I’ve made my peace with you not making it. I am ready to get the call telling me you’ve been found dead, and much though it hurts, I am prepared for it. You do what you need to do, but please know it’s in your hands now.’

  And that was a big enough shock for me to get off my ass, if only a tiny bit, and start reading. I didn’t want to, I fought against it, but it was just so clear that I had to if I wanted to stay alive.

  This is becoming a difficult thing to write abou
t. How easy it is to put on paper the negative things, the rapes, trauma, divorce, self-harming. How difficult to write about good things and solutions for fear of sounding like a dope-smoking, tofu-eating, dreadlocked hippie. The two books I was given that day were about the body and mind’s response to trauma (Waking the Tiger) and the inner child (Homecoming). I know. Pass the bucket.

  In the most British of ways I am mortified at having to acknowledge that I had to go so far down the hole that I needed books like this to survive. Spending time in a mental hospital is somehow like having a giant scar that at least garners a certain amount of respect. Self-help books? Like I said, mortifying.

  The thing is they didn’t only help me survive, they did something much, much greater than that. They took the beginning I had made in hospital in Phoenix and helped to nurture and grow that into a deep and long-lasting foundation upon which the rest of my life could be built – reliably, gently and solidly. Those books got past that odd kink in my character that will allow me to give time, money, effort and energy to someone else who is in pain but will resolutely balk at the idea of doing those things for myself. I had finally run out of options and started to honestly appraise things and start mending them.

  Clearly I wasn’t going to be capable of any kind of relationship, with the emotional and physiological responses of a child. I was intrinsically damaged, selfish, egocentric and self-involved, and the only way out of that was to go back, experience all of it again as an adult and try and mend things. And that’s what I did. For several weeks I meditated every day, often twice a day. I read the books, did the exercises suggested, wrote, even prayed, sat with the feelings without distraction and went into myself as I’d never done before.

  The most helpful thing I learned was to experience painful, shameful feelings but to drop any kind of storyline attached to them. In the past I’d feel shame or disgust or self-hatred, and as I felt those things I’d narrate them in my head, give them pictures and words, explore the reasons behind them, indulge in nurturing, judging and growing the feelings even more. Now I learned, slowly, to simply sit and notice them with curiosity, no labels, stories or judgment. I would just see where in the body they were gathered (invariably the heart or stomach), watch them, experience the pain, sit with it. And I promise you, when you do that, it all starts to heal. Slowly but surely it starts to heal and soften and lessen.

  And before long, something wonderful happened – I somehow made a connection with the me that existed before that gym teacher got his filthy hands on me, I realised that I wasn’t bad or toxic, I started to allow myself to mend and forgive myself and accept things for the first time.

  Amazing, isn’t it? That big a statement in one sentence. As if I’d undergone decades of trauma, personal reflection, medication, therapy, struggle and analysis and then suddenly something popped and I became whole again. Again. Not for the first time. But whole like I was when I was three years old and really fucking happy.

  And everything changed. Music became even more alive and important. Sleep started to become natural and restorative. My guts stopped exploding five times a day. My various squeaks, tics and twitches, which had come back, eased up. I didn’t have to flick light switches and tap out specific rhythms every few hours to prevent bad things from happening. I actually forgave myself for something that no one in their right mind would see as my transgression but that I had felt, since the age of five, was my fault.

  And although there had been several false starts over the years – shrinks, hospitals, twelve-step meetings, medication, psychiatrists, work-shops, a plethora of mental health remedies – it was, in addition to months of work in Phoenix, these two books, given to me by my manager on a rainy, miserable New Year’s Day, that finally brought about my new beginning.

  We are riddled with trauma. Abandonment, divorce, violence, abuse of every kind, neglect, alcoholism, anger, blame, judgment, religion, bullying – a thousand different forms of hell surround us from our first days on this planet. Sometimes intentionally, often totally unconsciously, we are, I believe, the walking wounded from a very young age. Some people seem to adjust well despite it, some don’t. And although I tried everything I could to distract from that hurt, I could not outrun it.

  And while forgiveness and meditation, reading and writing, talking and sharing all help, creativity is, for me, one of the most profound ways through trauma. Even more so when all that New-Age, treehugging stuff has finally cleared enough space in my head to allow me to be free enough to explore creativity in a new and slightly more manageable way.

  Three months into this new chapter in my life, I had never been so in love with the piano, with playing, writing, reading, devouring anything and everything creative. And I wrote an article for the Guardian that seemed to resonate. It was shared over 100,000 times, I got emails telling me it was read out in school assemblies in Texas and offices in Australia, hundreds of messages letting me know how much it had helped people move through into new areas of wonder. I wrote it at 6 a.m. one morning and it felt like the closest thing I’ve ever got to a mission statement.

  Here it is:

  ‘Find what you love and let it kill you’

  Guardian Culture Blog, 26 April 2013

  After the inevitable ‘How many hours a day do you practise?’ and ‘Show me your hands’, the most common thing people say to me when they hear I’m a pianist is ‘I used to play the piano as a kid. I really regret giving it up.’ I imagine authors have lost count of the number of people who have told them they ‘always had a book inside them’. We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity. A world where people have simply surrendered to (or been beaten into submission by) the sleepwalk of work, domesticity, mortgage repayments, junk food, junk TV junk everything, angry ex-wives, ADHD kids and the lure of eating chicken from a bucket while emailing clients at 8 p.m. on a weekend.

  Do the maths. We can function – sometimes quite brilliantly – on six hours’ sleep a night. Eight hours of work was more than good enough for centuries (oh the desperate irony that we actually work longer hours since the invention of the internet and smartphones).

  Four hours will amply cover picking the kids up, cleaning the flat, eating, washing and the various etceteras. We are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do whatever we want. Is what we want simply to numb out and give Simon Cowell even more money? To scroll through Twitter and Facebook looking for romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? To get nostalgically, painfully drunk in a pub where you can’t even smoke?

  What if you could know everything there is to know about playing the piano in under an hour (something the late, great Glenn Gould claimed, correctly I believe, was true)? The basics of how to practise and how to read music, the physical mechanics of finger movement and posture, all the tools necessary to actually play a piece – these can be written down and imparted like a flat-pack furniture how-to-build-it manual; it then is down to you to scream and howl and hammer nails through fingers in the hope of deciphering something unutterably alien until, if you’re very lucky, you end up with something halfway resembling the end product.

  What if for a couple of hundred quid you could get an old upright on eBay delivered? And then you were told that with the right teacher and 40 minutes’ proper practice a day you could learn a piece you’ve always wanted to play within a few short weeks. Is that not worth exploring?

  What if rather than a book club you joined a writer’s club? Where every week you had to (really had to) bring three pages of your novel, novella, screenplay and read them aloud?

  What if, rather than paying £70 a month for a gym membership that delights in making you feel fat, guilty and a world away from the man your wife married, you bought a few blank canvases and some paints and spent time each day painting your version of ‘I love you’ until you realised that any woman worth keeping would jump you then and there just for that, despite your lack of a six-pack?

  I didn’t play t
he piano for 10 years. A decade of slow death by greed working in the City, chasing something that never existed in the first place (security, self-worth, Don Draper albeit a few inches shorter and a few women fewer). And only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven – to be a concert pianist.

  Admittedly I went a little extreme – no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental hospital, most of my dignity and about 35lbs in weight. And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not perhaps the happy ending I’d envisaged as I lay in bed aged 10 listening to Horowitz devouring Rachmaninov at Carnegie Hall.

  My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom (counting ceiling tiles backstage as the house slowly fills up) punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure (playing 120,000 notes from memory in the right order with the right fingers, the right sound, the right pedalling while chatting about the composers and pieces and knowing there are critics, recording devices, my mum, the ghosts of the past, all there watching), and perhaps most crushingly, the realisation that I will never, ever give the perfect recital. It can only ever, with luck, hard work and a hefty dose of self-forgiveness, be ‘good enough’.

  And yet. The indescribable reward of taking a bunch of ink on paper from the shelf at Chappell of Bond Street. Tubing it home, setting the score, pencil, coffee and ashtray on the piano and emerging a few days, weeks or months later able to perform something that some mad, genius, lunatic of a composer 300 years ago heard in his head while out of his mind with grief or love or syphilis. A piece of music that will always baffle the greatest minds in the world, that simply cannot be made sense of that is still living and floating in the ether and will do so for yet more centuries to come. That is extraordinary. And I did that. I do it, to my continual astonishment, all the time.