Instrumental

by James Rhodes

  Derren Brown is, without sounding too creepy, the most genuinely likeable person I have ever met. He has been there for me both personally and professionally for many years now. He is giant of heart, overwhelmingly, frighteningly kind, supportive and absolutely reliable in every way. Should I ever manage to get to a vaguely comparable place in my career to his, I could only ever hope to be a fraction as real and humble as he is. He inspires me more than I can say.

  Stephen Fry is not only officiating at our wedding, he is and always has been a staunch supporter of good. He continually sticks his neck out over topics that are uncomfortable, misunderstood, complex and important. He is one of the very few people I know who is exactly the same over a cup of tea at his house as he is in front of the camera talking about manic depression or homosexual injustice. His kindness, advice, support and stupidly big brain have frequently stopped my wobbles from becoming full-on implosions. He is a fucking legend and the only man I would turn for.

  My publishers Canongate, with whom I was hit with the threat of legal action of this book in March 2014. Despite doing everything in our power to resolve this amicably, we ended up being forced to go to court in order to fight for the right to publish Instrumental. I will always be grateful to Canongate for standing beside me during the fourteen months of aggressive litigation that ensued. It has taken more than anyone could possibly imagine to stay the course, but I am very pleased that the book you have read has not been censored by the British courts in any way..

  Denis Blais. You have taken me from being a nobody to being a slightly better known nobody with a bunch of concerts, five albums, TV shows, a tonne of press, a book, DVD, world tours and a happy bank manager. You have done it cautiously, sensibly, carefully and caringly. You have done it when I’ve pushed, pulled, cried, shouted, screamed and complained. You have not once let me down. You have been responsible for everything that is good in my career and everything that is worthy in my personal life. You are a manager, lawyer, agent, shrink, nurse, bodyguard, photographer, cinematographer, writer, banker, chef, guide, priest, cleaner, consultant, producer, friend, comrade and surrogate father. On we go, together, playing our part in what we set out to do five years ago.

  Jack. My boy. You always have been, always will be, the greatest part of my life. One day perhaps you’ll be a dad yourself and then you will understand. Until that day comes I can only swear to you, on everything I hold dear, that there is nothing that could come even close to the love and pride I have for you. You’re my little cub, the tiny thing I held and fed and cuddled who has grown and explored and become his own, magnificent person. You will always have me, always have a home to come to, never have to worry about doing something you hate simply to pay the mortgage. I want you to do anything and everything that fulfils you and makes you smile. Be whoever you want, and know that I could not be any prouder of who you are. You, more than anyone else in my life, inspire me the most. You are my absolute joy.

  And finally Hattie. It is a truth I have only recently discovered, but I now know that the love of a good woman can rescue a man. And you are so much more than a good woman. You are brave and open and headstrong and vivacious. You have an energy about you that turns my world and my heart upside down and spins it on its axis. For all your delicious quirkiness, there is an all-consuming beauty that radiates from every pore, every cell, in you. And I hope I never, ever get to believe how lucky I am to have you by my side. I want always to feel like I’m falling ever so slightly short and therefore to keep trying harder. I want continually to earn the privilege that is being your man, to show you that my commitment to you, to us, is my immoveable priority. Because I love you. Oh how I fucking love you.

  Once there was a fragile man. And he met a fragile woman. They were lucky enough to realise that two fragiles equalled a strong, and so those two little weirdos got married. Because that is unquestionably, truthfully, honestly and absolutely the right thing to do. And one day they went on to have their own weird little cubs. And fucked them up royally like all parents do.

  Appendix

  ‘Outrage at Jimmy Savile conceals the fact that our culture encourages paedophilia. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about’

  Daily Telegraph Culture Blog, 1 November 2012

  WE READ MORE AND more about the horrors that went on and the now incontestable fact that others knew it was happening, and we get all shouty and indignant. It reveals the irksome, irritating side of Twitter, the tabloid press, self-published blogs and the loud, chatty guy in the pub. The moral high ground. The furious bleating and self-righteousness of the whiter-than-white populace.

  The outcry will not do any good at all. How many times since ‘Never again’ has it happened again? Using words like ‘molest’ and ‘abuse’ runs utterly counter to the horror of child rape. As do the prison sentences handed down upon conviction. You can serve longer in prison for saying ‘I’m going to kill you’ (maximum sentence 10 years) than you can for having sex with your three-year-old daughter (maximum sentence seven years). Newspapers happily show pictures of fourteen-year-old girls sunbathing and use sexual language to describe them while at the same time appearing indignant and appalled at the crimes of Savile, Glitter et al.

  The culture of celebrity has the same shroud of secrecy, power and authority as the Church. Why on earth should we be surprised at sexual abuse going on in those circles? The only thing that surprises me is that people actually seem surprised. In any environment where there is power, there will be an abuse of that power.

  For five years I was abused at school, at least one other teacher knew it was happening and even after voicing their concerns to the relevant authorities within the school, nothing was done and the horrors continued.

  We read about things like this and we think ‘how awful’ and then get on with eating our cornflakes, but no one really wants to look beneath the surface. The physical act of rape 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. And those bits do not seem to come back over time. What goes too often unreported and unexamined and unacknowledged is the legacy that is left with the victim.

  I’ve talked about this a lot. But some of it bears repeating. Until it’s heard by as many people as is necessary to work harder to stop it.

  Those side-effects I wrote about earlier: Self-harm. Depression. Drug and alcohol abuse. Reparative surgery. OCD. Dissociation. Inability to maintain functional relationships. Marital breakdowns. Being forcefully institutionalised. Hallucinations (auditory and visual). Hypervigilance. PTSD. Sexual shame and confusion. Anorexia and other eating disorders. These are just a few of my symptoms (for want of a better word) of chronic sexual abuse. They have all been a part of my life in the very recent past, some are still with me, and the abuse I went through was 30 years ago. I am not saying that these things are the inevitable result of my experience; I imagine that some people can go through similar experiences and emerge largely unscathed. What I am saying is that if living life is the equivalent of running a marathon, then sexual abuse in childhood has the net effect of removing one of your legs and adding a backpack of bricks on the starting line.

  I don’t want to be writing about things like this. I don’t want to deal with the inevitable feelings of shame and exposure that will come from it. And I don’t want to deal with the accusations of using my back story to flog albums, being full of self-pity, attention-seeking or whatever other madness has already and will no doubt continue being levelled at me. But neither do I want to have to keep quiet, or even worse, feel as if I should keep quiet, when there is so much about our culture (which is in many ways so incredibly evolved) that allows, endorses, encourages and revels in the sexual abuse of children. Paedophilia has acquired a grim, vaguely titillating, car-crash fascination that the press have jumped all over.

  We simply cannot on the one hand have sexualised images of children on billboards and m
agazines, underwear for six-year-olds with pictures of cherries on them, ‘school disco’ themed nights at bars and community service sentences for downloading ‘indecent’ images (indecent? Saying ‘shit’ in church is indecent – this is abominable), and on the other hand regard the Savile story with abject horror. It just does not equate. This is not about censoring what the press can write (typical example from one tabloid: ‘She’s still only 15, but Chloë Moretz . . . The strawberry blonde stepped out with a male friend in a cute Fifties-style powder blue sleeveless collared shirt which she tied at her waist – revealing just a hint of her midriff’), or what pictures they can publish. It is about protecting minors who do not have a voice, who are not capable of understanding certain matters and who cannot protect themselves.

  This has all been said before. And nothing has really changed. We forget (who would want to remember this stuff?), we think shouting loudly will absolve our collective guilt and change things for the better, we point fingers and form lynch mobs. We paint ‘paedo scum’ on convicted (or suspected) paedophiles’ homes. And yet what we need to do is open our eyes fully and simply not tolerate this, rather like we’ve done and continue to do so effectively with homophobia and racism. We need to look at providing more visible therapy for both victims, perpetrators and those who have urges that threaten to make them perpetrators. We need to overhaul sentencing guidelines and start tackling the issues with more clarity and integrity. Whatever it takes for as long as it takes needs to be the guiding principle here, because otherwise we will, to use a well-worn but apposite phrase, simply continue the cycle of abuse.

  ‘At last: the Classic BRIT Awards exposed as a sickening crime against classical music’

  Daily Telegraph Culture Blog, 8 October 2012

  PAUL MORLEY DESERVES A MEDAL. One of the greatest music writers ever, Morley has in one fell swoop exposed the Classic BRIT Awards for what they really are – an offensive, unnecessary, manipulative and dangerous sham.

  Sitting there last week at the Royal Albert Hall as a guest of Sinfini (the new classical music website funded, somewhat ironically, by Universal), he describes the horror show that unfurls before him. Morley says what so many of us in the classical world have long thought: ‘For those who have come to music through pop or rock, the way “classical music” was dressed up in candelabra kitsch and shop-worn corn would not have persuaded them that there was anything here for them.’

  He goes on to discuss the tricks employed by the organisers to deflect the sort of critical perspective that might question its motives, and indeed its tenuous relationship to classical music, or to any music at all.

  The key phrase here is ‘any music at all’. The people behind the CBAs (an assorted cabal of radio bosses, label heads, PR pundits, agents, promoters, journalists) have, for many years now, diluted and butchered classical music, throwing it into a blender alongside cross-over schmaltz, movie soundtracks, pop-opera and greed, and tried to convince us that the gloopy, sick-making result is ‘classical music’.

  I urge you I urge you to track down Morley’s blog, to read and reread it, print out, laminate and send to the head of every company associated with the bile-inducing cesspit that is the Classic Brit Awards together with a card asking WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

  I applaud Sinfini for having the guts to commission that piece – and it is surely no accident that they asked a rock journalist to do it. Most classical pundits would be too terrified to stick their heads above the parapet, given how small the industry is and the knowledge that they would most likely be blacklisted should they come out and criticise the CBAs.

  I have wanted to write a piece along these lines for a long time now, but figured (or at least my manager did) it would have made me too easy a target for accusations of jealousy and bitterness, what with me being a concert pianist and therefore, one would think, hungry for a BRIT nomination myself. I was invited to attend this year and my response was that I would rather sh*t in my hands and clap than sit through that. I, naively, went four years ago and vowed never to do so again. Truth be told, I still suffer occasional PTSD-like flashbacks from the experience. I have so far kept my opinions largely to myself but Morley has, gloriously, inspired me to put my cards on the table as well.

  The awards were inaugurated by the BPI, and voting is done by ‘an academy of industry executives, the media, the British Association of Record Dealers (BARD), members of the Musicians’ Union, lawyers, promoters, and orchestra leaders’, except for ‘Album of the Year’ which is voted for by listeners of Classic FM. How did any of these people decide that, in 2011, it was in the best interest of classical music to award Il Divo (the crossover ‘opera’ quartet signed to Simon Cowell’s label) ‘artist of the decade’? Decade. The most phenomenal classical artist of the LAST TEN YEARS is an operatic pop vocal group created, signed and managed by Cowell! Not Claudio Abbado, Martha Argerich, Stephen Hough, Gustavo Dudamel, Sir Simon Rattle or any one of a thousand internationally acclaimed core classical musicians who have trained, sweated, worked, honed, polished, refined and slaved hours a day for decades to raise their talent to the level necessary to play at Salzburg,Verbier, the Proms, Carnegie Hall. No. A photoshopped, shiny-toothed, suntanned, faux-classical Frankenstein.

  Who are these people to purposefully try and convince the general public that Katherine Jenkins is a proper opera singer, that Russell Watson really could handle a week at Covent Garden, that Ludovico Einaudi belongs to the same world as Benjamin Britten, that André Rieu, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Andrea Bocelli are amongst the greatest classical musicians alive today? When did MasterCard give themselves the go-ahead to, year on year, sponsor a conglomerate of people who are force-feeding the musical equivalent of KFC down our throats?

  I would, with a bucket of Xanax and an obliging shrink, be able to let this go if I felt it were a case simply of naivety on behalf of the organisers, or indeed even of good intention. But this is not the case. Instead, I am convinced that what we have here is a purposeful, well thought-out, structured plan to chip away year on year, track by track, album by album at the general public, convincing them over time that classical music really does not distinguish Russell Watson from Caruso. That Howard Shore and Beethoven can be mentioned happily in the same awed breath. That Mylene Klass and Vladimir Horowitz are both pianists.

  It makes me sick to my stomach. I experience a rage that threatens to overwhelm me listening to those people bleating on about the problems in the classical music industry. YOU ARE THE F****** PROBLEM. Classical music always used to be the music of the people. It is cheap (there are some incredible box-set bargains around), accessible (Spotify puts almost infinite amounts of classical music on every computer connected to the internet) and can be overwhelmingly, brilliantly, aggressively life-changing for all who listen to it. The Phantom of the Opera (played with gusto at the awards) is not without its charms, but it is clearly no Figaro. And when you invite Gary Barlow, Andrew Lloyd Webber and André Rieu up on stage in the same venue where the Proms provide the real thing, and hold them up as classical musicians you not only belittle classical music, but you belittle us. All of us.

  I understand that this is your moment to shine. That this is, in your eyes, the only chance you guys have to be close to the real Brit Awards. You get to be on TV (terrestrial TV, albeit at 11 p.m. on a Sunday), you get to walk the red carpet and smile for the paparazzi (who have no clue who you are or what you do), you get to pretend for one solitary, gauche night that you matter. That you are players. But you’re not.

  It is an undeniable truth that we will still be listening and talking about Bach, Beethoven, Chopin et al in 300 years. Celebrate that. Glory in that. It is magnificent, profound, enlightening and stupendous. Don’t cheapen it with your need for self-esteem. Go hate yourself on someone else’s time. The rest of us want actual music. Take a long hard look at the Gramophone Awards or the BBC Music Magazine awards, the genuine Oscars and Emmys of classical where bona fide classical musicians are honoured, and s
ee how it should be done.

  The truth is that there is simply no need to go down the Classic BRIT route. What you are in effect saying with this monstrous spectacle is that Joe Public is too uncultured, too dense, too stupid to deal with an unedited, beautifully played Chopin mazurka, Mendelssohn concerto or Beethoven sonata. That instead they need to be drip-fed music from the Hovis ad, complete with funky lighting, glitzy staging and music-hall pomp and told that this is classical music. And that mentality is simply unforgivable, all the more so as it is coming from the very people who should be ambassadors for classical music. Instead you continue to bastardise and cheapen it until very soon it will have been eroded beyond recognition. That, despite all of your empty lies about wanting to bring classical music to a wider audience, is the legacy you are leaving us.

  ‘Classical music needs an enema – not awards’

  Guardian Culture Blog, 18 September 2013

  CLASSICAL MUSIC IS NOT A glamorous industry. The pay is generally shit and almost always requires vigorous chasing. The people behind it are for the most part stuck in the 1930s and constitutionally incapable of connecting in any way with those born after 1960. The industry has been divided into sharks on the one hand (anything for a buck, even if it involves bastardising the music to an unrecognisable degree) and the ‘purebloods’ on the other – the Aryan race of the music world where this music is reserved for those who are intelligent and rarefied enough to understand it.