Free Instrumental by James Rhodes Page B

enough to keep me afloat.
    Alongside the piano of course. By this time I’d got my first proper teacher, who was awesome, but crippled by having me as a student. His name was Colin Stone and he was, and continues to be, a total dude. He would let me smoke in his garden, indulge my ridiculous enthusiasm for all things piano, listen to me rant and rave until I was exhausted, allow me to attempt pieces I had no business attempting.
    The problem was that I was sprinting marathons before I could even crawl. Trying to play pieces that were so far beyond my ability it was laughable, and yet somehow getting through them, carried only by a wave of irrepressible enthusiasm. The facilities there were second to none. Dozens of practice rooms, plenty of free time to lock myself away and play. They even allowed me to go out on my own into London proper to go to concerts. I don’t think they’d ever had a student ask permission for that before and it became a rare moment of blissful freedom, trekking down to the Festival and Wigmore Halls on the Tube to listen to the great pianists pound the keyboard.
    My life was governed by obsessions – The Boy, Bach, smoking. Every night I would listen to piano recordings of my heroes and stay up wide-eyed and in awe of what they were doing. I would plug in headphones and listen to Rachmaninov, floating away again with music and fantasy, imagining all the while that it was me playing. I foundrecordings by Grigory Sokolov, the greatest living pianist, that taught me more about music, life, commitment and passion than anything before or since has managed to do, and would listen slack-jawed and almost comatose at what he managed to do with a piano.
    Literally the only thing in the universe I realised I wanted was to travel the world, alone, playing the piano in concert halls. The only thing. I would happily have died at twenty-five to have just a few years doing that. Everything else was a distraction. I knew I was irreparably broken, with no real chance of a proper career or family, but this felt, albeit through the funhouse mirror of denial and dumb enthusiasm, achievable. Musicians were meant to be all shades of fucked up, none more so than classical ones, who don’t even have the luxury of ripped jeans, groupies and cocaine – they have to express their issues with stupid jumpers, non-existent social skills and deranged facial expressions, and I knew I fit the bill. All I needed was a piano and my hands and I was good to go. Social skills very much optional. It was the perfect career for me.
    And the very saddest thing was that I knew at some level that I still wasn’t good enough. I knew it. By the time they were my age, anyone considering a career as a concert pianist would have been playing pieces that I would never in a million years get close to playing. And they were playing them faultlessly. And although my lovely teacher tried his best (which included arranging for me to play to the head of keyboard at the Guildhall School who then offered me a scholarship), it was never going to happen. Not only did I lack the skills, my parents decreed it a no go. They would not support me should I go down that route, and insisted I go to a proper university. And mebeing the stupid, spineless wanker I was/am, I didn’t tell them to go fuck themselves and go to music college regardless. I sucked it up and said OK.
    How awful to have a passion so intense it dictates your every breath and yet to lack the moral backbone to pursue it.
    The second thing I wanted to mention was that I discovered drink. I had been drunk before (the gym teacher and others used it on occasion to soften me up), but I had never actively chosen it, bought it, done it of my own volition. And that first time I did, aged thirteen, was the only thing that was on a par with listening to that piece of Bach. Half a bottle of vodka, falling down stairs, puking everywhere, ending up in hospital, being almost expelled